Prince Harry, Spare

At Amazon, Prince Harry, Spare: The Duke of Sussex.

Prince Harry's Bridge-Burner of a Memoir Signals a Bigger Royal Rift

This is something.

At the New York Times, "The self-exiled royal has given the world a warts-and-all look at his family — with an emphasis on the warts":

LONDON — King Charles III has long pushed the idea of slimming down the British royal family. If his younger son’s unsparing new book is any indication, he has achieved his goal, though not in the way he intended.

The publication of Prince Harry’s memoir on Tuesday — with its scorched-earth details about his rupture with his family — seems likely to dash any near-term prospects that Harry will return to the fold by reconciling with his father; with Camilla, the queen consort; or with his older brother, Prince William.

The book, titled “Spare,” paints a portrait of a hopelessly divided House of Windsor. Far from the smooth-running operation known as The Firm, it comes across as a collection of warring fiefs, where family members jockey for advantage with a complicit tabloid press, trying to buff their images by dishing dirt on one another.

With Harry and his wife, Meghan, estranged and living in Southern California; the king’s disgraced younger brother, Andrew, in internal exile following his settlement of a sexual assault lawsuit; and the death of Queen Elizabeth II last September, the family’s senior ranks have dwindled to a handful of figures.

Even those who remain are caught in a poisonous public-relations contest that pits family members against one another, according to Harry. He writes that an aide to his father and stepmother planted negative stories in the London newspapers about William and his wife, Catherine — a practice that he said also tormented him and Meghan and contributed to their decision to leave.

“I was displeased about being used this way, and livid about it being done to Meg,” Harry said in the book, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “But I had to admit it was happening much more often lately to Willy. And he was justifiably incandescent about it.”

Buckingham Palace has stuck to its policy of not commenting on the book or on the cavalcade of television interviews Harry has done to promote it. But as the disclosures reach a clattering peak this week, royal experts predicted Charles and William would have to reach some kind of accommodation with Harry, if only to prevent the rift from overshadowing the king’s coronation in May.

The Harry-and-Meghan drama, several royal experts said, has become the gravest crisis confronting the monarchy since the fraught aftermath of the death of Harry’s mother, Diana, the Princess of Wales, in a car crash in the late summer of 1997, when the queen came under rare criticism for not showing enough sympathy.

“The key thing that rescued them every time in the past was that the queen was above reproach,” said Peter Hunt, a former royal correspondent for the BBC. “But we now have a king who is himself a divisive figure.”

The palace has signaled that Harry and Meghan might be invited to the coronation, suggesting that Charles still hopes to play a healing role. But in an interview Sunday with an ITV correspondent, Tom Bradby, Harry was noncommittal about attending. “There’s a lot that can happen between now and then,” he said.

So much has already happened that it is hard to imagine Harry in dress uniform, marching to Westminster Abbey with his father and brother.

“This seems unsustainable,” said Ed Owens, a historian who has written about the relations between the monarchy and news media. “It suggests an institutional failure, and a complete contradiction to how historians think of The Firm as always working together. They’re just as often at odds with each other.”

Mr. Owens said William, one of the most popular royals, had been particularly damaged by the book. Harry, the “spare” to William’s heir, portrays his elder brother as ill-tempered, entitled and prone to violence, knocking Harry to the floor in one altercation and grabbing his shirt in another.

“They’ve got to get a grip on how they deal with Harry,” Mr. Owens said.

The latest drip of disclosures began last week with teasers for a promotional TV interview Harry did with ITV and another with the CBS program “60 Minutes.” It accelerated after the book, published by Penguin Random House, leaked out nearly a week before its publication date, first in The Guardian and later in other papers after it was mistakenly put on sale in Spain. The Times obtained its copy in London.

For days, nuggets from the book have been splashed across front pages. “Outrageous boast,” The Daily Mirror said Saturday of Harry’s claim that he had killed 25 Taliban fighters as a helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. “Wills lunge at me after Philip’s funeral,” The Sun said on Sunday, referring to Harry’s account of a tense meeting with his brother after they buried Prince Philip, their grandfather, in 2021.

On Monday, after the TV interviews, the tabloids played up the claim that Harry had walked back one of the most explosive accusations made by him and Meghan in their interview with Oprah Winfrey in March 2021: that a member of the royal family had spoken in racist terms about their unborn child.

The episode is not mentioned in “Spare,” which is curious since Harry skips little else, from his recreational drug use to how he lost his virginity in a field behind a pub. Speaking to Mr. Bradby, Harry did not retract the couple’s claim that a family member had speculated anxiously about the skin color of the child. But he said it was an example of “unconscious bias” rather than racism.

Questions of racism reverberated for weeks after Ms. Winfrey’s interview, forcing William to deny that the royal family was racist. They resurfaced again recently when a former lady-in-waiting to the queen, Susan Hussey, was stripped of her duties and forced to apologize after subjecting a Black British guest at Buckingham Palace to insistent questioning about where her family came from.

For a few royal watchers, Harry’s decision not to reprise those accusations left the door open for some sort of peacemaking...

In Conversations, Many Young Britons in London Called the Monarchy Increasingly Irrelevant

By now, if you're even remotely attached to the news cycle, you heard word of the passing of Queen Elizabeth II.

I am a fan of the monarchy, and while no expert, I always teach the British case in my comparative politics courses each semester, and discussion of the history, role, and importance of the monarchy is a great part of that. So, though I'm a little late, expect a good number of posts on events happening in the U.K. over the next couple of weeks. This really is an end of an era.

The Queen's obituary is here, "Queen Elizabeth II Dies at 96; Was Britain’s Longest-Reigning Monarch," and "Queen Elizabeth II obituary.

In related news, Britain's young people are apparently over the monarchy, because racism. 

At the New York Times, "In London, Mourning, Remembrance and Tributes. And Some Shrugs."

Though mourning and grief were visible in Britain’s capital on Friday, some young Britons were more muted in their reaction to an institution that many called increasingly irrelevant.

LONDON — Gertrude Dudley remembers sitting on her grandfather’s shoulders in 1953 at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, a monarch she came to know as “the fabric of Britain.”

On Friday, Ms. Dudley, 78, a retired entrepreneur, was mourning the queen’s death along with a friend at a London cafe. “This country is in such terrible state, she was the one stability,” Ms Dudley said. “Now she, too, has gone.”

Chrissy Mash, 29, who was shopping for groceries in London’s Islington borough, had a much different reaction, though.

“I am surprised by how unaffected I am,” she said. “The monarchy does not serve any purpose and if it does it is superseded by the damage of colonialism,” she said. “I don’t buy into the fanfare anymore, it’s an excruciating display of a violent past.”

Signs of mourning and grief were on display in Britain’s capital on Friday as residents woke up for the first time in 70 years in a country in which Queen Elizabeth was no longer the monarch. Billboards and cinemas in the city’s main thoroughfares displayed tributes, events were canceled, and small talk about the queen kicked off first dates and business meetings.

But while the death of Elizabeth was a unifying force for many, conversations with Londoners also revealed signs of a generational divide in which many younger people expressed indifference, if not hostility, to the complicated institution the queen represented.

According to a YouGov poll taken in May, 74 percent of respondents 65 and older believe the monarchy is good for Britain, compared with 24 percent of 18-to-24 year olds.

Some younger people expressed fatigue at yet another royal disruption after two years of many crises — including the coronavirus or the war in Ukraine. Others shared amused jokes about how the queen’s last public action was to appoint the Conservative Party leader, Liz Truss, as prime minister this week.

Signs of mourning and grief were on display in Britain’s capital on Friday as residents woke up for the first time in 70 years in a country in which Queen Elizabeth was no longer the monarch. Billboards and cinemas in the city’s main thoroughfares displayed tributes, events were canceled, and small talk about the queen kicked off first dates and business meetings.

But while the death of Elizabeth was a unifying force for many, conversations with Londoners also revealed signs of a generational divide in which many younger people expressed indifference, if not hostility, to the complicated institution the queen represented.

According to a YouGov poll taken in May, 74 percent of respondents 65 and older believe the monarchy is good for Britain, compared with 24 percent of 18-to-24 year olds.

Some younger people expressed fatigue at yet another royal disruption after two years of many crises — including the coronavirus or the war in Ukraine. Others shared amused jokes about how the queen’s last public action was to appoint the Conservative Party leader, Liz Truss, as prime minister this week.

Many people from older generations could be seen wearing black as a sign of mourning, or rushing to buy newspapers dominated by the monarch’s picture, and some recalled memories of a queen who has been for so long part of their lives.

Sitting in front of a candlelit photo of Elizabeth in London’s St James’ Church, Angela Kennedy, 71, a retired fashion journalist, said she struggled to cope with the loss of the queen, whom she had met and long admired.

“It’s very hard to take it in,” she said. “It’s truly the end of an era.”

Ms. Kennedy recalled how the queen had visited the media organization she worked for in the late 1970s. She said that while Elizabeth appeared more interested in magazines like Horse and Hound than fashion publications, she still gave the staff her time, looking “immaculate” for the visit.

“She represented a figurehead that was truly British,” she said, adding that she felt fortunate to live in a country with a monarchy like Britain’s. “I have just grown up with it, it’s just part of my life.”

Sitting in front of a candlelit photo of Elizabeth in London’s St James’ Church, Angela Kennedy, 71, a retired fashion journalist, said she struggled to cope with the loss of the queen, whom she had met and long admired.

“It’s very hard to take it in,” she said. “It’s truly the end of an era.”

Ms. Kennedy recalled how the queen had visited the media organization she worked for in the late 1970s. She said that while Elizabeth appeared more interested in magazines like Horse and Hound than fashion publications, she still gave the staff her time, looking “immaculate” for the visit.

“She represented a figurehead that was truly British,” she said, adding that she felt fortunate to live in a country with a monarchy like Britain’s. “I have just grown up with it, it’s just part of my life.”

That sentiment will likely be expressed at memorials being held for Elizabeth over the next 10 days, culminating in a funeral expected to take place at Westminster Abbey.

Outside St. Paul’s Cathedral on Friday, crowds gathered as a bell rang out at midday, once for each of Elizabeth’s 96 years, as they did at churches across the country. At the gates of Buckingham Palace, people laid flowers — among them the newly ascended King Charles III — and gun salutes honored the queen’s life. Fashion shows were canceled, as were labor union meetings, carnivals and protests.

Elizabeth Hastings, 69, who was named after the queen, was holding a newspaper with a picture of the monarch plastered across the front page as she walked to a yoga class.

“I was born in 1953, the year of the coronation,” she said, “I have been brought up with her reigning and I have read so much about her growing up,” she said.

Ms. Hastings said she met the queen in the 1970s when she worked at the foreign office in London, and she remembered her beautiful skin.

“Like a doll,” she said admiringly. “It’s a really sad day,” she added.

Dave Stanley, 78, a retired butcher, was walking his German shepherd in London in between the rain showers that intermittently washed over the capital on Friday. “I am choked,” he said. “I was a kid when she was crowned; now she is dead. It’s an end of an era. I can’t explain it. I have known her all my life. And now she’s gone.”

Felix Clarke, 31, a manager at a coworking space in central London, stood at his counter seemingly unaffected by the news of the queen’s death.

e said that while every death was sad, he saw the royal family as an institution “founded on a colonial and racist past.”

Earlier in the day, his mother and sister had shared their sadness with texts on their family’s WhatsApp group, but Mr. Clarke refrained from adding his own thoughts.

“I didn’t want to jump in and be rude,” he said...