Alexander Larman

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.

A new year, a new grudge. Or, at least, a new expression of an old one, which is pretty much all that we’ve heard from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex over the past few years. Yet after the interminable six hours of score-settling that Netflix punished us with last month in the form of Harry and Meghan, the forthcoming publication of Prince Harry’s hugely anticipated (in some circles, anyway) memoir Spare is being promoted with two major interviews, one in Britain and one in the United States. Based on the previews that have been released, they promise to be every bit as attention-grabbing – or attention-seeking – as everything else that Harry has been involved with recently.

For the first King’s speech since 1951, the King might have been forgiven for striking a downbeat note in his inaugural address to the nation. After all, this year has seen the death of his mother, his continuing estrangement from his publicity-hungry younger son, and, for good measure, the fulfilment of his long-held desire to expel the not-so-grand old Duke of York from public life. Yet the speech – which was recorded on 13 December from the Quire of St George’s Chapel in Windsor, conveniently between the two instalments of the Netflix series in which Harry and Meghan did their best to humiliate the Royal Family – was far from the miserable or score-settling homily that many might have expected.

Not for the first time, it was Jeremy Clarkson’s fault. The weekend news, which began with a forensic dissection of the fallout from the six unrelenting hours of the Netflix series Harry and Meghan, was soon dominated by Clarkson’s extraordinary column in the Sun, in which he wrote of the Duchess of Sussex: ‘I hate her. Not like I hate Nicola Sturgeon or Rose West. I hate her on a cellular level.’ He went on to suggest that: ‘At night, I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, “Shame!” and throw lumps of excrement at her.

At the end of the sixth episode of the interminable, grotesquely self-indulgent wallow in self-pity and score-settling that constitutes Netflix's Harry and Meghan, a single thought dominates: we’ve been had. After all the months of hype and expectation, building up to a frenzy over the past few weeks – with every trailer for the show being scrutinised as if it was going to reveal some dark secret – the final judgement on this deeply unimpressive, prurient series has to be that it is nothing more than a cynical exercise in presenting a deeply partisan account of two obviously troubled and unhappy people’s lives: their truth, if you will.