Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1489838
9 NEWS WORLD maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 11 JANUARY 2023 "I've been told the matrons asked me to write a 'final' letter to Mummy. I have a vague memory of wanting to protest that she was still alive, and yet not doing so, for fear they would think I was mad". Queen never hugged her grandchildren Prince Harry leaves readers in no doubt that his grandmother, the queen, was al- ways on duty. Emotion and physical contact were never an option. To the extent that after a six-month tour away from the UK she gave her then six-year-old son Charles a stiff handshake on her return. Prince Har- ry reveals that he was never able to give her a hug. Indeed, while she was enjoying the celebrations for her golden jubilee, includ- ing Brian May playing God Save the Queen from the roof of Buckingham Palace, she ap- peared to relish the occasion and the music. "Sitting directly behind her, I couldn't help thinking the same thing. To see her tapping her foot, and swaying in time, I wanted to hug her, though of course I didn't. Out of the question. I never had done and couldn't imagine any circumstance under which such an act might be sanctioned." Wished he'd asked the Queen Mother more questions He describes an evening at Balmoral when as a teenager he sipped a gin and tonic with his "Gan-gan", as he called the Queen Mother. "I wish I could recall specifically what we talked about. I wish I'd asked more questions. She'd been the War Queen ... famous for saying that, no matter how bad things got, she'd never, ever leave England, and people loved her for it. I loved her for it. I loved my country and the idea of declaring you'd never leave struck me as wonderful." His dislike of Diana's butler Paul Burrell He describes how he would receive office paperwork from his father stamped "ATT HRH PRINCE HENRY OF WALES", his official name. "One day the package contained a series of memos from the Palace comms team about a delicate matter. Mummy's former butler had penned a tell-all, which actually told nothing. It was merely one man's self-jus- tifying, self-centring version of events. My mother once called this butler a dear friend, trusted him implicitly. We did too. Now this. He was milking her disappearance for money. It made my blood boil." Outranking the heir After "passing out", or graduating from army training at Sandhurst, he became Second Lieutenant Wales of the Blues and Royals, part of the Household Cavalry, bod- yguards to the monarch. His grandmother. He describes how the queen attended the parade for the first time in decades, so her appearance "was a dazzling honour". "And Willy saluted. He was at Sandhurst too now. A fellow cadet. He couldn't resort to his typical attitude when sharing an in- stitution, couldn't pretend not to know me — or he'd be insubordinate. For one brief moment, Spare outranked Heir. Granny in- spected the troops. When she came to me, she said: 'Oh ... hello'." Mesmerised by the Koh-i-Noor diamond At the funeral of the Queen Mother, which was a difficult reminder of his moth- er's funeral, he said his eyes kept going to the top of "Gan-Gan's coffin, where they'd set the crown. Its three diamonds and jew- elled cross winked in the spring sunlight. At the centre of the cross was a diamond the size of a cricket ball. Not just a diamond, the Great Diamond of the World, a 105-carat monster called the Koh-i-Noor. Largest di- amond ever seen by human eyes. 'Acquired' by the British empire at its zenith. Stolen, some thought. I'd heard it was mesmeris- ing, and I'd heard it was cursed. Men fought for it, died for it, and thus the curse was said to be masculine. Only women were permit- ted to wear it." Prince Harry's post-traumatic stress issues He reveals how he suffered panic attacks in 2013, toggled with bouts of debilitating lethargy. Hours before a speech he would begin to sweat then his mind would buzz "with ear and fantasies of running away". He feared the day would come when he would run offstage or burst out of a room. Getting dressed in a suit was enough to trig- ger an attack. He searched online for an answer and realised his problems stemmed from his mother's death. "I kept trying to self-diagnose, to put a name to what was wrong with me ... when the answer was right under my nose. I'd met so many soldiers, so many young men and women suffering from post-traumat- ic stress, and I'd heard them describe how hard it was to leave the house. "Despite all my work with wounded sol- diers, all my efforts on their behalf, all my struggles ... it never dawned on me that I was a wounded soldier. And my war didn't begin in Afghanistan. It began in August 1997." Meghan ordered him to address his problems Early in their relationship, Meghan made it clear to him he needed therapy. After drinking too much wine "the conversation took an unexpected turn, I became touchy. Then angry. Disproportionately, sloppily angry. Meg said something I took the wrong way ... I snapped at her, spoke to her harsh- ly — cruelly. As the words left my mouth I could feel everything in the room come to a stop ... Meg walked out of the room, disap- pearing for a full fifteen minutes. I went and found her upstairs. She was calm, but said in a quiet level tone that she would never stand for being spoken to like that." She asked him where it had come from, if he'd ever heard adults speak that way while he was growing up. "I cleared my throat, looked away. Yes. "She wasn't going to tolerate that kind of partner. That kind of life. She laid it all out, super-clear. We both knew my anger hadn't been caused by anything to do with our conversation ... "I've tried therapy, I told her. Willy told me to go. Never found the right person. Didn't work. "No, she said softly. Try again." Royals compete to appear the busiest Prince Harry says certain members of the royal family were "obsessed" with the annu- al record of official engagements called the Court Circular. He says they "feverishly" strived to notch up the most public duties, which would be tallied up each year and compared in the press. He says the daily list of royal engagements is a joke because it was self-reported and "rigged". He did not name anyone but said that although the Court Circular was not dis- cussed directly by the Windsors it caused tension under the surface as the end of the year approached. "The Court Circular was an ancient docu- ment, but it had lately morphed into a cir- cular firing squad," Harry writes of his ex- perience at Christmas 2013. "It didn't create the feelings of competitiveness that ran in my family, but it amplified them, weap- onised them. "Certain members had become obsessed, feverishly striving to have the highest num- ber of official engagements in the Circu- lar each year, no matter what, and they'd succeeded largely by including things that weren't, strictly speaking, engagements, recording public interactions that were mere blips, the kinds of things Willy and I wouldn't dream of including. "Which was essentially why the Court Circular was a joke." He said it was "gross- ly unfair" to be "publicly flogged for how much Pa" permitted us to do. The Princess Royal is often labelled the hardest-working royal after regularly hav- ing the most official duties in the Court Cir- cular each year, followed by King Charles. William competed for publicity After leaving the army, Prince Harry set about establishing the International War- rior Games. He believed that as his broth- er was essentially on paternity leave, it wouldn't clash with any of his work. "I reached out to Willy, expecting him to be thrilled. He was sorely irritated. He wished I'd run all this by him first. He com- plained that I'd be using up all the funds in the Royal Foundation. 'That's absurd,' I spluttered... "What was going on here? I wondered. "Then I realised: My God, sibling rivalry. I put a hand over my eyes. Had we not got past this yet? The whole Heir versus Spare thing." makes in his book 'Spare'