DAN WOOTTON: Harry has himself to blame for Sasha telling her story

DAN WOOTTON: After the crude and misogynistic disclosures in Spare, Prince Harry only has himself to blame for Sasha Walpole deciding to tell her own story about taking his virginity. No wonder Meghan has raised ‘concerns’ about the tell-all

Usually in the hours after a true but unflattering story has been published about the Duke or Duchess of Sussex, journalists are braced for the predictable and inevitable legal threat or whiny statement about some sort of horrific intrusion into their lives.

But yesterday there was no missive from Montecito after Sasha Walpole revealed in intimate detail how she took a 17-year-old Prince Harry’s virginity.

The idea that the deluded Duke can ever complain about someone in his life delivering their accurate version of events publicly, thanks to the tissue of half-truths and downright distortions he’s expected us to swallow in recent months, is risible.

After all, Harry is now the modern-day version of Lady Whistledown, author of Bridgerton’s anonymous scandal sheet.

Private conversations are all noted down for publication at a later date.

‘In this cruel new world of social media, Sasha, who is now 40, knew it was only a matter of time before she was rumbled, so wisely decided to control how she revealed her version of events’

Ordinary citizens getting on with their lives can be thrust into the spotlight as and when he chooses without any warning.

Family tragedies are exploited publicly to settle scores.

The Royal Family’s previously unbreakable internal cone of silence, so important to the late Queen, has been smashed. 

Even the liberal luvvie over sharers in the Hollywood establishment, featuring Harry and Meghan’s so-called new pals (translation: work acquaintances) can surely no longer trust him to keep his big trap shut.

Happily married mum-of-two Sasha, a respectable private citizen who now works as a digger driver, is one of the many victims of Spare, Harry’s grim autobiography designed to settle scores and make him very rich, to hell with the consequences to anyone else.

His revelations of a ‘quick ride’ with an ‘older woman’ who ‘smacked my rump’ prompted an international hunt for then stable girl Sasha’s identity, which was already an open secret in polo circles.

‘No wonder, realising the costly and long-term consequences to their precious brand from the tawdry past month, has Meghan started a campaign to distance herself from Spare’

Just 48-hours before she decided to go public, Hollywood actor Rupert Everitt upped the ante by claiming, ‘I know who the woman he lost his virginity to is’, before speculating the romp didn’t actually take place in a field outside a pub, as Harry had written.

In this cruel new world of social media, Sasha, who is now 40, knew it was only a matter of time before she was rumbled, so wisely decided to control how she revealed her version of events.

As woke Harry would likely now say, Sasha, who is actually only two years older than Harry, was claiming back her own narrative after keeping his secret for 21 years.

She told the Mail on Sunday: ‘I didn’t invite any of this attention, but I know the hunt would have kept going until people found me. I don’t understand why he went into such detail. He could have said he lost his virginity and left it at that. But he described how it happened – in a field behind a pub.

Dan Wootton

‘That’s fine if you’re not the other person involved. But if you’re me, then you suddenly feel as if your world is getting a little bit smaller.’

Throwing Sasha to the wolves was only one of many crude and misogynistic revelations in the tiresome tome Spare, where so-called feminist Harry gloriously revealed his anti-woman true colours to the world.

He trashes the ‘cold, small’ matron Pat at his school, who he would ‘stand on the landing below… doing antic dances, making faces, mocking her as she came down the stairs’.

He dismisses the country’s most successful female newspaper editor as a ‘loathsome toad’ and an ‘infected pustule on the a**e of humanity’.

But even women Harry claims to respect, like his ex-girlfriend Cressida Bonas, were still subject to his poison pen.

In Spare, the Duke admits the actress was the first person he was able to open up to and reveal his true feelings about the loss of his mother.

But he then decided to reveal to the world that she was in tears as he left her, when previously the public had been led to believe that Cressida ended the relationship herself because she couldn’t handle the spotlight.

While Harry might have successfully sought vengeance, especially against his media enemies (full disclosure: he brands me a ‘sad little man’ in the book) and brother Prince William, and have oodles of money to fund his extravagant lifestyle forever more, any veneer of respectability is now gone, meaning he and Meghan will increasingly be treated like bog standard celebrities.

We saw as much last night when he was the butt of jokes at the Grammy Awards, where Trevor Noah made a gag about Harry’s obsession with talking about his manhood while introducing his close pal James Corden on stage to present an award.

To tittering from the A-listers in attendance like Jennifer Lopez, the comedian said of the Late Late Show host in reference to Harry: ‘He’s also living proof that a man can move from London to LA and not tell everyone about his frost-bitten penis.’

No wonder, realising the costly and long-term consequences to their precious brand from the tawdry past month, has Meghan started a campaign to distance herself from Spare.

Sources seemingly close to the Duchess have told the Daily Telegraph – one of the few British titles with which the Sussexes retain a working relationship – that she ‘may have raised gentle concerns about whether it was the right move’.

One told the newspaper of her view on the book: ‘Is this the way she would have approached things? Possibly not. But she will always back him and would never have got involved in promoting such a personal project. This was about his own life, his own journey and his own perspective.’

But Meghan’s reputation is now intrinsically linked to that of her husband, who has proven himself to be petty, vindictive and hypocritical about protecting his privacy time and again.

Like the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson before them, it’s now clear to me that the decision to Megxit was selfish and financially motivated, not an altruistic bid to improve the world, as the Sussexes once tried to have us believe.

I predict Harry and Meghan’s reputation will only decline further as their proximity to the Royal Family fades and they will be remembered as the embittered and gossipy ex-royals who had the opportunity to modernise the monarchy from within and blew it all.

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