Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > Spare > Status Update

‘the phone-hacking case first broke wide open because of poor Milly Dowler, a teenager who’d been abducted and murdered. Rehabber Kooks’s minions broke into Milly’s phone after she’d been declared missing – they’d violated her parents at the moment of their worst pain and given them false hope that their little girl might be alive, because her messages were listened to.‘

I really do not want to hear this much about Harry’s penis, there is such a thing as oversharing! At least readers in other countries will learn the slang word ‘todger’ 😂

My own theory about Harry and the press: I think he does generally hate the press. People question why he would do all this, but I think for him getting his side across after all these years is important. They say why is he inviting more publicity with this, but I wonder if he thinks that there will always be publicity around him, so why not on his own terms?

‘Also, no matter what they did to us, it was done away from the press, so for me every day was a kind of holiday. The training centre was like Club H. No matter what the colour sergeants dished out, there was always, always the compensatory bonus of no paps. Nothing could really hurt me in a place where the press couldn’t find me.’

If anyone’s squeamish, I’ve just had to hear about how Prince Harry had his head shoved inside a deer carcass as part of a ritual hunt when he was younger.

‘It struck me at some point that the whole basis of education was memory. A list of names, a column of numbers, a mathematical formula, a beautiful poem – to learn it you had to upload it to the part of the brain that stored stuff, but that was the same part of my brain I was resisting. My memory had been spotty since Mummy disappeared, by design, and I didn’t want to fix it, because memory equalled grief.’

I swear this book has the shortest chapters I’ve ever seen.

‘That was my sudden insight. With nothing to do but roam the castle and talk to myself, a suspicion took hold, which then became a firm belief. This was all a trick. And for once the trick wasn’t being played by the people around me, or the press, but by Mummy. Her life’s been miserable, she’s been hounded, harassed, lied about, lied to. So she’s staged an accident as a diversion and run away.’

Here we go, narrated by the man himself.