To be annoyed at Prince Harry's memoir title SPARE

[benisright]

I have zero interest in this couple who seem to enjoy making a living on moaning about how they are poorly treated in Britain. Just saw the headline news and the cover of Harry's memoir with his face and one single word SPARE.

Get a life for goodness sake. I'm about his age and never once thought of him as a spare. He kinda invented his own tale.

🙄 Yes it does makes sense. There are allegations of favoritism in most families with more than one child. It doesn't have to be a tale of two princes. Have you never heard about it?

All parents say they have no favourites and even if they have, they absolutely treat all the kids the same. The number of people who say there was favouritism would suggest otherwise.

Favouritism is very different to giving birth to one child to inherit the Royal Family business, and birth to a "spare" in case the first one dies.

Not on the level of feelings which is what the book is presumably about. It will still be directly relevant to their lives because it will affect how they judge their father for writing the book and how they view their cousins where there will be an eventual king (even though they barely know them).

How has harry produced " a spare" his children will never be in line for the throne ?
Unless some catastrophic event wipes out william and his children .

The motivation for having more than one child is broadly similar whether you are talking about the king of an actual castle or the house-proud owner of a castle that is basically a bungalow in Skegness. You still worry about losing an only child. It would mean no prospect of grandchildren or continuity of your bloodline. It is primal , not institutional.

I barely know my cousins, big deal.

They will like all adult children judge their parents for how they raise them. An issue none of us know anything about.

Bloody hell! I did NOT have my second child in case my first child died. And I did not have children to continue the bloodline.

Harry was the spare in case something terrible hsppened to william ,not necessarily the less favoured child ,by all accounts prince Andrew was the Queens "favourite " but he was the spare too.

It certainly crossed my mind as a primary consideration. From my own experience, I knew the clichés about 'playing together' or 'entertaining each other' to be dubious.

if people didn't have 'spares', the human race would have died out long ago due to infant mortality, and other reasons. We are all 'spares' in that sense. The concept of spare as it refers to primogeniture is connected to wealth because it keeps a wealthy 'estate' intact and in sensible hands (the heir is trained for the job) so that the wealth grows as opposed to being frittered away by family members untrained in ways of wealth management.

His version, which will be accepted as the truth in the same way that his mother's performance on Panorama was.

@MaulPerton I think it is disgusting to have children as a spare. I think it is even more disgusting to call a child a spare however jokingly.
I had two children because I wanted two children.

Slight aside, but I occasionally wonder if the perception of Diana would be the same today. i.e. I wonder if she would be more ridiculed for that Panarama interview than she was back in the 90s.

Certianly, it doesn't stand up to modern day viewing very well (the clips I've seen repeated here and there). It's far too melodramatic for today's audience, I think.

There's a wicked little bit of me that wishes he were Hewitt's child and that the Royal Family announce it the day before the publication of Spare (Me), the me-me-me-memoir, that's his mother's name trashed and he is even more pointless. She would be off to find another rich man to support her ridiculous ambitions as Harry would have lost his currency. Sadly, the Philip photo is clear evidence that he's a Windsor.

Yes, I agree. Even though I love kids, I was not compelled to reproduce until I had the makings of an estate to pass down. At that point, it really became a necessity. You can set up the most elaborate trust funds but they are a pointless expense without benefactors who are sufficiently worthy in your eyes (that is usually your children).

Beneficiaries

I remember watching it at the time ,she certainly played up to the camera,s
Who knows what the " sainted" Diana would have made of her life ?

I find that a very strange reason to have children. There are always other family members to pass any wealth onto. Anyway I would be dead.

I have children because I wanted children and like children. I wanteed to bre a mother.

I think the upper class are a bit unfeeling about their children anyway. So I guess seeing children in that way is not really a surprise.

A large section of the population and the media took it to be perfectly true, she could have said that the earth's flat and been believed. If anyone, like me, ridiculed her, they were considered very wicked, similarly when she died, if one didn't buy into the sob-fest it was considered awful. All the screeching about the dreadful Queen not coming to London to 'be with us in our grief' was the only version allowed, saying that she was doing exactly the right thing by staying with her grandsons and leaving it up to the Spencer family to bury their family member was totally wrong! Who else would take over the funeral of their ex daughter in law on this site????

And throughout history most people had no wealth to pass on. It is not what kept the species going. What kept it going was a lack of contraception.

Such hyperbole. Those saying that were a tiny minority. What people did want was the sign that they gave a damn about Diana dying. Because there did not seem to care at all. They originally wanted a private funeral and no public acknowledgement of her death beyond a vague press release expressing regret. Indeed the initial press release after Saville died expressed more regret than the initial one after Saville died.

Indeed the initial press release after Saville died expressed more regret than the initial one after Diana died.

Im not sure ,they did ,it was only after her death she became the " sainted Diana " prior to her death ,some papers were less than complimentary about her .

I don't really have any opinion about Harry, or Meghan, one way or the other. They impact my life in exactly zero ways.
I feel sorry for him, in that the early, very traumatic loss of his mother, must have been appalling. And that his life has never really been his own. It's that whole "gilded cage" problem. Incredible privilege, but at what cost?

The title comes from the phrase "an heir and a spare". It's a well-known phrase.