By turns sympathetic and absurd, this is a memoir that deals in the tropes of tabloid storytelling even as it lambasts them
The monarchy relies on fiction. It is a constructed reality, in which grown-up people are asked to collude in the notion that a human is more than a human – that he or she contains something approaching the ineffable essence of Britishness. Once, this fiction rested on political and military power, supported by a direct line, it was supposed, to God. Nowadays it relies on the much frailer foundations of habit, the mysteries of Britain’s unwritten constitution, and spectacle: a kind of symbolism without the symbolised. Ceremonials such as the late queen’s funeral are not merely decorative; they are the institution’s means of securing its continuance. The monarchy is theatre, the monarchy is storytelling, the monarchy is illusion.
All this explains why royals are so irresistible to writers of fiction, from Alan Bennett to Peter Morgan: they are already halfway to myth. And, it seems, no one cleaves harder to the myths than the royals themselves. There’s a fascinating passage in Prince Harry’s autobiography, Spare, in which he describes his father’s delight in Shakespeare: how he would regularly take his son to Stratford, how he “adored Henry V. He compared himself to Prince Hal.” Harry himself tried Hamlet. “Hmm. Lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with … parent’s usurper? I slammed it shut.” At Eton, he was cast as Conrade, one of Don John’s comic minions in Much Ado About Nothing. To his surprise, he was rather good. “Being royal, it turned out, wasn’t all that far from being on stage.”
