SPARE : Prince Harry details physical attack by brother William in new book

 

Prince Harry details physical attack by brother William in new book

 

Exclusive: Harry writes in new autobiography Spare that William ‘knocked me to the floor’ during confrontation in London in 2019

Harry and William in London in September, following the death of the Queen. The Guardian obtained a copy of Harry’s autobiography.

 

Martin Pengelly in New York

@MartinPengelly

Thu 5 Jan 2023 00.03 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/04/prince-harry-william-physical-attack-2019-meghan-spare-book

 

In his highly anticipated autobiography, Spare, Prince Harry recounts what he says was a physical attack by his brother, William, now Prince of Wales, as their relationship fell apart over the younger prince’s marriage to the actor Meghan Markle.

 

Describing a confrontation at his London home in 2019, Harry says William called Meghan “difficult”, “rude” and “abrasive”, which Harry calls a “parrot[ing of] the press narrative” about his American wife.

 

The confrontation escalated, Harry writes, until William “grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and … knocked me to the floor”.

 

The extraordinary scene, which Harry says resulted in visible injury to his back, is one of many in Spare, which will be published worldwide next week and is likely to spark a serious furore for the British royal family.

 

Amid stringent pre-launch security around the book, the Guardian obtained a copy.

 

The book’s title comes from an old saying in royal and aristocratic circles: that a first son is an heir to titles, power and fortune, and a second is therefore a spare, should anything happen to the first-born.

 

Spare is a remarkable volume, in which the altercation between the two princes forms a startling passage.

 

Harry writes that William wanted to talk about “the whole rolling catastrophe” of their relationship and struggles with the press. But when William arrived at Nottingham Cottage – where Harry was then living, in the grounds of Kensington Palace and known as “Nott Cott” – he was, Harry says, already “piping hot”.

 

After William complained about Meghan, Harry writes, Harry told him he was repeating the press narrative and that he expected better. But William, Harry says, was not being rational, leading to the two men shouting over each other.

 

Harry then accused his brother of acting like an heir, unable to understand why his younger brother was not content to be a spare.

 

Kate, William, Harry and Meghan at Windsor Castle in September following the death of the Queen.

Kate, William, Harry and Meghan at Windsor Castle in September following the death of the Queen. Photograph: Kirsty O’Connor/AFP/Getty Images

 

Insults were exchanged, before William claimed he was trying to help.

 

Harry said: “Are you serious? Help me? Sorry – is that what you call this? Helping me?”

 

That comment, Harry says, angered his brother, who swore while stepping towards him. Now scared, Harry writes, he went to the kitchen, his furious brother following.

 

Harry writes that he gave his brother a glass of water and said: “Willy, I can’t speak to you when you’re like this.”

 

He writes: “He set down the water, called me another name, then came at me. It all happened so fast. So very fast. He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor. I landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out.”

 

Harry writes that William urged him to hit back, citing fights they had as children. Harry says he refused to do so. William left, Harry says, then returned “looking regretful, and apologised”.

 

When William left again, his brother writes, he “turned and called back: ‘You don’t need to tell Meg about this.’

 

“‘You mean that you attacked me?’

 

“‘I didn’t attack you, Harold.’”

 

Harry says he didn’t immediately tell his wife – but did call his therapist.

 

When Meghan later noticed “scrapes and bruises” on his back, and he therefore told her of the attack, Harry says she “wasn’t that surprised, and wasn’t all that angry.

 

“She was terribly sad.”

 

Harry’s resentment of being the “spare” is the unifying theme of his book, through chapters on his childhood, his schooling, his career as a royal and in the British army, his relationship with his parents and brother and his life with Meghan through courtship, wedding and marriage to their own experience of parenthood.

 

Early on, Harry recounts the story of how his father, now King Charles, supposedly said to his wife, Princess Diana, on the day of Harry’s birth: “Wonderful! Now you’ve given me an heir and a spare – my work is done.”

 

Whether describing his memories and love for Diana, who was killed in a car crash in Paris in August 1997, or his similar love for his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, who died last year, Harry is unsparing in his recounting of intensely private scenes and conversations.

 

 

Harry met Meghan in 2016. They married at Windsor Castle in 2018. As Duke and Duchess of Sussex, they began life as working royals but quickly drifted apart from the family and eventually embarked on a largely separate existence, moving to Canada and then California.

 

Their acrimonious split from the royal family has been the subject of endless press coverage, some of it steered themselves, including via a famous interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021 that caused huge controversy on both sides of the Atlantic and around the world.

 

Subjects from that interview and a recently released Netflix documentary, including a miscarriage suffered by Meghan and her thoughts of suicide, and suggestions of racism within royal circles, are covered extensively in Harry’s book.

 

The book has been trailed and two interviews with Harry are due to be broadcast in the UK and US this weekend, with ITV News at Ten and CBS 60 Minutes. Both interviews are eagerly awaited, trailers and teasers reported on as news as speculation about what Harry has chosen to say in his book continues.

 

In a clip from the ITV interview, Harry said: “I would like to get my father back, I would like to have my brother back.”

 

Given the details recounted in his book, that might not seem immediately likely. Indeed one of Harry’s most pertinent revelations of private conversations between the senior royals comes from the very front of his book.

 

Harry recounts an anguished meeting with Charles and William after the Windsor Castle funeral of Prince Phillip, the queen’s husband, in April 2021.

 

Charles, he says, stood between his warring sons, “looking up at our flushed faces”.

 

“Please, boys,” Harry quotes his father as saying. “Don’t make my final years a misery.”

Oh NO ! Another ‘Bridgeton’ version of a classic novel !?! / Dangerous Liaisons | Official Trailer | STARZ

“You’re better off thinking of it as Bridgeton in France. Gossip Girl in powdered wigs. Game of Thrones in silks, slaying only reputations. Which is to say: park your brain at the door and enjoy the ride.”

 

Review

Dangerous Liaisons review – a classic novel becomes Gossip Girl in powdered wigs

Yes, the script for this adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’ book is terrible. Sure, the French accents are ropey. Never mind – park your brain at the door and enjoy the ride

 

Lucy Mangan

@LucyMangan

Sun 6 Nov 2022 09.00 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/nov/06/dangerous-liaisons-review-a-classic-novel-becomes-gossip-girl-in-powdered-wigs

 

Put aside Choderlos de Laclos’ novel. Forget the magisterial 1988 film version starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich. The new eight-part Starz adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons (Prime Video) is billed as the origin story of the marquise de Merteuil and vicomte de Valmont we know and love-hate. You’re better off thinking of it as Bridgerton in France. Gossip Girl in powdered wigs. Game of Thrones in silks, slaying only reputations. Which is to say: park your brain at the door and enjoy the ride.

 

We are in Paris, 1793. Les peasants are revolteeng, but Camille (Alice Englert) and Pascal (Nicholas Denton) are young and in love and care nothing for the scent of revolution in the air, nor the terrible script they have been tasked with delivering. Nor for any kind of French accent. Englert in fact seems to be aggressively Englishing hers instead, which does make it hard to understand on occasion. “Take me somewhaa I’m not paaaaawh!” she says breathlessly to Pascal. When he spins a dreamy yarn about how that might be accomplished, she slightly unfairly asks, “Have you forgotten my dat?” This, it transpires, means “debt”. Camille (the marquise de Merteuil-to-be) is a courtesan in hock to her madam. Pascal (the vicomte de Valmont come the day) is a mapmaker with a side hustle in seducing rich, titled ladies in the hope of being rewarded with riches and a title.

 

One of his ladies is the current marquise de Merteuil, Genevieve (Lesley Manville, somehow grounding the show while soaring above it all), who has foolishly poured her heart out in letters to him (this is ye olden days’ equivalent of sending nudes, children) and now wants them back. Hmm – oui mais non, says her stripling lover. Alors, says the marquise, and carries on sleeping with him while she works out what to do.

 

The answer comes when Camille’s friend Victoire (Kosar Ali) – no great fan of le petit mapmaker – steals the letters from him and Camille discovers that Pascal has been playing hide the saucisson not just with Genevieve but several others, too. They take them to the marquise and trade them for an introduction to high society. Genevieve, heartbroken about her lover’s betrayal, steps through the stages of grief and arrives rapidly at the lesser-known sixth stage: Massive and Ongoing Vengeance. She begins training Camille out of the ways of the cheap courtesan and into the ways of trading sex for palaces rather than centimes. Camille’s glow-up begins with a Pretty Woman-esque wardrobe fitting and trip to the opera, where Genevieve takes a minute out of her busy bewigging schedule to kick Pascal in the virtual noisettes and send him on his way.

 

Pascal, meanwhile, has only his penis to work with. From second-tier project Florence de Regnier (gloriously played with a fibrillating edge of madness by Paloma Faith) he gets a gold clock, which won’t do.

 

Because they are not yet their fully poisonous adult selves, Pascal is keen to get back into Camille’s good graces, which – for … reasons – requires seducing the look-how-pious-I-am Jacqueline de Montrachet (Carice Van Houten), and eliciting epistolary proof after the fact.

 

From there, it’s just a roiling sea of absurdity. Scam builds upon scam, scandale follows scandale and everybody – except the rightly exasperated Victoire – has a whale of a time. Including the viewer, despite (or perhaps, morally corrupt horrors that we are too, because of) some atrocious dialogue and a liberal scattering of terrible performances.

 

For all that it is about love, sex and the deceits that come with it, this Dangerous Liaisons resists becoming encumbered by any deeper messages about the damage people are willing to do to each other to get ahead. It’s about watching Camille learn the manipulative ropes from a mistress of them and seeing how far she can get on her wits alone. This can get a touch repetitive – you might need to do an episode or two at a time rather than binge-watch the lot – but that’s the common weakness of all but the most riotous escapist fare.

 

In short, give up, kick back, relax and enjoy. Clear your mind of any thoughts of how Pierre C de L must be spinning in his grave. Resistance to the accumulating absurdities is useless. As a wise, if endlessly malevolent man once almost said: it’s beyond your control.

Prince Harry says he wants his father and brother 'back'

'I want my father and brother back': ITV releases trailer for interview with Prince Harry

Prince Harry: I would like my father and my brother back

 

Duke of Sussex tells ITV ‘it never needed to be this way’ and that ‘I want a family, not an institution’

 

Miranda Bryant

Mon 2 Jan 2023 15.46 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/02/prince-harry-would-like-father-brother-back-itv

 

The Duke of Sussex has said he wants his father and brother “back” during an ITV interview due to be broadcast on Sunday, two days before the publication of his highly anticipated memoir.

 

The latest intervention by Prince Harry, expected to again rock Buckingham Palace with revelations of its inner workings, is one of two interviews to be broadcast on the same day either side of the Atlantic. In the other interview, with a US broadcaster, he accuses the palace of failing to protect his family in the same way as other royal family members.

 

The prince says “I would like to get my father back, I would like to have my brother back” in a preview clip from the interview with the ITV News at Ten presenter Tom Bradby.

 

The 90-minute programme, produced by ITN Productions for ITV, will be broadcast two days before Harry’s autobiography, Spare, is published on 10 January.

 

In a series of clips cut together with no questions heard, Harry says “it never needed to be this way” and refers to “the leaking and the planting”, before adding: “I want a family, not an institution.”

 

He also says “they feel as though it is better to keep us somehow as the villains” and that “they have shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile”, although it is unclear to whom he is referring.

 

Filmed in California where Harry lives with this wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex and their two children, the interview will go into “unprecedented depth and detail” about his life in and outside the royal family, ITV said.

 

Bradby, who has known Harry for more than 20 years, was also behind the interview during the couple’s 2019 southern Africa trip, when he asked Meghan about the impact of the pressure she was under during an ITV documentary.

 

In comments that became an early public signal that the couple were struggling under the intense media spotlight, she said: “Thank you for asking because not many people have asked if I’m OK, but it’s a very real thing to be going through behind the scenes.”

 

In a separate interview, to be broadcast on US television, Harry told the 60 Minutes programme on CBS News that “silence is betrayal” while talking about the alleged failure of Buckingham Palace to defend him and the Duchess of Sussex before they stepped down as senior royals.

 

In a clip from the interview, to be broadcast on Sunday, Harry tells the journalist Anderson Cooper: “Every single time I’ve tried to do it privately, there have been briefings and leakings and planting of stories against me and my wife.”

 

“The family motto is ‘never complain, never explain’, but it’s just a motto,” he added. “[Buckingham Palace] will feed or have a conversation with a correspondent, and that correspondent will literally be spoon-fed information and write the story, and at the bottom of it, they will say they have reached out to Buckingham Palace for comment. But the whole story is Buckingham Palace commenting.

 

“So when we’re being told for the past six years, ‘we can’t put a statement out to protect you’, but you do it for other members of the family, there becomes a point when silence is betrayal.”

 

Buckingham Palace said it would not be commenting on either trailer.

 

Harry has previously said that Spare is written “not as the prince I was born but as the man I have become”. It will include “the highs and lows, the mistakes, the lessons learned”, he has said, promising it will be a “first-hand account of my life that’s accurate and wholly truthful”.

 

The book’s publisher, Penguin, described the memoir as “intimate and heartfelt” and “written with raw, unflinching honesty”.

 

Promotional materials say Harry will write for the first time about walking with William behind their mother’s coffin and include details of his time in the military in Afghanistan, and Meghan and Harry’s home life.

 

An audiobook, read by Harry, will also be released on the same day.

 

The interview comes weeks after the release of the six-part Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan in December, which broke viewing records at the streaming service and divided viewers with its explosive details.

 

The series, directed by Liz Garbus, included personal footage shot by the couple and their accounts of their heartbreak over wars with the palace, claims of Prince William shouting at his brother and briefing against them and the stresses over privacy action against the Mail on Sunday, which they believe led to them miscarrying.

 

Last month, the Sun was forced to apologise after publishing a column by Jeremy Clarkson in which he said he “hated” Meghan “on a cellular level”.

 

The article rapidly attracted widespread criticism and became the Independent Press Standard’s Organisation’s most complained about article. It was later removed from the Sun’s website at Clarkson’s request.

 

A spokesperson for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex said the apology was “nothing more than a PR stunt”.

Dame Vivienne Westwood: Fashion icon dies aged 81

Obituary

Dame Vivienne Westwood obituary

Fashion designer who from punk origins created an international brand with a dissident edge

 

Veronica Horwell

Fri 30 Dec 2022 13.18 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/dec/30/dame-vivienne-westwood-obituary

 

No fashion designer ever had a Paris show like the one staged by Vivienne Westwood in 1991. Although she was by then 50 and had been making clothes for sale for 20 years – and the British Fashion Council had named her designer of the year – she stitched much of that collection on her own sewing machine in her shabby south London flat, hand-finishing it in the van that transported her, and the models, to France, where the couturier Azzedine Alaïa had invited her to guest-show. Despite those limitations, the collection was a major success.

 

The life of Westwood, who has died aged 81, was like that, both rackety and responsible. She went on behaving as an eternal student, although she had dropped out after one term at Harrow Art School because, as a working-class teen, she had no idea how to make a living from art. She was candid with biographers and interviewers that her real, worldly education came from relationships, usually with men for whom she was the practical back-up, paying the bills or totting up the till receipts.

 

Westwood handcrafted the rips in her punk gear; when she was appointed OBE in 1992, she went to Buckingham Palace in a finely tailored suit, but wore no knickers beneath. She never had any intention of becoming an international designer – running her own market stall would have been enough – let alone Dame Vivienne Westwood, eminence and brand, “dowager empress of the west”, as she was known in China. It had all been one pragmatic response after another to chance and exigency.

 

She was born in Tintwistle, just outside the mill town of Glossop, Derbyshire, the daughter of Dora (nee Ball) and Gordon Swire. Her father was a factory worker; her mother had been in the mills and appreciated a length of good wool worsted – although everything was in short supply during Viv’s childhood. Her education at Glossop grammar school ended in 1958, when the Swires saved enough to buy a little post office business in London, and moved to Harrow. Viv soon left her art school course, frustrated that it prohibited sewing. Her own style was beehive hair, pencil skirts, stiletto heels – all the music-allied experiments of London’s first teen generation.

 

She became a primary school teacher and in 1962 married Derek Westwood, a toolmaker with ambitions, which he achieved, to be an airline pilot. Their son, Ben, was born in 1963, but the couple separated soon after, divorcing in 1966. She returned to her parents, and began to make jewellery for a stall in Portobello Road.

 

Among those sharing a rented flat with her brother, Gordon, was a charismatic art student, Malcolm McLaren. Westwood and her son moved in, too, and she became McLaren’s first girlfriend, soon pregnant with their son, Joe, who was born in 1967 – but only, Westwood claimed, after she had decided against an abortion and spent the money on a cashmere sweater instead.

 

McLaren, far into situationist politics of consumption and display, fizzed around the leftist landscape, trying to reach Paris in revolutionary 1968, while Westwood and her sons decamped to live in her parents’ holiday caravan. When McLaren wooed her back, they moved to a small, worn flat in an art deco block off Clapham Common, to a life neither romantic nor domestic.

 

Their first collaboration was flogging vintage rock records, as McLaren promoted music, and when they were left with unsold T-shirts from a concert, Westwood reworked and embellished them as fashion. Her original ideas about appearance came out of an instinctive understanding of the early, brief, sexual appeal society traditionally permitted to working-class women. As she told her biographer Ian Kelly, they were “people who’ve had a harder life and more dramatic experience … the poor have the status … of having more experience”. Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel had had a similar revelation around 1918.

 

In the late 60s, No 430 Kings Road, located just where Chelsea swerves towards Fulham, had been the cartoony Mr Freedom boutique, before being let to a fading jeans store, where McLaren began selling his records at the back. In 1971 Westwood borrowed £100 from her mother and rented the whole place, contracting a partnership with McLaren, and running up stock on her machine to supplement the bought-in goods. They called it Let It Rock, changed within a year to Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, selling biker jackets and Westwood’s tough T-shirts. These she printed with slogans and lewd images, gay and straight; she distressed and adorned them, dyed them in her bath and stitched on chicken bones boiled clean in the kitchen.

 

McLaren, who grasped publicity better than politics, regularly revamped the shop according to the zeitgeist. Its next incarnation was as SEX, in 1974, with Westwood sourcing its stock of rubber fetish-wear through the pages of Exchange & Mart. To promote the business, McLaren and Westwood visited New York, where he got hooked on rough new music, while she was picked up by Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd, a sexy eccentric with hair like a bleached loo brush, who pub-talked radical politics.

 

Back in London, McLaren recruited his own punk band, the Sex Pistols, with Westwood encouraging their creative destruction in music, gigs and clothes. She did claim the credit for some Pistols’ lyrics, but never for punk’s emblematic safety pin, though, as a craftworker, she appreciated all the young punks’ improvisations, their black bin bags and loo chains. SEX morphed into Seditionaries during the Pistols’ short, sensational career, making Westwood spokeswoman for punk at its gobby height in the silver jubilee summer of 1977.

 

The shop’s clothes were attributed to both McLaren and Westwood, although both later furiously disputed ownership of ideas. As Seditionaries drew international attention, it needed stock to be manufactured rather than sourced and worked over, so Westwood found a tailor, cutter, sample machinist, and a few specialist hands, and began producing on a small craft scale. McLaren went full-time into music management.

 

Westwood acknowledged McLaren’s early awareness that clothes were turning fantastic and theatrical, and that he gave her the keywords “romantic” and “pirate”. Further inspiration came from a historical pattern handbook, Norah Waugh’s The Cut of Men’s Clothes, and volumes about art history. This homework provided the basis of her Pirates collection of 1981, saved from being fancy dress by Westwood’s feeling for the erotic potential of period detail. It was her first catwalk collection, shown at Olympia, and sold in 430 Kings Road, which again had been revamped melodramatically and renamed Worlds End; in 1982, Westwood and McLaren tried a second London shop, Nostalgia of Mud. They also began a protracted split that left her without cashflow.

 

Westwood accepted an offer of management from the fashion PR Carlo D’Amario, and they travelled to Italy to seek backing for a label of her own. He showed Westwood, whose parameters had been the Clapham flat and teeny tatty premises in Camden, how Italy managed its high-tech, craft-based production, yet no big deals happened, and they lived as renegades, commissioning sample lines for collections that had guest showings in Paris and Tokyo.

 

Westwood was discovering that her work was known, and admired, more outside Britain than in it. After the economic turmoil of the 1970s, international couture had turned towards ostentation and ready-to-wear towards conservatism, so she was a rare surviving rebel.

 

Nostalgia of Mud closed in 1984, and, still on the run, she staged a 1985 show in New York, the “mini-crini” collection – tutu-skirted, body-fitting clothes, with shoes far madder than the winklepickers she had worn as a teen; Westwood loved platforms, and later elevated them so high that the model Naomi Campbell fell off 9in soles on her catwalk.

 

By this time Westwood was broke, but with practical help and a modest loan from family and friends, reopened the shuttered Worlds End, lit by candles after the electricity was cut off, and easily sold her limited supplies.

 

The Harris tweed, tartan and barathea of her collection of 1987, again sewn in the flat, recalled Glossop’s stout wool stuffs, respecting tradition yet radically cut. Other ideas, such as an 18th-century-style corset bodice with Rigilene plastic instead of whalebones, came from her favourite London museum, the Wallace Collection. Westwood acknowledged the help, too, of her friend Gary Ness, who for years advised her on what to look at and for, and what to read.

 

The Harris tweed and later, far wilder, Brit collections gave Westwood her second, and permanent, fashion identity: London tailoring plus romantic gowns, with a dissident edge, labelled with her logo, a coronation orb circled by Saturn’s rings.

 

Her finances remained unsound. With introductions from rag trade friends, she moved incrementally into bank loans and business funding to pay off the debts of Worlds End, and to buy rather than rent her second shop, in Davies Street, Mayfair. Westwood earned where she could, teaching fashion at the Academy of Applied Arts, Vienna (1989-91), and the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin (from 1993). In the Vienna lecture room, she fell in love with her best student, Andreas Kronthaler. He moved to London, then into her flat, and they married in 1993.

 

Westward’s 1990s Paris shows attracted Italian backers who realised that her core belief in women dressed not as dreams or goddesses but as heroes already had a following in Japan and was building another in China’s then very new market. Over time, her agglomerated business was structured into a global company with headquarters in Battersea, south London. Her own clothing preferences had become a genre in which other staff, especially Kronthaler, could work, and with her encouragement, he showed his first independent collection in 2016. Although Westwood kept the old Clapham flat, she and Kronthaler moved in to a Queen Anne house on the other side of the common.

 

Westwood’s politics, unstoppably advocated, were anti-establishment, whatever the current establishment might be, and settled in the direction of Green party-pro-environmentalism, although there were problems over her company’s tax-related fine for undervaluing its assets, and its corporate tax wriggles. She never resolved the conflict between her personal disapproval of consumerism and fashion’s worsening profligacy. Still, by the time she was made a dame in 2010, she had matured into a national institution.

 

Kronthaler and her sons survive her. Joe, who used his father’s maternal grandmother’s surname, Corré, founded a lingerie business, Agent Provocateur, inspired by his mother’s outrageous bra and corset designs.

 

 Vivienne Isabel Westwood, designer, born 8 April 1941; died 29 December 2022

Vivienne Westwood Interview | Screen Test | The New York Times

Vivienne Westwood on the Wallace Collection