Don’t vilify Prince Harry for picking on Camilla

Prince Harry has a point. That’s a sentence I thought I’d never write. Making money from exploiting your royal connections, while also complaining about them, as Harry is doing, is singularly unattractive. But there is one part of Spare that does merit sympathy: Harry’s views about his stepmother Camilla.

Harry has written that he and his brother ‘begged’ their father not to marry Camilla. In an interview with CBS’s Anderson Cooper he said, ‘She was the third person in their marriage. She needed to rehabilitate her image’. That pretty well gets to the heart of the thing, quite apart from the interesting question of the extent to which Camilla traded information with journalists.

The blame for Camilla and Charles’ adultery can plainly be evenly shared, but it is asking an awful lot of a young man to forgive and forget the pain that the affair caused his mother.