Prince Harry's subtle swipe at Princess Anne has been revealed in his newly released book, Spare, as the Prince opens up about the competitive mentality within the Royal Family when it comes to appearing at royal engagements.
- Prince Harry's autobiography Spare was released on January 10, 2023.
- The shocking tell-all book from the Duke of Sussex has revealed some shocking truths about royal life and certain royal traditions.
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Princess Anne has defended her hardest-working royal title for many years, and come every December, the Princess Royal is nearly always the member of the family to pip others to the post by attending the most royal engagements in the past year.
In 2022, the Princess attended 214 royal engagements, beating her brother King Charles who attended 181 engagements.
The Court Circular showed that this was a recurring theme as in 2021, Princess Anne was once again dubbed the hardest-working royal and attended the most engagements (despite pandemic restrictions) with a total number of working days of 170 and 179 engagements. Her brother, King Charles, attended the second-highest number of engagements with 160 attended over 153 working days.
While this may seem impressive, Prince Harry had a rather negative view about the engagements logged by the royals, as he made a thinly veiled dig at Princess Anne and his father, King Charles.
In Spare, Prince Harry wrote, "The Court Circular was an ancient document, but it had lately morphed into a circular firing squad. It didn’t create the feelings of competitiveness that ran in my family, but it amplified them, weaponized them."
"Though none of us ever spoke about the Court Circular directly, or mentioned it by name, that only created more tension under the surface, which built invisibly as the last day of the calendar year approached," he said.
The Prince then directly spoke about particular individuals becoming 'obsessed' with trying to log the highest number of engagements. Considering Princess Anne is constantly topping the list, it is clear that he is suggesting the Princess Royal was involved in this competitiveness.
"Certain family members had become obsessed, feverishly striving to have the highest number of official engagements recorded in the Circular each year," said Harry. "No matter what."
The Prince then suggested that perhaps the engagements logged by other members of the family weren't valid, and were the sort of thing that Prince William and Harry would not have included.
"They'd succeeded largely by including things that weren't, strictly speaking, engagements, recording public interactions that were mere blips, the kinds of things Willy and I wouldn't dream of including," he said.
The Prince concluded this commentary on the Court Circular by suggesting that it was a 'joke' and a 'scam', particularly because King Charles was the 'sole decider' when it comes to deciding how many engagements Harry and William attended.
"To be publicly flogged for how much Pa permitted us to do—that felt grossly unfair. Rigged," said Harry.
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