Perils of royalty

LONDON — Prince Harry’s book “Spare,” about his terrible tiffs with higher-ups in the British royal family, including the “heir” to the throne, elder brother Prince William, invites comparisons with another “royal family,” that of Kim Jong-un, up in North Korea. Had Prince Harry lived in another age, he would have suffered the same consequences as did the relatives of Kim Jong-un.

In “Spare,” the enemy, the bane of Harry’s existence, and later that of his bride Meghan, was the accursed British media led by the paparazzi who ruthlessly besieged them night and day. Aside from the camera-snapping “paps,” the villains ranged from royalty writers and gossip to the owners of their powerful newspapers.

In North Korea, of course, there is no disruptive press, no “paps” in wild pursuit of Kim or his wife Ri Sol-ju or younger sister, Kim Yo-jong, or tween-aged daughter, Kim Ju-ae, though they’re followed by mordant fascination whenever they show up in North Korea’s state media. Up there, the powersthat-be rule with the ferocity of, say, Henry VIII, who ordered the beheading of difficult wives and numerous other lords and ladies.

The travail of Harry and his American actress wife Meghan, who still claim the titles of Duke and Duchess of Sussex while living in splendid self-exile in southern California, has implications that go beyond the fun of headlines in the tabloids that Harry hates.

You have to wonder, reading “Spare,” if something really serious is going on, a brutal class war in which the goal, instinctive, not fully understood even by those responsible for making Harry’s life a living hell in royal palaces and cottages and playgrounds, is to get rid of the monarchy, to drive it into obscurity and destruction.

Harry comes close to accusing the “paps” of murdering his beloved mum, Princess Diana, implying but not saying that they flashed laser beams on the vehicle in which her intoxicated chauffeur was careening through a Paris tunnel, getting the car to veer fatally.

Prince Harry can’t quite explain the underlying causes for the media’s inordinate lust for Diana and him, and later Meghan. You would have thought their unscrupulous editors would have had enough of the lot. He does, however, give enduring images of the inner lives of the British royal family, of their struggle for relevance and meaning in a society where actually they wield no real power.

It’s the absurdity of the monarchy that comes through to a non-British reader who frequently visits London and is actually quite addicted to the tabloids.

Having seen numerous articles about the foibles and oddities of British royalty and never taken them for anything other than fleeting entertainment, I’m startled to discover the young man should have cared so much. Well, it’s hard to put myself in the psychological place of a prince. We just have to accept the fact that he, and Meghan, were terribly, terribly hurt.

On the way to that unavoidable conclusion, Harry portrays himself as quite the lad, able to go through unbelievably tough training to become an army officer and helicopter pilot and shoot up bad guys in Afghanistan, also able to survive in the jungles of Africa, to reach both the North and South poles and rush back to blighty in time for parties with Granny, the late Queen Elizabeth II.

However, what was going on in the United Kingdom while Harry was doing going to war, helping woebegone, impoverished people in Lesotho, setting up the Invictus Games for wounded veterans and getting drunk and high on drugs?

This book, so glibly written by an excellent ghost-writer, J.R. Moebringer, barely acknowledged on the final page, gives no clue of the suffering of ordinary Brits, of the ins and outs of power struggles, of the great issues of the day other than the survival of the monarchy and its “Spare” prince, fifth in line for the throne after Willy spawned three kids.

We’re never told who was running the government and how they got along with the royals who came in for such awful articles. Who were the prime ministers? He doesn’t name one.

Harry can count himself lucky, though, to have been a child of a monarchy in decay and disarray. He would never be expelled to a gulag or face a firing squad. He and Meghan, spurned by royalty, are rolling in royalties for a book that purports to say all about what they endured but says little or nothing about the future of the monarchy and the kingdom that nurtured and then expelled them.