Prince Harry’s book, ‘Spare,’ details Taliban kills, virginity loss

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LONDON – The headlines in Britain on Friday were all about Prince Harry. A handful of news organizations have obtained early copies, mostly in Spanish, of the Duke of Sussex’s memoir, Spare. Among their main products? They report that the prince lost his virginity … in a field.

Behind a pub. With a woman who treated him “like a young stallion.”

The memoir marks the final installment of a couple who left royal service to live their best, financially independent lives in California, mostly telling stories of their estrangement from their families and the palace.

Many Brits claim they’ve already heard enough, thank you very much, from Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. But pre-sales have put Harry’s book, scheduled for official release on Tuesday, at the top of Amazon’s best sellers. The Harry-hating tabloids here are going crazy over the story, and social media in Britain is abuzz with dueling hashtags about the couple’s pros and cons.

Prince Harry’s memoirs describe the attack by his brother

Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace continue to refuse to comment on either.

Harry killed 25 Taliban fighters in Afghanistan

The prince says he killed 25 members of the Taliban during his two tours serving with the British army in Afghanistan. “When I found myself immersed in the heat and confusion of the fighting, I did not think of those 25 as human beings. They were chess pieces removed from the board. Bad people are eliminated before they kill good people,” he wrote, according to the BBC account.

Harry served five months as an air traffic controller and Apache helicopter pilot. The Ministry of Defense would not confirm the specifics of his account, saying: “We do not comment on operational details for security reasons.” Former British army officers have told the media that boasting about killings is unwise and could expose the prince and his family to increased security threats.

William and Kate encouraged his Nazi costume

Harry claims he was deciding whether to go as a pilot or a Nazi at a Natives and Colonials themed party in 2005 and asked his future brother and sister-in-law to help him decide. “I called Willy and Kate, asked them what they thought. Nazi uniform, they said,” says Harry, who writes that they laughed when they saw him wearing it.

Tabloid photos of him in that suit were one of Harry’s royal family’s biggest headaches — at least before he left his royal role and moved to California. In previous interviews, Harry has said that the decision, when he was 20, was something he would always regret.

Harry sought out a psychic to communicate with his dead mother

Harry writes about using a psychic who claimed to have “powers” to communicate with his mother, the late Princess Diana. She told him that Diana “was happy to be living the life she never could,” according to the BBC.

His days at Eton included drugs and sex

Harry admits that in the years he attended Eton College, England’s most elite boarding school, he smoked marijuana and snorted cocaine, starting at the age of 17. This revelation has largely received an opening in Britain, where few believed Buckingham Palace’s previous denials about Harry’s drug use.

Attracting more attention is the story of losing his virginity. It was “a humiliating episode with an old woman who liked macho horses and who treated me like a young stallion,” the prince wrote. “One of my many mistakes was letting it happen in a field, right behind a very busy pub.”

He resisted his father’s marriage to Camilla

Harry writes, according to the Sun, that he and his brother William begged their father Charles not to marry his long-term partner Camilla. The prince recalls fearing she would become a “wicked stepmother” and be unfairly compared to Diana.

When he aired any objection is unclear. Charles and Camilla, now king and queen consort, married in 2005.

Wedding dresses and Easter gifts fuel Meghan-Kate tensions

The Mail Online headline on Friday focused on the saga between Harry and William’s wives: ‘What’s really behind Meghan and Kate’s long-running feud: Harry’s memoir claims over Meghan’s gowns brides, Easter gifts and lip gloss drove them away (but ‘memories change’).”

The British tabloids have been quite obsessed with this story, including who made whom cry first, Meghan or Catherine.

Harry and William got into a physical fight over Meghan

In a passage leaked earlier this week to The Guardian, Harry writes that his older brother physically assaulted him in a kitchen confrontation in 2019 after William called Harry’s wife Meghan “difficult,” rude’ and ‘abrasive’.

During their fight, Harry writes, his older brother “grabbed me by the collar, ripping off my necklace and knocking me to the floor,” according to the Guardian. Harry says he sat in a dog bowl, which left him bruised, and that his brother egged him to hit him, but he didn’t.

Who commented on his baby’s skin color remains a mystery

None of the book’s accounts so far reveal the answer to one outstanding question: Who in the family raised questions about what Harry and Meghan’s biracial baby would look like when it was born? The story was one of the headlines of Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021. They declined at the time to say who instigated the conversation — only that it wasn’t Queen Elizabeth II or her husband, Prince Philip. And Harry may not be willing to go any further than that in the book.

But Harry will also be doing interviews this week, closing the book. Is there anything left to discover?

The prince is sad to have lost ties with his father and brother and says we want “a family” and “not an institution”. In an ITV teaser, Harry talks about wanting to “reconcile” his father and brother, but says, “first, there has to be some responsibility.”

In another clip from an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper that aired Sunday, Harry admits he was “probably a freak” before he started dating Meghan, that he was “pretty naive” about how the British tabloids would changed the relationship and that the “racial element” of the couple’s relationship was “immediately opened”.