7,000-word whinge that suggests Harry’s ghostwriter is as thin-skinned as the prickly prince himself!

BACK in January when Prince Harry’s misery memoir began flying off the shelves, smashing all publishing sales records, one thing rapidly became clear: the lofty promise on the jacket of ‘insight, revelation, selfexamination and hard-won wisdom’ risked being undermined by the book’s litany of howlers and historical errors.

Perhaps spotting the danger of this narrative, Harry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning ghost writer, John Moehringer — better known by his pen name J.R. Moehringer — tweeted some words from the American essayist Mary Karr, which cryptically hinted at ‘inadvertent mistakes’ in memories and memoir.

‘The line between memory and fact is blurry, between interpretation and fact,’ he wrote.

For good measure, Moehringer shared a quote from Harry himself: ‘My memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates what it sees fit, and there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in socalled objective facts.’

With that, the ghostwriter — who was reportedly paid around £800,000 for his work — and Harry settled back as the sales for Spare went off the charts: 3.2 million in the first week alone.

But there was no attempt to address the mistakes and, amid all the bile Harry poured over the Royal Family, the blunders went unchallenged.

These discrepancies varied from the frivolous — he claimed that the gift his late mother had bought him for his 13th birthday in 1997 was an Xbox when, in fact, the Microsoft games console was not released until 2001 — to the more serious.

His assertion that the last thing Princess Diana ‘saw on this Earth was a flashbulb’ and the last sound she heard was ‘a click’, goes to the heart of Harry’s hatred of the Press. While the actions of the paparazzi at the scene of the princess’s crash in Paris may have been morally indefensible, they did not provide her last sights and sounds.

Paramedics who took her to hospital told the inquest years later that they spoke to Diana. ‘She was conscious; she could speak to me,’ said one.

Four months on from publication and it seems the criticism has been neither forgotten nor forgiven — at least not by Harry’s ghostwriter.

In an overlong and utterly selfserving article for The New Yorker magazine this week, Moehringer complained that within days of Spare’s publication, an ‘amorphous campaign’ was launched which claimed that his ‘rigorously fact-checked’ book was riddled with inaccuracies.

That this article should appear just days after the Coronation and Harry’s 28-hour flying visit to Britain — which left questions over his royal future — seems an extraordinary coincidence.

Many assumed Harry must have been joking when he described in the book how Moehringer ‘spoke to me so often and with such deep conviction about the beauty (and sacred obligation) of memoir’.

After reading his collaborator’s pompous exposition on what he calls the ‘art’ of ghostwriting and the trials and tribulations of working with the prince, it’s clear he may have been entirely serious.

Hell hath no fury like a ‘proper’ American writer scorned and Moehringer lets rip at his critics, particularly those in Britain who didn’t spare Spare their mockery.

Without naming him, he singles out a review by the novelist Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review Of Books, whose piece, headlined ‘Off His Royal T**s’, accused the American writer of showing off.

‘Prince Harry has never read a book in his life, so his ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer, invites a round of applause every time he goes all Sartre or Faulkner,’ wrote O’Hagan, who has his own experience of the genre, having ghosted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s memoir.

Moehringer hit back by describing a long essay of O’Hagan’s on his methodology for ghostwriting as sounding ‘like Elon Musk on mushrooms — on Mars’.

O’Hagan was one of many reviewers who ensured that, while Spare was a financial triumph, it was less successful in the Sussexes’ battle for hearts and minds.

The book was the catalyst for many people, who had hitherto been on their side, to begin to break ranks. Worryingly for the Sussexes, this phenomenon was particularly observable in the U.S., the market so crucial to the California-based couple’s ambitions.

Review after review accused Harry of going too far, obsessing over petty grievances and — hypocritically — offering up spiteful and detailed revelations about other members of the Royal Family.

U.S. newspapers that had previously accepted every claim which came out of the Sussexes’ mouths changed tack and started pointing out the cracks in their arguments.

‘At once emotional and embittered, the royal memoir is mired in a paradox: drawing endless attention in an effort to renounce fame,’ said the New York Times, previously one of the couple’s chief media cheerleaders.

‘The prince claims to have a spotty memory... but doesn’t appear to have forgotten a single line ever printed about him and his wife, and the last section of his tellall degenerates into a tiresome back-and-forth about who’s leaking what and why,’ wrote critic Alexandra Jacobs.

Doubtless to Moehringer’s horror, she also attacked the writing: ‘Like its author, Spare is all over the map — emotionally as well as physically. He does not, in other words, keep it tight.’

The San Francisco Chronicle crowned Harry the ‘King of TMI’ (Too Much Information) and compared him to Christina Crawford, whose life has come to be defined by her shocking memoir — Mommie Dearest — about her abusive relationship with her adoptive mother, the film star Joan Crawford.

New York Magazine, to which Meghan gave a rare interview, noted: ‘Throughout Harry and Meghan’s post-royal productions, their lack of self-awareness can make even their legitimate complaints seem grating. Spare is no different.’

The verdict of the sober Wall Street Journal must have particularly stung.

The book, it declared, was a ‘slog’, adding: ‘What may gall the reader most is the hypocrisy. Harry claims to want privacy, but there he is putting it all out there for Oprah . . .’

Elsewhere, the National Review described Spare as ‘a betrayal of family, of country, and above all of self’, while misgivings about the book extended to less well-known media outlets. The Mississippi Clarion Ledger’s reviewer wrote: ‘Reading Spare confirms long-held suggestions that the Windsors have not been known for impressive intellect and that Harry is as imprudent as his mother.’

Now Moehringer, who grandiosely argues that ghostwriting is ‘a vital public service’, is ignoring his own imperative that ‘ghostwriters don’t speak’. And his rage is palpable.

‘I can’t think of anything that rankles quite like being called sloppy by people who routinely

There was no attempt to correct errors One critic accused him of showing off