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8 NEWS WORLD maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 11 JANUARY 2023 PRINCE Harry's memoir, Spare, was re- leased on Tuesday, allowing the world to see in full detail his decades of anger at his position in the royal family and how he feels he has been treated by them. Bereaved boy, troubled teenager, wartime soldier, unhappy royal — many facets of Prince Harry are revealed in his hard-hit- ting memoir, often in eyebrow-raising de- tail. The Associated Press describes his mem- oir as "The Americanisation of Prince Harry". Others have called it a "pathetic attempt" to vilify his stepmother, Queen Consort Camilla, and a "sad book" that can- not fail to leave the reader more sympathet- ic to the prince. It details his trauma sparked by the death of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, his life in uniform as he embarked on a tour in Afghanistan and his life after meeting Meghan Markle. Why Prince Harry wrote Spare The prince begins the book with a scene shortly after his announcement he was leaving royal life, in which he met his father, then Prince Charles, and brother, Prince William, in Frogmore Gardens in the grounds of the royal estate at Windsor. He tried to set out his feelings and both replied that they did not understand his reasons for turning his back on life as a working royal and leaving his country behind. The book is his explanation. Meeting Dodi Fayed and his father Mo- hamed Al Fayed Prince Harry writes about what it was like to meet Dodi Fayed, the boyfriend who died alongside her in the Paris tunnel in August 1997. He says Dodi had always been de- scribed as "Mummy's friend". "Nice enough bloke, I thought." The brothers were present when Princess Diana first met Dodi in St Tropez and had enjoyed playing on jet-skis. Dodi gave their mother a diamond bracelet "which she wore a lot". "Then he faded from my consciousness," he writes. He met Dodi's father, Mohamed Al Fayed around the same time. While detailing how he circled London one night in a helicopter, "someone on the ground hit us with a laser pen. I was disoriented. And furious ... I was also perversely grateful for the stray mem- ory it knocked loose. Mohamed Al Fayed, giving Willy and me laser pens from Har- rods, which he owned. He was the father of Mummy's boyfriend. so maybe he was trying to win us over. If so, job done. We thought those lasers were genius." King Charles's health regime The prince reveals the dangers of entering his father's quarters at Balmoral without knocking. He is likely to be being dressed by his valet or worse still "you might blunder in as he was doing his headstands ... in just a pair of boxers" — exercises prescribed by a physio as a remedy for neck and back pain caused by polo injuries. Prince Charles made him visit a rabbi after wearing Nazi costume Prince William and his wife Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, laughed when Prince Harry suggested he would wear a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party. When the pictures leaked into the press, causing a scandal, he phoned his father, whom he calls Pa. The prince writes: "He didn't gloss over the facts. 'Darling boy, how could you be so foolish'." He says his father described it as "the fool- ishness of youth" but sent him to visit the Chief rabbi of Britain as atonement. The prince writes that the rabbi "didn't mince words" as he condemned his actions and put his "stupidity" in historical context. "I'd arrived at his house feeling shame. I now felt something else, a bottomless self-loathing." British military subjected Prince Harry to Muslim taunts to prepare him for possible capture in Afghanistan He writes about an army exercise in Cornwall, one of "the last hurdles for flight crews and pilots before deployment" in Afghanistan, which simulated a helicopter crash-landing behind enemy lines. He and his comrades were ambushed by a group of men in "camo jackets and black balaclavas", who wrapped blacked-out ski goggles over their eyes and zip-tied their hands before interrogating them. Role-playing captors were used in the ex- ercise with a woman in a scarf, seeking to exploit the duke's mother's friendship with Dodi Fayed in the weeks before her death in a Paris car accident in 1997. "She was wear- ing a shemagh over her face," he writes. "She went on and on about something I didn't understand. I couldn't keep up. "Then I realised. Mummy. She was talking about my mother. Your mother was preg- nant when she died, eh? With your sibling? A Muslim baby!" He said nothing, but "screamed with his eyes", before she stormed out and one of the captors spat in his face. Senior officers later defended the exercise, saying "we felt you needed to be tested", Prince Harry claims. "I didn't answer," he says. "But that took it a bit too far." Bullet magnet in Iraq The prince was on the verge of quitting the British Army after the most senior gen- eral scrapped his deployment to Iraq fol- lowing threats from insurgents. After a happy cadetship and graduation from the Sandhurst Royal Military Acade- my, he was told he would be part of the UK deployment to Iraq in late 2006. "Specifically southern Iraq. My unit would be relieving another unit, which had spent months doing advanced reconnaissance," he writes. "Dangerous work, constantly dodging roadside IEDs and snipers. "In that same month 10 British soldiers had been killed. In the previous six months, 40." He says two months after the announce- ment the plan was called off. He had be- come "the mother of all targets" or Iraqi snipers. "I'd become ... a bullet magnet." Harry used laughing gas to 'enhance his calm' during son Archie's birth The prince says he used laughing gas and ate Nando's to "enhance his calm" during the birth of his son, Archie. Writing about the scene at the private Portland Hospital in London in 2019, he says his wife Meghan was "so calm". He was calm too, he says. But he saw two ways of "enhancing" the state. "One: Nando's chicken. (Brought by our bodyguards)," he writes. "Two: A canister of laughing gas beside Meg's bed. "I took several slow, penetrating hits. Meg, bouncing on a giant purple ball, a proven way of giving nature a push, laughed and rolled her eyes. "I took several more hits and now I was bouncing too." Queen phoned Meghan to order her to resolve troubles with her father The queen once called Meghan to talk about her father, Thomas Markle, accord- ing to Prince Harry's new book. "She was responding to a letter Meg had written her, asking for advice and help," he writes. Meghan told her she did not know how to make the press stop interviewing him, "enticing him to say horrid things". "Granny now suggested that Meg forget the press, go and see her father, try to talk some sense into him," he writes. However, Meghan explained that he lived in a Mexican border town and she did not know how she would get through the air- port without being seen by the press. "Granny acknowledged the many prob- lems with this plan. "In that case, perhaps write him a letter? Pa agreed. Splendid idea." That letter was later published by The Mail on Sunday and led to a series of legal cases. Harry shops at TK Maxx Prince Harry said he received an official clothing allowance from "Pa" each year, but it was strictly for formal wear, such as suits, ties and ceremonial outfits. For more casual clothes he would shop at the "discount store", where he could snap up just-out-of-season clothes for bargain prices. He said he was "particularly fond" of its annual sale, when the shop would be flush with items that were just off-season or slightly damaged, from Gap or J.Crew. The late queen used a lift at Balmoral He describes spending time at Balmoral Castle, where the late Queen Elizabeth II would spend her summers. Describing the castle, he says: "In the heart of this main chamber was the grand staircase. Sweeping, dramatic, seldom used. Whenever Granny headed up to her bedroom on the second floor, corgis at her heel, she preferred the lift. The corgis preferred it too." He also describes how he and his brother would bow as they passed a statue of Queen Victoria which was placed at the top of one set of stairs. Prince Harry was given Diana's hair as proof she was dead He explains in great detail how the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, has haunted and traumatised him. He refused to believe she was dead for years, and even demand- ed his driver take him through the tunnel in Paris where she was killed so he could relive it. He also says that in the immediate after- math of her death, he had a "pivotal en- counter" with his aunt Sarah. She had two tiny blue boxes for the boys containing their mother's hair. "Aunt Sarah explained that, while in Par- is, she'd clipped two locks from Mummy's head. So there it was. Proof. She's really gone." Told to write a 'final letter' to his mother He sets out his often unhappy times at school, where he did not excel, and stood out because of his royal status. Key new claims Prince Harry makes The first copies of Prince Harry's new book Spare are unpacked during a midnight sale at a book shop in London