With jabs, nicknames and a dose of rancor, Harry skewers palace culture

Those are the nicknames Harry has given to three senior courtiers in the British royal household, who he said handled the tensest negotiations among him, his wife, Meghan, and the royal family, including the deal under which they withdrew from public duties and moved to Southern California in 2020.

Harry never names the three officials, but he makes clear he blames them, almost as much as his father and brother, for failing to protect him and Meghan from a poisonous drip of negative stories in the London tabloids, which Harry said tormented the couple and precipitated their decision to break with the family.

For all its juicy details about royal sexcapades, shoving matches and drug use, the book, titled “Spare” and released Tuesday after days of hyperventilating promotion, may be most intriguing for its revealing, if at times cryptic, look at how the institution of the monarchy operates behind closed doors. Amid all his sharing, Harry does not name, or uses nicknames for, many of those he is disparaging.

Bee, Wasp and Fly, in Harry’s telling, are central to the operation — and to his jaundiced view of palace culture. They are at the apex of a sprawling hierarchy that he says undermined him and his wife. It includes communications secretaries, ladies-in-waiting and a passel of junior aides who jockey on behalf of their royal bosses, sometimes to the detriment of other family members.

“I’d spent my life dealing with courtiers, scores of them,” Harry wrote. “But now I dealt mostly with just three, all middle-aged white men who’d managed to consolidate power through a series of bold Machiavellian maneuvers.”

Two people with ties to Buckingham Palace identified the courtiers as Edward Young, who served as private secretary to the queen; Clive Alderton, the private secretary to Charles; and Simon Case, who was private secretary to William and is now the government’s Cabinet secretary, the highest post in the British civil service. The two people insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

The palace, asked about the role of the three courtiers, declined to comment on employees, as it has withheld a response to anything in the book. The Cabinet Office also declined to comment when asked about Case.

At once emotional and embittered, the royal memoir is mired in a paradox: drawing endless attention in an effort to renounce fame. (Andrew Testa/The New York Times)

In the week since morsels from the book began leaking out, Harry has come under criticism from some quarters for reciting a litany of grievances and for violating his family’s privacy, the same practice for which he has long condemned the tabloids.

That was a sentiment some customers expressed Tuesday morning at a Waterstones bookstore in Piccadilly Circus as the book went on sale. “It feels like they’ve gone the tabloid aspect of dishing dirt,” said one customer, James Broadley. He added that he understood the financial motives behind it and was nevertheless considering buying the book.

While Harry has unapologetically named close family members, he has avoided it in the case of some outside antagonists. For example, in the case of Rebekah Brooks, a former tabloid editor who runs Rupert Murdoch’s News U.K., he turned her into “Rehabber Kooks.” Harry filed a lawsuit in 2019 against Murdoch’s Sun and other papers, saying they had hacked his phone.

He referred to two especially persistent paparazzi as Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber. Another tabloid reporter is called the Thumb, so named for having written what Harry recalled as an overblown story about him breaking a bone in his thumb while playing rugby at Eton College.

He cited a well-known 2013 essay in the London Review of Books by historical novelist Hilary Mantel, in which she compared the royal family to pandas — “expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment” — but he did not identify either Mantel or the publication.

Harry is less shy about Murdoch himself, writing that his politics were “just to the right of the Taliban’s.”

Harry’s gripes aside, “Spare” does offer a sobering peek at the cloistered, highly formal world in which the royal family lives — a circuit of black-tie dinners in Windsor Castle and tartan-clad shooting trips in the Scottish Highlands.

His description of the Sandringham meeting, in January 2020, places special emphasis on the role private secretaries play. Although the queen, Charles and William all attended the session, two of the three secretaries essentially ran it, according to Harry’s account. They laid out five options for the couple that ran the gamut from no change in their status to a wholesale break with the family.

When it was time to pick an option, Harry said, one of the officials produced a paper copy of the most extreme one. When Harry asked whether he had printed out the other options, he wrote, the official said his printer had stalled.

“Everyone was staring away or down at their shoes,” Harry wrote.

Such a passive reaction from the queen and the next two people in line for the throne might seem surprising. But experts on the royal household said it accurately captures the wide latitude that private secretaries have, from setting agendas to brokering meetings, even with other family members.

“The private secretaries run the place, basically,” said Valentine Low, royal correspondent for The Times of London and the author of “Courtiers: Intrigue, Ambition, and the Power Players Behind the House of Windsor.”

“On a banal level, they write their principals’ speeches and organize their diaries,” Valentine said. “But they run their lives. They’re their gatekeepers. They’re kind of joined at the hip.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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