‘It never needed to be this way,’ sighs Prince Harry in the trailer for his forthcoming ITV interview: ‘the leaking and the planting… I want a family not an institution.’ The Duke has long-despised the meddling machinations of Fleet Street’s finest, telling Andrew Marr in 2016 that:

Everyone has a right to privacy. Sadly that line between public and private life is almost non-existent any more. We will continue to do our best to ensure that there is the line… Everyone has a right to their privacy, and a lot of the members of the public get it, but sadly in some areas there is this incessant need to find out every little bit of detail about what goes on behind the scenes. It’s unnecessary.

Now with the release of his long-awaited memoir, we can see the cause of his frustration. How dare the press leak, intrude and breach privacy – don’t they know that’s Harry’s job? The book’s launch proves that the royal recluse has learned a thing or two about the media’s tastes from three decades in the public eye, detailing everything from Jilly Cooper-esque romps in Windsor fields to Stallone-style killing sprees from Apache helicopters.

Indeed, the head of the press watchdog has already warned that Harry will find it harder in the future to defend his own right to privacy after revealing so much in his book. Lord Faulks KC, chairman of the Independent Press Standards Organisation, told the BBC yesterday that it ‘most people don’t want anybody to know anything about their private life, but if they are prepared to discuss it then it is not unreasonable for the press to write about it.’ So much for finding freedom.

Below then are five examples of Prince Harry breaking confidences, breaching privacy and blurring that infamous line between public and private life – a distinction that he was once so keen to maintain…

King Charles

Unlike those devious denizens of Fleet Street, Harry seems to prefer breaching the privacy of those he actually knows, rather than just complete strangers. Take his father for instance. The Duke of Sussex has no compunction in revealing details of an intensely private conversation with Charles and William after the Windsor Castle funeral of Prince Phillip in April 2021. Mere moments after burying his own dad, a grieving Charles reportedly begged his sons ‘Please, boys, don’t make my final years a misery.’ Harry’s response? To stick the incident in his book.

Prince William

‘I would like to get my father back, I would like to have my brother back,’ Harry told Tom Bradby in his ITV interview. If so, he’s got a funny way of showing it, given that his book repeatedly slags off said father and brother. William is probably the villain of the whole debacle, given Harry’s headline-grabbing claim that the future King ‘knocked me to the floor’. ‘You don’t need to tell Meg about this’, Harry quotes his brother as saying – instead he’s just told the whole world.

Among the other private conversations detailed include Harry suggesting that William and his wife encouraged him to wear a Nazi costume to a ‘native and colonial’ party in 2005 – a claim which makes Harry look both spineless and spiteful. He also alleges that William and their father Charles confronted him after Prince Philip’s funeral ‘looking for a fight’: a suggestion that verges on paranoia. And the royal heir will surely be delighted that Harry has effectively told the world that he is circumcised too.

Queen Camilla

Harry reveals that he and his brother agreed never to accept Camilla as their stepmother, that he and William begged Charles not to marry her, and said they would always regard her as ‘the wicked stepmother’. And he likened his first meeting with the now Queen to an ‘injection’, writing ‘close your eyes and you won’t even feel it. He also seems somewhat outraged that Camilla dared to change his bedroom into her dressing room at Clarence House – after, er, he had moved out. ‘ To think of all the fuss Harry and Meghan caused when details emerged in the press of their Frogmore Cottage arrangements…

Princess Kate

Harry once called Kate Middleton the big sister he never had. Those days are truly gone, judging by the casual way he has publicly revealed her anger at Meghan’s ‘baby brain’ comment in early 2018. In the Duke of Sussex’s account, Kate had forgotten something insignificant in a pre-wedding conversation, which prompted Meghan to comment that she must have ‘baby brain’. Kate, who’d given birth to her and Prince William’s third child, Prince Louis, just weeks before Harry and Meghan’s planned nuptials in June, was said to later reveal that she didn’t appreciate the remark.

In June, following the royal nuptials, Harry wrote that both couples sat down for a reconciliatory tea at Kensington Palace to discuss the topic. ‘You talked about my hormones,’ Kate allegedly said of the comment. ‘We are not close enough for you to talk about my hormones!’ The offence was apparently so great that Kate was allegedly gripping the upholstered side of her chair so intensely that her fingers went white. Not that that stopped Harry deciding to repeat the comment to a global audience, four years later.

Queen Elizabeth II

The late monarch was venerated on both sides of the Atlantic and even Harry probably knows that anything slandering her would be too much even for the most ardent of Sussex stans. But that doesn’t stop him from revealing details of her deathbed scene. He recounts arriving at Balmoral last September to be met by a grieving Princess Anne and then going to the bedroom where the Queen lay. He whispered to her that he ‘hoped she was happy’ and would be reunited with Philip, adding also told her that he admired her for having carried out her duties until the end – an ironic statement, perhaps.

The death also gives Harry the chance to take another pop at Charles, this time for not allowing Meghan to accompany him to Balmoral on account of it being just close family. His irritated account of the conversation on that day does somewhat overlook the fact that the-then Prince of Wales was about to lose his own mother. Talk about classy.

And if all this wasn’t bad enough, just imagine what didn’t make it into the book. According to Meghan’s biographer, lawyers at the publisher Penguin Random House reportedly sent back numerous pages of questions after receiving the final draft from Harry’s ghostwriter…