SARAH VINE: If Harry had stuck with old friends like Sasha Walpole, he might not be so angry
The passage in Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, where he describes losing his virginity ‘in an inglorious episode with an older woman’ is itself one of the more inglorious passages in the book. ‘She liked horses, quite a lot, and treated me not unlike a young stallion,’ he wrote. ‘Quick ride, after which she’d smacked my rump and sent me off to graze. Among the many things about it that were wrong, it happened in a grassy field behind a busy pub.’
It was a crude, thoughtless and totally unnecessary detail that unleashed a wave of salacious speculation as to the identity of the woman in question and proved that whatever else he may be, Harry is no gentleman.
It’s the one faint dig in an interview that is otherwise unfailingly generous about the Prince. Not in a fawning, bowing and scraping sort of way, just in the sense that Sasha Walpole – now married and a mother of two – comes across as a thoroughly decent woman, simply someone who has been put in an impossible position and who has decided, for the sake of her own sanity and everyone else’s, to speak out.
She was not the one who started all this, it was Harry – and he did so, characteristically, without the slightest consideration for how it might affect her existence. Bad enough that he would betray someone like the Princess of Wales, but she has a degree of protection against his attacks. Sasha, by contrast, was totally exposed.
He may not have directly named her, but enough people knew who she was for her identity to inevitably be revealed.
She’s not rich, famous or posh, as many speculated. She’s the daughter of a cleaner and a groundsman who left school at 15 and got a job as a groom at Highgrove, where she first met the Prince.
She doesn’t, like Harry, have access to security and money and status to insulate her and her family from the unwanted attentions of public and press. No £1,000-an-hour legal muscle for her, no pet journalists to rally the troops on Twitter.
You might have thought he would have at least done her the courtesy of alerting her to his intentions. But no. She found out in a WhatsApp message from a friend. In typical Harry style, he apparently did not give a second thought to the chaos this particular ‘truth grenade’ of his might cause, to the unwanted exposure it might bring. Her feelings in all this were simply irrelevant to him. Talk about princely entitlement, talk about droit du seigneur. What an absolute cad.
Source of data and images: dailymail
