It puts front and center that which the modern royals work hard to help us forget-that their positions in life are determined long before they are earned. An entrenched system of hereditary privilege and precedence that cannot be modernized without being abandoned. It also has the effect of reminding us of the impenetrable hierarchy that sits at the heart of monarchy-a system that means by accident of birth some are heirs and some are spares. It signals to us that he will talk about things in a way that once he did not a precursor that much will be unleashed when the pages of the book are turned. Harry’s very public embrace of it, therefore, can be seen as a symbol that he has once again crossed into territory where the monarchy would not go. But it is not a word that you would ever expect to hear the royal family use officially. It is a word that Harry knew was attached to him as he grew up alongside his brother, the heir Prince William. It has been used prolifically to refer to British royalty for the past 100 years-with Princess Margaret often described as Queen Elizabeth’s spare and Prince Andrew (and sometimes ostensibly Princess Anne) labelled the spare to Charles. The phrase the “heir and a spare” is believed to have been first uttered by American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt in describing her two sons with her British aristocrat husband, whom she married in 1895. Harry and Meghan briefly reunited with the royal family at Queen Elizabeth’s funeral earlier this year.
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