Alexander Larman

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.

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.