OPINION:
There is another universe right now where Sasha Walpole is just your usual busy working mother, dusting toast crumbs off of her favourite jumper while trying to track down lost swimming kit; a universe where she is not suddenly globally famous for one quick, ill-considered tryst more than 20 years ago and a universe where her name, for the rest of her life, will not be synonymous with a drunken fumble in a field behind a pub.
Walpole is, of course, the woman who outed herself over the weekend as the “older woman” who took Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex’s virginity, an escapade he revealed to the world via the pages of his best-selling memoir and score-settler Spare.
Let’s be honest here: The minute the world learned of the royal’s post-pub slap and tickle, it was absolutely and utterly inevitable that at some point this woman would be outed.
Et voila! Over the weekend Fleet Street’s hacks got to revel in their own Woodward and Bernstein moment.
But the events of the last 24 hours leave a bad taste in the mouth because this whole grubby episode would seem to prove one thing: Our man Prince Aitch, the patron saint of truth-telling and manly necklaces, is a hypocrite.
As the Mail on Sunday tells it, Walpole’s decision to go public was not driven by a hunger for fame but by the fact she was “scared of the real-life consequences” of Harry’s decision to include her in Spare.
Walpole told the Mail of her “panic” after finding out that their shot-fuelled shag was included saying that “it got to the stage when a strange car drove by I’d think, ‘Is this it?’ I worried that I’d wake up one morning and find a barrage of cameras outside my house.
“At first I thought I could hide and that it would blow over. But as the names of different women, some of whom I know, became public I realised that to make the speculation stop, I needed to tell the truth.
“I wanted to take control of the situation before it took control of me … I can stop looking over my shoulder.”
You have to feel a bit sorry for Walpole, a woman who sounds like she would have much preferred anonymity to becoming a global punchline because of an adolescent indiscretion.
You have to wonder, in making the choice to include the story of their encounter, did Harry once stop and think that it would fire the starting gun on the race to find his “older woman”?
Which brings us to the crux of the issue here.
For years now, Harry has taken the highest moral high ground, pointing out the many failings of not only the British press but that flawed bunch of hug-phobes called the royal family. He and wife Meghan have made calling out the dysfunction of both Fleet Street and the House of Windsor the bread and butter for much of their post-Palace proselytising, and it can be argued, they were right to do so.
However, a series of choices that the Sussex have made over the past couple of years – with Spare the acme of this signature Sussex sermonising – have exposed just how hollow that superior posture is.
Take the fact that one of the central themes of Spare is that for decades Harry endured having his privacy invaded by the unscrupulous, shameless sections of the press. All very, very bad, I think we can agree.
Little wonder then that ring-fencing his new life and shielding his family from the long lenses of the ravening paparazzi has become something of a crusade for Harry, their privacy something to be militantly protected.
And yet in Spare, Harry tramples all over the royal family’s own privacy with seeming indifference.
The Princess of Wales is not particularly welcoming to Meghan, “grimacing” after being asked to lend the former actress her lip gloss, throwing a wobbly over bridesmaid dresses, and taking umbrage after the former actress suggested she had “baby brain”.
Meanwhile his brother, the Prince of Wales, comes across as hectoring and insecure, while King Charles is both a dud Dad and provider of comic relief, doing his daily handstands and carting his childhood teddy around the country like some parody of a character from Brideshead Revisited.
When ITV’s Tom Bradby pointed this particularly uncomfortable fact out to Harry, he rebuffed Bradby with the childish argument that “my family have been briefing the press solidly for well over a decade. So, I’m sorry that me owning my story and being able to tell my own story is upsetting to some people.”
But is it “owning your story” if you then resort to the same self-serving approach that you have accused others of?
Harry can’t have his Battenberg cake and eat it too. He can’t perch atop the mount, preaching about the error of his family’s ways and their willingness to tattle about him and then engage in exactly the same sort of tit-for-tat revelations.
In Harry’s telling, the way the royal family operate when they are far away from the iconic Buckingham Palace balcony and rummy public eyes is as a flawed series of courts, all locked in an unsavoury, unseemly battle for good press. In that quest to win the PR game, the various frontline Windsors are willing to climb over one another, a climate where self-interest trumps family. Icky stuff indeed.
But how is that different from what we have seen from Harry and Meghan in recent years?
They went ahead with their prime-time claymore of an interview with Oprah Winfrey in March 2021 as Prince Philip lay dying in hospital.
Four months later, as Queen Elizabeth grieved the loss of her husband of 73 years, the duke announced he was writing an autobiography.
In May 2022, at a time when it has recently been alleged that Her Majesty was battling cancer, it emerged that they were making a Netflix “docu-series” about their lives.
Why not wait to do all of this until the inevitable had happened and the nonagenarian stalwart had died?
Earlier this year, sources close to the late monarch told the Telegraph that her grandson’s “constant ambushing” of his family had “an impact on the Queen’s health in her final year. It did take its toll”.
The same report also revealed that “another well-placed source” had said they had “absolutely” no doubt that the allegations made by the Sussexes affected the late Queen’s health.
So … Harry bristles and points fingers when his family exploit him to get ahead but then he seems curiously willing to follow the exactly same tawdry route.
For the duke, there seems to be one rule for his family, the media, and anyone with a smartphone but another when he decides that he fancies a bit of truth-telling.
(Decidedly handy too that not only will the truth set you free but also make you oodles of lovely dosh too.)
Harry has made it his mission to hold the media and the royal outfit to account but does not seem particularly inclined to apply the same critical eye to his own choices.
Imagine if it was not Harry who had revealed his field romp with Walpole to the world but the other way around. Let’s imagine she didn’t name names precisely, like Aitch, but she wrote about having sex with a teenage Prince after a boozy night.
She would be pilloried. She would be cast as money-grubbing, willing to trade an intimate moment for cash and rightly so.
So why shouldn’t the same standard hold for him too?
Harry knows how the media operates – he had to have known that writing about that field moment would spark a huge tabloid hunt for the woman in question.
What I wonder is, how much consideration or thought, if any, did he give for the various people whose lives might have been affected by all of his truth-telling public forays?
His grandmother, his grandfather, his brother, his sister-in-law? Or even his nieces and nephews?
It is now, forever more, out in the public domain that William attacked him during a quarrel over Meghan’s alleged treatment of the couples’ shared staff in 2019. One day, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis will be able to read about their father’s bullying ways and their mother’s supposed coldness towards Meghan. Did Harry give any thought as to how it might affect them to have their parents tarred and feathered by their own uncle?
We are now at the one-month mark since the first bombshells from Spare hit and what have we learned? The royal family are an emotionally defective bunch driven by ego and a desire to come out on top PR-wise, no matter the possible cost to people they are supposed to care about. The apple really doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?
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