Alexander Larman

Those of us unlucky enough to have suffered through the six interminable hours of the Netflix Harry and Meghan series might now be regarding further updates from the less-than-dynamic duo with the same excitement that a dental patient looks forward to a round of root canal. But because the Sussexes have signed a multi-year deal with the streaming service in 2020, Netflix remains determined to get its money’s worth, and has decided what Harry and Meghan’s next venture with them should be: romantic comedies. A source at the company has informed the Daily Telegraph that ‘There will be more of a heavy focus on fictional, scripted content. It will be rom coms, feel-good and light-hearted programmes.

Most men in their seventies, if they had to attend an arduous public event, would hope that their younger son’s presence would be the last thing they had to worry about. They might assume their offspring would be on hand to attend to their ageing parent; to offer comfort and support when required, and to discreetly deal with any difficulties that arose during the course of the day. That their child would be the greatest cause of the angst they might feel about the ceremony is not, in virtually every imaginable case, a woe that most people could ever consider. For King Charles, alas, what’s going on with Prince Harry is probably most of what he thinks about these days.

As the furore about Prince Harry and Spare finally shows some signs of dying down – the book’s second week sales dropped 82 per cent, albeit with a wildly impressive 82,538 copies sold – it is time, once again, for his uncle to take centre stage. It seems as if the beleaguered and not-so-grand Duke of York has been involved in one scandal after another recently, and this week has been no exception. Firstly, it has been made clear by King Charles that his disgraced brother can have no further official dealings with Buckingham Palace.

For all of the noise that Prince Harry has made over the past few days (weeks, months, and years) about his loathing of the British media, he knows – or has been made aware by his publishers – of the necessity of sitting down with journalists in order to promote his book. And so it is that, yielding to the entreaties of publicity, he has been interviewed by the estimable Bryony Gordon for the Telegraph. It’s an interesting feature, full of colour and anecdote, and demonstrates, as if it needed to, that the rebellious prince remains a source of endless fascination to everyone in his former home country.

The epigraph for Spare, Prince Harry’s frenziedly awaited memoir, is from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun. It states simply ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ As a gesture of authorial intent, it’s a bold one. It suggests from the outset that this is not going to be some backwards-gazing book, but instead that it is going to be fully engaged with the present. Given the fact that Spare’s publication has dominated headlines for days, it’s not an inaccurate statement. Yet – how best to put it? – Harry has never struck most of us as the kind of man who habitually quotes Faulkner.

It’s fair to say that last night’s ITV interview – imaginatively entitled Harry: The Interview - between Prince Harry and his long-standing friend, the journalist Tom Bradby, has been overshadowed by the chaotic leak of Harry’s autobiography Spare. Given the sheer wealth of revelations in the book, what should have been a revelatory teaser for its publication tomorrow has now become almost anti-climatic. Nonetheless, ITV has done an excellent job of teasing snippets from the encounter between the Duke of Sussex and Brady, and anticipation has been rife for the 90-minute show.