William was in the wrong re Harry’s wedding

[MaybelleMary]

Re William didn’t stay over with Harry the night before his wedding and caused a fuss about having to go to the hotel he was in the night before for dinner. As his only brother and as best man he should’ve been there with him. We hear all the time how wonderful and amazing Catherine’s family are - surely on the occasion of his only sibling getting married her parents could’ve come over to help her with her newborn and the children for the night. They have nannies and cleaners and staff so not exactly short of help in general.

my DH has only one brother too. He got married when my baby was 6 weeks old post a difficult c-section. We went to the hotel for 3 nights - so DH could have drinks with his brother and bridal party the night before, the night of the wedding and the night after the wedding. I was fine with this as it was his only siblings wedding. Yes it was difficult for me and exhausting but it was important to us both that we made a big effort for his DBro especially as (like Harry) they were missing a parent at the wedding.

from my view either William or Catherine or both didn’t care enough to put themselves out for Harry and his wedding which reflects poorly on them.

??? Maybe just lots of different people disagree with you and the post 😵‍💫

One of the problems with discussions about what happened in all these scenarios using the information in Harry's book is that he himself said in the book:

Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates as it sees fit, and there's just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts.

Harry's ghostwriter also shared the following quotes on Twitter last week in reference to Spare/Ghostwriting from a book by a memoir writer:

He posted three quotes from Mary Karr's The Art of Memoir. In one, Karr writes, "The line between memory and fact is blurry, between interpretation and fact. There are inadvertent mistakes of those kinds out the wazoo." In another, Karr writes, ""Neurologist Jonathan Mink, MD, explained to me that with such intense memories as David’s, we often record the emotion alone, all detail blurred into unreadable smear."

So this is fine - we are getting Harry's raw emotions - how he felt about things that happened to him - and no one can dispute his own truth about that - but these memories are not always based in reality or facts - it doesn't matter so much in some recollections such as whether it was a Playstation or an XBox, or where he was when he heard the Queen Mum had died, or that he's directly descended from Henry VI etc. It's weird these things weren't fact-checked but it's not affecting anyone else.

But when the memory is accusing someone of assault (William), elder abuse/control (The Bee - Sir Edward Young) or supporting racism (Kate advising him to wear a Nazi costume and finding it hilarious) then it's unfair and awful to put out these 'memories' as factual things which happened.

Great post @wordler

You mean the statements that could not be printed due to a printer that is not 'working'?
You cannot get any more transparent than this, it's laughable.

For anyone who has not read the book - here is probably the best review I've seen and is a tribute to the skill of the ghost writer.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/23/prince-harry-memoir-spare-review

Why didn’t harry explain what options 2 and 4 were? That’s the odd bit.

Aren't they on the other 400 pages that were not printed? Most likely, I would say.

I don’t believe he was told that. As I said he could have asked for them to be emailed to him or if they were understandably concerned he would have leaked them (which he would have) he could have asked to read them. I would imagine they had them all printed but they weren’t willing to show the rest to harry as he would have used them to launch a counter narrative to undermine them because he didn’t get his own way. This point really doesn’t matter, except to underline the royal family already did not trust them because he had tried to wipe their eye already

Seeing as you’re here posting @notanotheroneagain in reply to a comment posted after mine, I’m assuming you didn’t see my Q to you so I’ll repeat:

You said people keep name changing- to what and whom are you specifically referring to? Cheers.

Hmmm it’s a bit of a stretch to extrapolate that because of the memory haze re exactly where he was when the queen mother died, or x box vs PlayStation, that he, what…? imagined William getting physical with him? imagined a phone call to W&K re the Nazi costume?

I mean, I get that you might misremember the location, or the time, or the exact circumstances. But do you remember someone assaulting you if it didn’t happen?

How odd to go in to such detail disparagingly describing the queen’s advisors that he couldn’t fit in 2/5 of the options given to him. Ludicrous

Well the person who rented the costume to him said he was in the shop with William when he chose it - so no need to phone William AND Kate. William reportedly had asked about a Zulu costume but they didn't have one. Another awful option - thank goodness they didn't have one.

The dog bowl incident - lots of options - he was drunk and wasted and fell backwards during a heated row?

Who knows - the problem is there's so many factual errors, and he's admitted his memory is flawed, that trusting his factual account of things should be questioned. How it made him feel - sure.

Stupid to book the wedding 3 weeks after Kate’s due date - if Kate had posted on here the consensus would have been not to go as bride and groom clearly hadn’t considered her comfort at all, so no need to consider theirs. I can’t believe the palace didn’t tell them to book for June/July instead.

And given the falling out the William and Harry had had, I’m not surprised William didn’t want to stay over. Maybe Harry saw that as extending an olive branch and felt offended when he was knocked back? But this is how family rifts can snowball due to perceived slights on both sides.

I’m not a fan of either. Harry seems incredibly thin skinned, petulant and quick to take offence at everything he can think of. William seems like an almighty arse, pompous, petty, bossy and also pretty petulant. Get rid of the lot of them.

So a witness says William was in the shop with Harry, but Harry says otherwise. If William was with him, it is indeed very unlikely he called William and Kate at the same time, or even just Kate.

And on the matter of inaccuracies, as I pointed out above, despite Meghan wanting a private, small wedding ceremony in the U.K. and the palace saying no, this is not what Harry states and implies in his book. He says their first wedding venue choice was Westminster Abbey.

Sorry missing words in my above post: I mean despite a tabloid saying Meghan wanted a small and private wedding ceremony in the U.K…

I think this is one case where Harry's recollections may be the correct ones.

If he and Meghan had genuinely wanted a small private wedding then there's nothing 'the palace' could have done to stop them. Neither seemed to give a moment's thought to anyone other than themselves, so no way they'd have meekly given in to 'the palace'. And aren't we also told that the royals were intimidated by how assertive and confident Meghan was? Yet she quietly allowed the most important day in her life to be dictated to her by 'the palace'? Which is it? Both can't be true.

Regarding the Abbey, as I said above there was never a chance that Harry was getting married there as he was only a non direct line grandchild of the sovereign. Of course, Harry blames William even though it will have been the Queen making the decision. Seems to be something of a pattern with him.

In their defense on this one, they probably didn't have much leeway with dates - they can't do the weddings in June/July because of all the Queen's commitments to Trooping the Colour etc, plus big sporting things like Wimbledon. And then Balmoral in August. It's why Eugenie had to have the autumn wedding in October - to give Queen time to get back from Balmoral and handle any state/politcal stuff but before all the Remembrance things kick in. They've also got to avoid anyone else's significant dates and anniversaries, and fit around official engagements.

There was probably only 2-3 Saturdays in the whole calendar available.

Fair enough. But then don't get all sniffy nearly 5 years later if your brother prioritises his post partum wife and newborn son over a stag night with you and your mates.

Why would Kate lie saying she was on her own with George and didn't have staff o Anglesey if she did?

It would be so easy for that to be disproven. Just the same as people seem like to disprove Harry and his recollections.

There was no need for it to be a Saturday.

Oh I agree @IcedPurple that Harry is telling the truth - they didn’t really want a small, private wedding in the U.K, they wanted Westminster Abbey.

And Harry is wrongly blaming William.

My point was that @notanotheroneagain ’s insistence that Meghan wanted a small, private U.K. wedding - according to a tabloid, arf - is contradicted by Harry himself.

True but unlike with William and Kate I don't think the government was going to make it a public holiday if they'd had it on a weekday so probably were thinking about maximising people's chance to see it.

Yes. Totally agree.

The contradictions abound.

I just find it amusing that a supporter of Harry’s (notanotheroneagain ) has ignored what Harry himself wrote in his book and instead decided a tabloid was correct

Yes, she really should have given it more thought before cutting and pasting a screenshot from the Sussex Squad Twitter archive.

I suspect (may be wrong!) that I because I handed @notanotheroneagain her arse on a plate about her Meghan screenshot, she was shooting back at me when she wrote the following:

And can you posters stop with the constant name changes, makes it hard to engage, as it sound rather 'trolly'.

The reason I think this is because in another post I wrote that my username was inspired by the extract in the book about killer whales. That’s the only reference to name-changing on here. I’ve asked notanother to clarify who she meant twice but she hasn’t.

So just so we’re clear: I didn’t change my name during this thread. I changed it a week ago. As you’ll see if you do a quick Advanced Search, I began using it on the 12th Jan. It’s the only name I’ve used on this thread.

Bossily telling people not to name change and saying it sounds “rather ‘trolly’”, sounds rather ‘trolly-hunting’. Which is against MN rules. And name changing is allowed within MN rules, as long as you’re not using two names on a thread in a sock puppet-y way.