Farrukh Dhondy | What Harry the ‘Spare’ is really aiming for: To stay in spotlight

“The mirror in a lover’s eye

Was conceived there to flatter

The fact the image is a lie

Doesn’t really matter

To then know even as one is known

Or as one wants to be —

O Narcissus you’re not alone

In seeing what you want to see…”

— From The Bum Shower of Peshawar, by Bachchoo

The word “spare” is frequently used for tyres, the one that replaces the active one that’s punctured or burst. The Duke of Sussex has called his ghosted autobiography “Spare”. It’s supposed to reflect the fact that being the second son of King Charles III, he’s not the heir to the throne. He would, now that his brother William, the Prince of Wales, has three children, be the fifth in line to the throne and only get there if, God forbid, Charles and the first four die in some ghastly accident. Yes, Harry is, even though he has skipped off with wife Meghan to California and given up all royal duties, still fifth in line to the throne. If he were a tyre, all four on the vehicle would have to be bust, replaced and even then, there would be another spare before he could…

(This is getting tedious — Ed. Sorry yaar, I’m coming to the point! — fd)

I recount this, gentle reader, to convey (boast?) that I am not a spare. Being the eldest son of the eldest son, of the eldest son of the eldest son, I am the legal heir to all the Dhondy estates and wealth. The only problem is there aren’t any estates or any wealth to inherit. Alas!

Harry has fortunately been granted the title of Duke and inherited the saleability of his royal lineage, especially since he married Meghan, who is half Afro-American. It has enabled him to launch his war against the British royals, alleging that they are racist and scheming. He and Meghan opened this assault with a much-publicised and much-viewed interview with the queen of American TV, Oprah Winfrey. They followed this with a six-part documentary for Netflix, the book Spare and several interviews Harry gave to coincide with its publication.

Though Harry says he wants to be reconciled to his father and his brother, his pronouncements against his stepmother, Queen Consort Camilla, and his recollections of being physically assaulted by William over his relationship with Meghan, together with his assertion that there is lot of dirty linen on the royal family which he disdains to hang out, may not lead to such a reconciliation.

Not that I think they care. These interviews, the book, the documentary series and the assertions are part of their armoury of internecine warfare. If this were an earlier century, Harry and Meghan might have raised an army and marched on London’s palaces to imprison King Charles III and kill all the others in line for the throne. Richard III had no compunction in sending his nephews to the Tower of London and having them smothered. Or so the story, which some historians have begun to doubt, goes.

There is no doubt that in the Mughal dynasty, though primogeniture of the male offspring was recognised as the rule, brothers and step-brothers felt entitled to raise armies and excuses to kill the eldest heir and lay claim to the Peacock throne.

Akbar’s half-brother Mirza Hakim led such a rebellion against him claiming that by marrying a Rajput Hindu and appointing Hindus to his court he had turned his back on Islam and become a “kaffir” who then deserved to be replaced as the ruler of what he would declare a Muslim kingdom.

Akbar’s great-grandson Aurangzeb, the second son of Emperor Shah Jahan, raised an army in the name of Islam to fight wars against his three brothers. His first victim was his elder brother Dara Shikoh, heir to the Mughal throne, who had translated Sanskrit Hindu texts and was a follower of Sufi Islam, which Aurangzeb condemned, in all sincerity and not just to find an excuse for his ambition, as heresy.

Britain too has had its share of sibling rivalry which led to wars and usurpations. King John took the opportunity of grabbing the throne while his bother Richard the Lionheart was away fighting crusades. Even Edward VIII, who was forced to abdicate in order to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson, is thought to have harboured the ambition to return and displace his brother on the throne after Hitler, whose war and Nazi ideology he supported, had conquered Britain. A proxy army of the German state, in the days when kings and their brothers couldn’t raise one.

Harry’s war against the British royals and the British media is conducted with the contemporary equivalent of the proxy force — the American media. His ambition, he declares, is to shame the British royals into modern attitudes and perhaps share his contemporary platitudes? He doesn’t have designs on the crown. He declares that Camilla was the shameless manipulator who had her eye on it when Prince Charles, as he then was, included her to be the “third person”, as his wife Princess Diana, the Princess of Wales (Harry’s mother) put it, in their marriage.

But perhaps Harry’s ambition is not what he claims. It may be simply to keep him and wife Meghan in the spotlight. And then there are the possibly $200 million to be gained from marshalling these forces. That’s a lot of spare change!