Harry Spare memoir: If you're going to treat people like celebrities, don't be surprised when you get showbiz drama

Let me be the first to inform you all the artist formerly known as Prince Harry has a book out.

I know what you’re thinking – how exciting. Finally a member of the royal family putting their head above the parapet to speak about Prince Andrew.

Oh sweet summer child, I’m afraid not. Instead it’s a cry for help masquerading as a book with lurid anecdotes and gross brags we were all better off not knowing.

I, for one, had never had any interest in Harry’s sex life, but thanks to this book, like Cluedo, I know where it happened (a field), with what (a spank) and by whom (a horse girl).

Harry, the Duke of Sussex, with wife Meghan. Picture: PA

That is not a story of an engaging memoir from a man desperate to get his point across, but instead the stuff of nightmares, a tale nobody normal would admit to.

Nobody in touch with reality would boast of killing 25 people in Afghanistan, because it’s gross and a fundamentally weird thing to mention.

Similarly, I can’t think of a single friend who would admit to getting decked by their brother, let alone admit being called “Harold”.

It’s also really boring, none of this is a surprise. Oh, you’re in the army and did your job? Surely not. You went to private school and then took cocaine because you somehow didn’t know or care that it destroys the rainforest and is paid for in blood? Shocking.

But that’s the thing with the royals. They aren’t normal, or at least not in the way they’d like to be.

I’m fairly sure they are flesh and bone, but really they are sheltered creatures raised in luxury and funded by a state they’re not legally liable to pay for.

A relic of a bygone era, every aspect of what they do is treated with reverence and obsession, with their marriages international events the British capital shuts down for.

They are a national institution, an ever present we have put on a pedestal and followed with a microscope and paparazzi lens, watching them grow up with a trauma partly inflicted by the UK’s tabloid media.

Newspapers hire body language experts to discuss what they’re thinking, relatives are paid to criticise Meghan, and the whole time we as a nation pretend this is fine.

The same few people who worked with Princess Diana are wheeled out to opine on the same “are they OK?” question. Frankly, it’s all a bit American.

Harry is, in my opinion, boring, but by venerating what these people most of us have never met do, we have made them think what they say has value.

His book is being treated like a new Harry Potter, people desperate flicking through to know if his career dies at the end.

He has been fooled into thinking everything he says is interesting, when really the royals are just influencers you aren’t allowed to unfollow.

They are reality stars we cannot vote out, but who our obsession with also means they can’t leave, forever paying for their security and watching their family bonfire.

Being angry about Harry and Meghan is like shouting at Made in Chelsea. Just grow up and watch something else.