Try as I might, I have not been able to ignore the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

Before Christmas, their six-hour Netflix series aired. One suspects that, by Christmas Eve, the residents of Hell, Michigan, had more important things on their mind as their town froze over:

Now we have Prince Harry’s new book, Spare. Many of us have been going spare at the non-stop coverage.

I feel a conflict of emotion about Harry. Part of me is deeply disappointed with his unnecessary revelations. Another part feels really sorry for him. Yet another finds some of these anecdotes, principally the one involving the dog bowl, amusing.

Someone did a mock-up of the incident in a Bayeux tapestry style. ‘Canis’ on the dog bowl is a nice touch:

On a serious note, though, William seems to want his brother back as we can see from the book’s Spanish translation. On Friday, January 6, The Times reported (emphases mine):

The encounter, which took place in early 2019 while Meghan was away, began with William coming to ask him to “do something” about his wife, telling him: “Meg is a difficult person . . . she is rude, brusque and has made enemies of half the staff.” Those comments, Harry told him, parroted “the press narrative” about his wife.

In 2021, The Times revealed that Meghan faced a bullying complaint during her time at Kensington Palace. It claimed that she had driven out two personal assistants. At the time, the couple’s lawyers said the newspaper was “being used by Buckingham Palace to peddle a wholly false narrative”.

Recounting the episode at Nottingham Cottage, in the Spanish translation of the book, Harry writes: “Willy had not come to debate anything. He had come to lay down the law …

“He insulted me. He called me everything.” According to a version seen by The Guardian, when William said that he was trying to help, Harry replied: “Are you serious? Help me? Sorry — is that what you call this? Helping me?”

… Harry went into the kitchen and William followed.

Harry writes that he gave his brother a glass of water and said: “Willy, I can’t speak to you when you’re like this.”

He then tells how William called him another name and “then came at me”. He writes: “Everything happened very fast . . . He broke my necklace by grabbing me by the collar of my shirt and he threw me to the ground. I fell on the dog bowl, it broke under my back and the pieces scratched me. I stayed on the floor a few seconds, stunned, and then I got up and told him to leave.”

William urged Harry to fight back, saying: “Go on, hit me! You’ll feel better if you hit me!” but he refused. William then left the kitchen, returning a few minutes later to apologise.

Harry writes that William told him that he did not need to tell “Meg” about this and claimed: “I didn’t attack you, Harold.” The duke reveals that he did not tell Meghan straight away but did contact his therapist, later admitting to his wife what had happened when she saw the “scrapes and bruises”.

On Wednesday, January 11, UnHerd columnist Mary Harrington finds that Harry reminds her of his mother: ‘Why Harry couldn’t be a hero’.

She thinks he should raise cattle in some remote location. Poor cattle. Harry would be too busy navel-gazing to tend them.

Harrington introduces us — me, anyway — to a new word, ‘lolcow’:

A “lolcow”, for those who don’t know, is a derogatory, very online term for someone who gains notoriety via attention-seeking behaviour, combined with imperviousness to criticism and lack of self-awareness …

A lolcow is, in essence, someone who isn’t very good at playing the game of calculated self-disclosure; that’s Harry, to a T.

Harrington says that Princess Diana was the original lolcow in the 1990s:

… 28 years ago, in 1995, in an emerging world of 24-hour news cycles and ever-hungrier tabloids, Harry’s mother became the first true lolcow. She also set the bar for media oversharing, in the notorious Martin Bashir interview that tipped her from remote, paparazzi-hounded royal to press-courting celebrity megastar. Here, Diana coyly dropped bombshell after bombshell of juicy gossip for the media, interspersed with soft-voiced woe about how awful it was that the media wanted to know everything about her.

True! I remember it well.

The acorn does not fall far from the tree:

In Spare, Harry has followed decisively in her footsteps, producing more than 400 pages of such painfully needy oversharing that every page of airport-novel prose cries out for a hug. And it does so while conveying a queasy sense of squinting through the curtains at some sordid domestic scene. Reading it left me bemused at how the people around this clearly unhappy man could have encouraged him – or at least not stopped him – over-sharing to quite such a degree.

But why do it? Why subject yourself to the hostility and humiliation that anyone could predict would follow these revelations? To a significant extent, the opportunity to lolcow himself in this way is not of Harry’s choosing. Rather, the larger context is the fact that this outdoorsy, obviously basically well-meaning-but-emotionally-mixed-up midwit was not born a prince in (as a wag observed on Twitter) an age where he could perish heroically in some ill-advised charge against Prussian cavalry. Rather, he had a prominent role thrust upon him, unasked, from birth, in an age that has made commodifying ourselves a centrepiece of culture and commerce alike.

I expected to feel exasperation and perhaps distaste reading what has by now been exhaustively trailed in every newspaper as a bombshell tell-all memoir of the notoriously private Royal Family. But I was surprised to find myself feeling deeply sorry for the Duke of Sussex. And if Spare has this unexpected effect, it’s less because it reveals him – as he presents himself – to be the innocent victim of persecutory tabloids and conniving courtiers. Rather, it’s in demonstrating just how ill-equipped he is, by temperament, to navigate the impossible choices with which fate has afflicted him.

In the decades since Diana’s death, ever greater swathes of the human soul have been redirected from human relationships to commercial exploitation. Celebrity culture is perhaps the most well-established and pervasive of such dynamics. It commodifies two other core features of our emotional landscapes, redirecting them from intimacy to profit: the social roles of gossip, and of self-disclosure. As our daily lives grow ever more atomised, we depend more and more on synthetic gossip about celebrities we don’t really know to fill the gaps in our personal “village” and provide fodder for its water-cooler conversations.

Lolcow status often brings with it a Faustian bargain, as it did with Harry’s mother, one of my reasons for concern about him:

But if Spare depicts being endlessly “papped” as a living nightmare, it’s also in the nature of Faustian bargains, as Darran Anderson noted yesterday, to offer power as well as a horrible price. It is, after all, a function of Harry’s public profile that anyone cares about his childhood or inner life at all. And if Harry laments the way media scrutiny ruins relationship after relationship for him, he doesn’t seem able to imagine simply opting out altogether …

Harry’s explanation of his father’s behaviour in turn sheds light on his own tragic path to lolcow-dom. After a youth “deprived of love”, Harry speculates, Charles is “dangerously, compulsively drawn” to the “elixir” offered by the media. If Spare is at all accurate, this could apply just as well to Harry. But perhaps what damns Harry, unlike his father, to a tragic fate as lolcow is simply that he’s not very good at managing the balance between disclosure and self-protection, probably because he’s simply not cold-blooded enough …

For intimate self-disclosure to strangers rarely produces just empathy. While you may get a measure of this (and Harry has plenty of supporters) you’ll also get objectification, mockery, and further demands for personal details. Then, still needy, and still craving love and validation, those with lolcow tendencies will respond by further disclosure, thus provoking ever more objectification and so on.

My sense of the Duke of Sussex is that, unlike more cold-blooded and self-disciplined operators, he has spent his life since that moment in Balmoral reaching out again and again for a metaphorical hand-hold, only to receive in return another barrage of photography. So he’s given in, and attempted what he calls “honesty” — which is to say, flinging every personal detail into the maw of the machine at once, presumably in the hope that this will finally make the great mass of strangers like him.

Without ever leaving the same studiedly bland, tabloid-register prose, the book lurches between accounts of travel and action, grotesquely over-personal revelations, including about family members who doubtless never consented to be thus exposed, and strangely platitudinous passages of introspection. The cumulative impression is of someone who put his own personality into storage, and bought a replacement one in IKEA.

What beggars belief is the sheer level of neediness implied by such a wince-inducing level of self-exposure. But it’s hardly difficult to grasp why he should be so needy: his mother’s death haunts almost every page of Spare. He describes Diana as “light”, and reminisces about “Her devastating smile, her vulnerable eyes, her childlike love of movies and music and clothes and sweets – and us. Oh, how she loved us.”

However, Harrington reminds us that Diana often left her two sons behind while seeking romance after her divorce from Charles. She went on several trips abroad, then it all ended with her fateful, final stay in Paris:

… in truth his mother abandoned him before she died. “My mother legendarily said there were three people in her marriage,” he writes. “But her maths was off. She left Willy and me out of the equation.” And indeed she did, divorcing Charles and leaving her two sons behind with him, while she jetted off to beach resorts.

Those of us who experienced the non-stop onslaught of Diana news remember the boys’:

“surrogate mums”: school matrons, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, and Teej, an older friend. Meanwhile the sainted Diana can do no wrong.

What concerns me is that history could repeat itself, as Harry himself suggests. Harrington is spot on with her analysis:

Perhaps, then, we shouldn’t berate him for vulnerabilities and cognitive dissonances he has, to such a great extent, inherited from her. For Spare also reveals just how far Harry is his mother’s son. He has inherited her fear of the dark, he says, “along with her nose, her blue eyes, her love of people, her hatred of smugness and fakery and all things posh”. But he seems to have followed her footsteps in more ambivalent ways, too. Spare is already as much of a voyeuristic sensation as she was. And it’s not much of a stretch to imagine Diana rationalising her own prioritisation of personal feeling over tradition and obligation much as Harry does, as part of “living in truth”.

Harry talks about fearing “a repeat of history, another untimely death like the one that had rocked this family to its core 23 years earlier”. The clear implication is that he is afraid Meghan might die in a car crash just like his mother. But my sense is that if anyone is in danger, it is Harry. For if he has inherited Diana’s nose, we may infer from Spare that he has also inherited her cocktail of vulnerability, emotional reasoning, and (shall we say) below-average analytic capacity that, combined with unasked-for levels of public scrutiny, has sealed his fate as Prince Lolcow.

Another tragic thing about Harry is that there are many truly disadvantaged boys and girls who have lost a parent, perhaps both parents. Their home lives, in some cases, are gone, their lives snapped in two.

They’re the ones for whom I feel sorrier. Harry has every advantage known to mankind. It’s time he began looking differently at life and his future.