Prince Harry’s Loyalty Questioned by Princess Margaret’s Friend Who Says Duke’s ‘Aunt Margo’ Would Have Never Written a Book Like ‘Spare’
Following the release of Prince Harry‘s revealing memoir Spare, there’s been a lot of talk around that term and other royal “spares.”
In his book, Prince Harry wrote about Queen Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Margaret, and how much he thought he had in common with his great-aunt. But now a close friend of the late Countess of Snowdon is reacting to Harry’s comparison and insisting that Margaret would have never written anything like what he did about her sibling.
What Prince Harry thought of his Aunt Margo
In Spare, the Duke of Sussex admitted that he didn’t really know Margaret.
“I didn’t know Princess Margaret, whom I called Aunt Margo,” Harry wrote (via Town & Country). “She was my great-aunt, yes, we shared 12.5 percent of our DNA, we spent the bigger holidays together, and yet she was almost a total stranger. Like most Britons, I mainly knew of her. I was conversant with the general contours of her sad life. Great loves thwarted by the Palace. Exuberant streaks of self-destruction splashed across the tabloids.
“Growing up, I felt nothing for her, except a bit of pity and a lot of jumpiness. She could kill a houseplant with one scowl. Mostly, whenever she was around, I kept my distance. On those rarer-than-rare occasions when our paths crossed, when she deigned to take notice of me, to speak to me, I’d wonder if she had any opinion of me. It seemed that she didn’t. Or else, given her tone, her coldness, her opinion wasn’t much.”
As the years have gone on though Harry said he realized just how much they “had in common” as “two spares.”
“[Margaret’s] relationship with Granny wasn’t an exact analog of mine with Willy [Prince William], but pretty close,” Harry explained. “The simmering rivalry, the intense competition (driven largely by the older sibling), it all looked familiar.”
Margaret’s friend says she would have never written a book like ‘Spare’
However, someone who did know Margaret very well insisted that she would have never written a book like Harry’s because she was “loyal” to her sister and the monarchy.
Lady Anne Glenconner, who was the countess’s lady-in-waiting for three decades, said: “I haven’t read Prince Harry’s book and I’m not going to read it. I think it would upset me; it’s all too sad. Princess Margaret would never have written a book like that. She was loyal.”
Lady Glenconner added that the prince’s great-aunt did not overly struggle with her role or complain about being a spare because of her commitment to the family and her duties.
“I think the only thing Princess Margaret complained about was that she wasn’t educated as well as the queen,” Lady Glenconner wrote in Newsweek. “Her elder sister had people from Oxford and Cambridge come and teach her things, while Princess Margaret did not. I think that was the only thing she ever really minded. But she was completely loyal to her sister all her life; I never heard her say anything derogatory about her … there was no whinging, no complaining.”
Margaret ‘cutoff’ Harry’s mother when she and Charles split
Princess Margaret’s biographer, Christopher Warwick, also spoke about the countess’s loyalty to the Firm and how she would “cut off” anyone who threatened the queen’s reign including Prince Harry’s mother.
According to the author: “Margaret thought that [Princess] Diana wasn’t doing the right thing. She thought this was disrespectful to the queen, to the idea of monarchy. That’s when there was the cutoff. If she felt that you were in any way letting the queen down, being disrespectful to the queen, betraying the queen. That was it.”
Margaret died on Feb. 9, 2002, after battling a series of health issues. Princess Diana died following a car accident on Aug. 31, 1997.
