Spare a thought: Why Prince Harry’s recollections are a harbinger of the future

The ghostwriter of Prince Harry’s memoir Spare tweeted a crucial remark by the rampaging royal this week on his just-released take-no-hostages book: “Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory…. There is just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts.” So he summarily elevates recollections to the status of fact, which should actually surprise no one in today’s world of teri-meri—personalised—truths. The key phrase in Prince Harry’s self-exculpatory observation is “objective facts”. Call it royal prerogative or something else, he has decided to equate recollection with fact, and fact with truth. But as John Adams, who later became the second US President, famously argued during a court case in 1770, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” But the 42nd US president Ronald Reagan was being more contemporary than he probably he realised in 1988 when he made a Freudian slip by saying, “Facts are stupid things.” Prince Harry would heartily agree. More so today when the concept of a “subjective fact” has been accepted as “facts seen from the perspective of an individual, based on inner perceptions, feelings, and beliefs or knowledge, rather than on external evidence of events” in dictionaries. History is the most affected by bifurcation of fact into objective and subjective. Chronicling has already suffered from suppression of truth and facts down the ages. At least suppression presupposed their immutability—uncomfortable facts and truths needed to be hidden by those positing theses that ran counter to them. But now Prince Harry avers that truth and facts can (and should) depend on how they are recalled by people! No need to hide, just alter them at will! So the prince can justifiably call a long dead British king a direct ancestor—great-great-great etc grandfather— though that monarch left no direct heirs as his only son died “issueless”, to use an Indianism. And say he got an Xbox as a present from his maternal aunt in 1997, four years before it was released. Also, say that his wife booked her father first class air tickets to London from Mexico on Air New Zealand—which has only business class as its top category. Of course, British toffs have long held that attention to detail is very boringly middle class. Only swots value accuracy because they have to clear exams to get ahead; those who list as many kings on their family tree in Britain as penguins do in Antarctica, don’t care. And interactions and events involving relatively few people are particularly prone to divergent perceptions of facts and truth, depicted brilliantly by Akira Kurosawa in his 1951 film Rashomon. Since Spare focuses on British royals and their close circles, most of its contents fall into that fungible genre. And as the family members who could corroborate or contradict ‘his’ facts and truths with some of their own will not do so, he’s safe. The late Queen Elizabeth II had the most charitable explanation for her grandson and his wife’s relentless fusillade of unverifiable accusations against the rest of her descendants: that their “recollections may vary”. Indeed, recollections are practically meant to vary as memories are susceptible to many factors including time and emotion. Upgrading memories to “truth” usually left no room for manoeuvre; but if truth is subject to memory, Prince Harry can easily backtrack on the Sussexes’ 2021 accusations of racism in the royal family and recast it in 2023 as ‘unconscious bias’. But surely deeming truths to be as subjective as recollections is nothing but intellectual dishonesty? This crime is compounded if ghostwriters are complicit and editors are lazy or amoral. Every memoir should be put through a fact-check, in the interest of credibility, not only so that readers are not misled but also so that the other people and events featuring in it are given a fair deal. Spare has not been fair, and there could be several possible reasons why it remains riddled with inaccuracies, putting a question mark on the gamut of his claims and complaints. The ghostwriter and editors may have just sat back and not bothered to cross-check. Royals are famously not amused when they are contradicted so they may not have wanted to annoy him by questioning his powers of recall. Or minions have checked but their bosses did not want to let facts get in the way of a sensational story. As Spare has become a runaway bestseller, they clearly made a good business call by not disturbing Prince Harry’s train of thought. The tendency to selectively present facts in order to sensationalise is not limited to petulant princes and mischievous ghostwriters—politicians are the usual suspects. Remember, Donald Trump is credited with presiding over the apogee of the ‘post-truth’ era with his highly individualistic (Harry-like?) recollections and characterisation, beginning with his estimate of the crowd at his inauguration. But the integrity of language has long ceased to matter in politics. Funnily enough, Trump’s main antagonist—the media—is the other favourite target of such accusations. Even more ironically, Prince Harry claims Spare is an attempt to correct the biased coverage the Sussexes have had to weather when they lived in the UK. But passing off unverified ‘memories’ as fact and truth will not embarrass the media into a change of heart or coverage. It will only lead to battles of competing facts and trusts—not just wildly varying recollections. The author is a freelance writer. Views expressed are personal. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.