Alexander Larman | The Spectator columnists & writers

Prince Harry’s ‘Spare’ is making the Royals nervous

The title of Prince Harry’s long-awaited memoir will be enough to make the royal family nervous. Spare, which was originally due out this year, will be released in January. ‘His Words. His Story,’ the tag-line of the book promises. The Queen’s death this year – and the coming together of the Royals in their shared grief – led to suggestions the book would be toned down. That looks like a faint hope. Spare suggests we will see a presentation of the same old Harry: cast out from a family that had no need for him as he fell down the line of succession. ‘With its raw, unflinching honesty, Spare is a landmark publication full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief,’ the promotional fluff for the book promises.

Just Stop Oil is wrong to target King Charles

After Just Stop Oil’s recent attack on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery, the group has become emboldened by the international publicity their actions have earned. This is clearly the explanation for today’s field trip to Madame Tussauds where, after buying tickets like good little anti-capitalists, two of its activists covered a waxwork model of King Charles III with chocolate cake. In a statement released by Just Stop Oil, the vandalism was justified by the protestors, who said: ‘We are here because we seek to protect our freedoms and rights, because we seek to protect this green and pleasant land which is the inheritance of us all.’ They noted that the Royal Family has form in expressing environmental concerns of its own, reminding us that ‘last year at COP26 in Glasgow, Queen Elizabeth said: “The time for words has moved to the time for action!”’ and that King Charles – a noted environmentalist for most of his adult life – made a passionate speech in November 2019 in which he said: ‘We are feeling the effects of all of this now, and disasters are increasing with terrifying frequency and intensity, and causing unprecedented levels of physical and economic damage.

The Crown doesn’t need a disclaimer

Is Will Smith too toxic to be taken seriously?

After 9/11, American comedians found themselves in a tricky situation. Make fun of any of the usual standbys of their trade – politicians, authority figures, Rudy Giuliani, anyone who wore a badge for a living – and they were liable to be shouted down in an angry chorus of: 'Too soon!' Yet if all the jokes they could tell were sanitised and tame, their reputations would decline in an instant. It was a bold comic who tried to argue that telling jokes was a natural human response to disaster; many audiences simply refused to find things funny. Will Smith now finds himself in a similar position. The one-time Fresh Prince of Bel-Air has been a Hollywood pariah since he assaulted Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars in March.

Meghan makes it all about herself, again

Since the Queen’s death last month, the Duchess of Sussex has found it hard to maintain her usual vice-like grip on the world media’s attention. Rumours have swirled that relations between her and Prince Harry and the now-Prince and Princess of Wales are yet to improve — despite the surface show of amiability that was demonstrated over the mourning period. There has been the sense that Meghan has been relegated to second fiddle: a state of affairs that this particular prima donna is reluctant to accept. This week has spelt a comeback of sorts. Photographs have been released of the Duke and Duchess, taken by Misan Harriman, when the Duke made his indifferently received speech at the One Young World conference in Manchester.

Why Harry has been allowed to wear his military uniform

P.G. Wodehouse once wrote that ‘it is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.’ Much the same might be said of Prince Harry, whose ability to bear grudges – and to make it clear, publicly, why he is doing so – has been displayed with remarkable consistency over the past couple of years. When he isn’t suing the British government for not allowing him to bring his own private security to the country of his birth, he’s railing against the iniquities of his family to Oprah Winfrey or giving angry public speeches in which he denounces whatever ills he has found in society. These, admittedly, usually come as more of a surprise to him than the rest of the world, who have not enjoyed quite so cossetted an upbringing.

The enduring brilliance of Mad Men

Queen Elizabeth II, our remarkable monarch

Queen Elizabeth II, who has died at the age of 96, was the longest-serving British monarch. From the uncertain beginnings of her reign, acceding to the throne at the age of 25 after the unexpectedly early death of her father George VI in 1952, to final years troubled by public outrage displayed towards her son Andrew and grandson Harry, she came extraordinarily far, both as a monarch and as a human being. Her Majesty single-handedly transformed an increasingly moribund institution in the process. It is a testament to the Queen’s success in her role that republicanism has not had any serious discussion in British intellectual or social life in the past seven decades. Even after the moment of greatest reputational danger for the Queen personally – the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana in 1997, and the unchecked criticism of the Palace’s high-handed and emotionally tone-deaf attitude towards the national mourning that followed – there was no public upsurge in a demand for the monarchy to be replaced by a presidential system.

The Harry ‘n’ Meghan circus shows no sign of coming to an end

It seemed fitting that, for her return to Britain, Meghan Markle was joined at the One Young World summit in Manchester by none other than Sir Bob Geldof. The presence – on a Monday, no less – of the Boomtown Rats hitmaker-turned-all-purpose humanitarian was designed to show the worthy company that the Duchess of Sussex keeps these days. But it also ran the risk of suggesting that she, too, is in danger of repeating her single greatest hit all too often. Does Meghan still have a loyal audience, or is her schtick in danger of wearing thin? She decided to be emollient. Although recent press interviews with her have trotted out well-worn attack lines – the Royal Family are awful, I’m a victim – there was less sign of the woe-is-me incarnation of Meghan on stage in Manchester.

Rebekah Vardy’s spectacular own goal

Jamie Vardy is one of English football's most prolific strikers. But thanks to his wife, his surname will be forever associated with one of the all-time great legal own goals. Rebekah Vardy has spectacularly lost her high-profile libel battle against Coleen Rooney in the so-called 'Wagatha Christie' case. It's hard to overstate how damning today's judgment is of Vardy: Mrs Justice Steyn said that Vardy’s evidence, which she had treated ‘with very considerable caution’, ‘was manifestly inconsistent with the contemporaneous documentary evidence' and was 'evasive' or 'implausible’. She also decided that Rooney’s Instagram post – which sparked the bust-up between the two WAGs in the first place – was ‘substantially true’.

Homage to Sydney Kentridge, South Africa’s courtroom giant

Sydney Kentridge, the protagonist of Thomas Grant’s superb legal saga The Mandela Brief, is that trickiest of biographical subjects: a great man. Grant acknowledges ‘it is rare that, on closer acquaintance, a person touted as a “great” man or woman conforms to the initial description’, but the South African lawyer has been described by countless barristers as the greatest courtroom advocate they had ever seen. Notable for the apartheid cases he conducted as a defence lawyer of especial distinction and passion, Kentridge has also been admired for his calm and assured bearing in court. The Observer praised him in 1968 as having ‘the face and bearing of an upper-class Regency buck speaking Afrikaans whenever he was obliged to with what sounded like a Knightsbridge accent’.

Prince Harry’s clunky Mandela day address

Every time that a picture of the Duchess of Sussex arriving at the United Nations is beamed around the world, it gets harder to avoid thinking the words: ‘she’s running’. Rumours of Meghan Markle’s presidential ambitions have been growing over the past few years, and she has done little to assuage them. Meghan’s every public utterance and appearance is carefully stage-managed in order to give the impression she has Something Important To Say, and that she may, yet, be the all-encompassing saviour an anxious America needs. But today, for once, she was not the star attraction. Instead, her husband-cum-cavaliere Prince Harry was thrust into the spotlight, with a high-profile address to the UN on Nelson Mandela day.

What is Elon Musk up to now?

Did Elon Musk ever intend to buy Twitter, or was it all another piece of showboating from a man apparently addicted to the spotlight of publicity? After he announced last Friday that he was walking away from the $44 billion deal that he had previously agreed, Twitter has sued him. A lawsuit angrily states that ‘Having mounted a public spectacle to put Twitter in play, and having proposed and then signed a seller-friendly merger agreement, [Mr] Musk apparently believes that he – unlike every other party subject to Delaware contract law – is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away’. Musk was unperturbed. ‘Oh the irony lol’, he tweeted. Yet underneath his imperviousness, it seems as if Musk’s inexorable rise to success is being checked in ways that he could never have predicted.

The rise and fall of R Kelly

It’s been an eventful week for celebrity justice, especially of the entirely predictable kind. First, Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years for recruiting and trafficking young girls. Now, the musician and paedophile R. Kelly has received a 30-year prison sentence for sexually abusing girls, boys and women. He was convicted of the offence last September so a lengthy prison sentence has been inevitable ever since. Still, 30 years is a long, long time. Should Robert Sylvester Kelly make it to the end of his incarceration — and the odds against a high-profile convicted sex offender surviving unmolested are not high — then he will be 85 upon his release. A once-stellar music career is over. His name is now a byword for infamy.

Tom Cruise: the last movie star

The actor Tom Cruise has recently released a new film, his first in four years thanks to Covid-induced release delays. You may have heard of it, a low-budget arthouse picture called Top Gun: Maverick. Ecstatic critics have fallen over themselves to praise Maverick not merely as superior to the original Top Gun (a mere 36 years old now) but as one of the greatest action films ever made. It currently has a hugely impressive 97 per cent 'Fresh' score on the reviews aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes. Coincidentally, that’s the same score that Cruise’s previous film, Mission Impossible: Fallout, received there, too. It is proving an enormous box office hit. And the perma-smiling Cruise has done everything that he can to promote it, short of going into space – where he is heading for his next film, apparently.

The royal rabble vs the Queen

By and large, the Platinum Jubilee celebrations were a success. Barring the odd moment of inexplicable poor taste, it was a well-choreographed blend of pageantry, ceremony and fun, and the deservedly viral clip of Paddington taking tea with the Queen seemed to epitomise a spirit of generosity and togetherness. Yet Her Majesty might be forgiven, looking at the headlines since the Jubilee, for wishing that she could always be in the company of an amiable fictitious bear, rather than her unpredictable and wilful family. The first major story of the past weekend was the revelation that Prince Charles is vehemently opposed to the government’s policy of deporting migrants to Rwanda, describing it privately as ‘appalling’ and suggesting that he was ‘more than disappointed’ with the idea.

Will anyone watch a Harry and Meghan Netflix docuseries?

Picture the convivial scene. You have been invited into the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s palatial £11 million mansion in Montecito, California as an honoured guest. Once you have removed your shoes, been frisked for weapons or recording devices and been offered a kombucha smoothie, you are ushered into the inner sanctum of the world’s most talked-about satellite branch of the royal family. What would you expect to find? A dartboard with Prince Charles’s face on it? Endless piles of obscure genealogical books that explain why Prince Harry is, in fact, the rightful heir to the throne? Or endless expensive, studiedly tasteful rooms that lack any heart and soul whatsoever? Harry and Meghan’s day-to-day lives may only be of marginal interest to most people, but Netflix remains convinced that their multi-million dollar investment in the couple has to be repaid somehow.

Meghan Markle’s presidential run appears inevitable

Meghan Markle has starred in a Netflix show and married into the Royal Family, but has she got her eyes on even loftier ambitions? Since quitting the UK and moving to the United States, the Duchess of Sussex has involved herself in various soft-political campaigns. She's asked Congress to legislate paid family leave. She has also placed herself in the company of the Obamas and the Bidens. Is this all serving as a prelude to a presidential bid for the Democratic nomination? If so, Joe Biden's sister appears to have given the game away. While Meghan has kept schtum about her political aspirations, Valerie Biden Owens has suggested president Markle might not be such a far-fetched prospect. In an interview with Good Morning Britain, Owens suggested that ‘of course’ the Duchess of Sussex would be a viable candidate for president one day.

This isn’t the beginning of the Charles Regency

One of the cruellest and most accurate remarks made about Prince Charles is that he is less king-in-waiting and more the perennial prince, forever hanging about in his mother’s shadow and increasingly desperate to assume the throne. Yet he is now 73 years old, and will be the oldest monarch to ascend the throne since William IV, who became king aged 64 in 1830. This is a source of endless frustration to Charles. Newspaper briefings by well-placed courtiers have suggested he longs for greater involvement in the day-to-day running of ‘the Firm’, perhaps even culminating in an official Regency, given his mother’s declining health. Today he has perhaps his most high-profile opportunity yet, with his delivery of the Queen’s speech at the state opening of parliament following his mother’s indisposition.

The perverse joys of Elon Musk buying Twitter

The predictable yet somehow still hilarious news that Elon Musk is to acquire Twitter for $44 billion has been greeted with the usual chorus of anguished hand-wringing. The left seems appalled that such an unconventional and apparently ungovernable figure now has control of the most volatile social media platform in the world. (It’s hard to imagine that Musk purchasing, say, Instagram would have led to anything like this level of excitement and upset.) Yet even as one acknowledges that Twitter in its current state is hardly run by a commune of basket-weaving, soya-milking Brooklyn hippies, the flamboyant Mr Musk remains one of the oddest men to have emerged in public life for decades. I do not have the space to detail the various escapades that the world’s richest human has engaged in over the past few years, many of which seem to have been conducted as if for large bets.

Prince Harry’s stolen future

It had been, for a change, a good few days for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Not only have they managed to make an atypically low-profile and successful visit to Windsor Castle for an air-clearing meeting with the Queen – which, unlike virtually ever other appointment they have had in recent years, appeared in the media after it took place – but they have now headed to The Hague for the Invictus games. The games remains one of the most successful endeavours that Prince Harry has ever associated himself with. After months of negative publicity, there has been the potential for the much-maligned duo to re-establish themselves in good standing with the Royal Family and the wider world before the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations in June.

The Prince Andrew conundrum

Prince Philip’s memorial service yesterday was an affecting occasion. The hymns, including Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer and Britten’s Te Deum In C were well chosen, and the Dean of Windsor’s well-judged sermon acknowledged both the Duke of Edinburgh’s sincere but never pious religious faith and his energetic, at times abrasive personality. The Dean suggested, rightly, that the Duke would never have wanted to be remembered as a plaster saint. After the low-key Covid-necessitated funeral service of last year, it was a public reminder that the royal family can still command both dignity and respect. So why, then, have today’s headlines been so dreadful? The answer, naturally, is because of the presence of Prince Andrew, who led his 95-year-old mother into the service.

Prince William is turning into his brother

For a tour that should have been an unmitigated success, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s visit to the Caribbean has ended up being surprisingly controversial, described as nothing less than ‘a PR disaster’. Even if some of the negative coverage feels confected, especially in light of the exploits of Prince Andrew and Prince Harry, it seems extraordinary that the supposed outrage could not have been anticipated. It has been an inauspicious curtain-raiser to the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations in June: from the unfortunate images of the Duke and Duchess shaking hands with Jamaican children through a chain-link fence to the protests that have greeted their progress from local republicans. Yet it has produced two notable news stories.

Prince Andrew settles. What next?

In some ways, the news is a disappointment. Prince Andrew’s decision to settle the civil case filed against him by Virginia Giuffre has likely deprived the public of weeks of damaging revelations. After much lawyer-led bravado about how the Duke of York was going to fight the scandalous and defamatory claims against him, he has now decided not to. This can only be seen as a terminal blow to what little remains of his public reputation. The statement released by the lawyers suggests that Giuffre will be receiving an undisclosed financial settlement and that Prince Andrew will be making 'a substantial donation to Ms Giuffre’s charity in support of victim’s rights'. The tone of the statement contains numerous lines that are almost jaw-dropping when viewed in the context of earlier comments that the Duke of York’s lawyers have made — for example, about Giuffre’s lack of reliability as a witness.

The banality of Prince Harry

When Prince Harry was unveiled as 'chief impact officer' at a tech start-up in California, many people were baffled. What did his job title mean? Well, now we know: his mission is to spout meaningless platitudes for wads of cash. Among the pearls of wisdom dished out by Harry in his appearance on a virtual panel for mental health awareness company BetterUp, was that: 'Mental fitness is the pinnacle'. We also learned that, when things get busy, 'self care is the first thing that drops away.' Harry's solution? Firms should ‘give everyone time to focus on themselves’. Introduced by BetterUp’s boss Alexi Robichaux as ‘one of the bravest advocates for mental fitness’, the Duke’s insights into the topic were, as ever, eagerly awaited by his admirers.

Prince Andrew’s high-risk sex case strategy could easily backfire

Prince Andrew isn't known for his shy and retiring nature. That much has been clear, at least, from the saga of the Duke of York’s increasingly compromised public standing. And when a New York judge announced earlier this month that Virginia Roberts’s civil case against Prince Andrew could proceed, he was faced with two options: offer an out-of-court settlement to Roberts that would be substantial enough to deter her from her chosen path of legal action; or prepare for trial. It should hardly come as a surprise – even if it will horrify the rest of the Royal family – that he has opted to carry on fighting. Andrew has, once again, exhibited the brass neck that has been a consistent feature of his, or his lawyers’, defence strategy throughout the whole affair.

Will Jeremy Hunt be the next prime minister?

Since he was defeated by Boris Johnson in the 2019 Conservative leadership contest, Jeremy Hunt has had a quieter life as a backbench MP. He has campaigned for the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe from custody in Iran and has been an effective and interventionist chairman of the Health Select Committee, often calling out his own party over inadequacies in their response to the Covid crisis and NHS funding. But could he now be preparing for another shot at the top job? Now that partygate looks increasingly likely to lead to a change of leader, Hunt has told the House magazine that: ‘I won't say my ambition has completely vanished, but it would take a lot to persuade me to put my hat into the ring.’ As the Prime Minister’s nemesis Dominic Cummings tweeted: ‘[This] is SW1 code for: leadership contest is imminent, sign up early if you want a seat in Cabinet, am on phone to donors and getting office set up, there has to be one non-Brexit nutter in last two’.

Is Britain really too dangerous for Harry and Meghan?

Shortly after his abdication in 1936, the now-Duke of Windsor wrote a series of letters while in European exile, in which he complained vociferously about numerous perceived privations that he faced. Chief amongst these was the provision for their security. The British government saw this as now being the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s responsibility, rather than the country’s, but the Duke was infuriated by what he perceived his former kingdom’s ingratitude in not offering to foot the bill for his police protection. A similar dilemma now presents itself to Edward’s great-great-nephew the Duke of Sussex and his wife. Ever since their announcement of their quasi-abdication from their roles two years ago, they have struggled both for relevance and attention.

How could No.10 staff party on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral?

If any single image epitomised the sacrifices that millions made during the pandemic, it was that of the Queen, masked, black-clad and entirely alone, in a pew at Windsor Castle on 17 April 2021, at Prince Philip’s socially distanced funeral. For those who regard Her Majesty as the exemplar of the public servant, who has done her best for her country for nearly seventy years, it was an almost heartbreakingly poignant representation of loss. Even for republicans, the image of the then-94-year old woman mourning her husband of 73 years was deeply affecting on a human, as well as a symbolic, level. It was unsurprising that Keir Starmer invoked the distinction between the Queen’s actions that day and Boris Johnson’s parties at a recent Prime Minister’s Questions.

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