I’m sure I was not alone in feeling that Harry was one of those okay guys who fell in love with the wrong woman, turned into a milquetoast, and allowed her to call the shots in their relationship, no matter how stupid, cruel, or self-centered those shots were. Harry’s memoir, however, establishes that the low-IQ but ordinary guy we thought we knew was, in reality, every bit as awful as his wife.

The one-time Prince Harry always seemed like an impressively ordinary guy for someone raised in the Royal Family. He publicly went through his stupid teens and early 20s but seemed to settle down after seeing active duty in Iraq and founding the Invictus Games. When Prince William and Kate became an item, Harry seemed happy palling around with them.

And then, Meghan Markle appeared. The world thought it witnessed her transforming Harry into an awful version of a California guy, whining with his posh accent about getting in touch with his feelings. We immediately knew that Markle was a bad apple using the royal family’s stratospheric fame, along with the race and sex cards, to elevate her status in the world, maybe right into the White House.

Image: Harry. YouTube screen grab.

However, now that we’ve learned the contents of Harry’s memoir, entitled Spare, is an anguished, existential scream, all stemming from the fact that his older brother is first in line to the throne, there’s a new complexion on things. Harry, it turns out, found and married his emotional doppelgänger.

I have not and will not read the book. Just reading the Daily Mail’s headlines, though, tells you that only a person with a heart of stone could fail to laugh at the sheer horror of Harry’s life as a young scion of the most famous family in the world:

• Meghan Markle kneeled and put her palms on Princess Diana’s gravestone to ask her late mother-in-law for ‘clarity and guidance’ on 20th anniversary of her death, Prince Harry reveals 
• What’s REALLY behind Meghan and Kate’s long-standing feud: Prince Harry’s memoir claims fallings out over bridesmaids dresses, Easter gifts and lip gloss drove them apart (but ‘recollections may vary’) 
• How Hippy Harry inherited a love of psychics from Diana: Late royal regularly consulted mediums - including one who was with her the day she recorded Panorama interview
• Harry’s ‘wild child’ years: Before he was a woke warrior, the Duke smoked, drank and partied through his twenties after smoking joints at Highgrove and taking cocaine at 17 (and even did a stint in rehab) 
• ‘You’ll be King one day and I won’t - so I can do what I want’: Princess Diana’s protection officer reveals what Prince Harry said to Prince William when they were both just small boys
• Prince Harry likens himself to goofy Friends character CHANDLER - who uses humor to cope with trauma of his parents’ divorce - as he reveals he spent summer 2013 binging hit sitcom while suffering from ‘panic attacks’ 
• Meghan `placed hands on Diana´s grave and asked for guidance´
• Harry’s frostbitten penis ISN’T as rare as you may think: All you need to know about bizarre injury after Prince confessed to using Elizabeth Arden cream to soothe pain from 200-mile Arctic charity expedition
• King Charles feared being ‘overshadowed’ by Meghan Markle and was worried about having to pay for her upkeep as he said Royal Family is ‘not made of money’, Prince Harry says 

I remember back in the 1990s, before, during, and after Diana’s death, how often the young royals were in the headlines because of their immature, self-serving lifestyles. Many people felt that those blessed enough to live such a rarefied life ought to be thinking in terms of public service rather than partying, sleeping around, and then sleeping around and partying.

While it's true that Harry lost his flamboyant, self-involved mother at a painfully young age, that in itself is not a recipe for the kind of extraordinary narcissism we see here. Somehow, Harry managed to do this all by himself.

You see, it turns out that Harry wasn’t a cloistered naif overwhelmed by Meghan’s feminine wiles. Instead, he met someone who is a soulmate. Both are self-absorbed, shallow, petty, vindictive, and thin-skinned. When they look at each other, each sees his or her reflection looking back—and rather than being horrified by the grotesquerie of the reflection, each feels calmed, validated, and empowered.

We’re being reminded, again, that character is the only thing that will make a person happy. It’s not what life gives us that determines our contentment; it’s how we respond to what life throws our way.

Harry, a boy born on a platinum platter, turns out to have been shortchanged when it came to the one thing that mattered most: being a good human being. I deeply pity his and Meghan’s children. It’s tough enough to be a narcissist’s child. However, when you’re hit with a double-whammy of over-the-top personality disorders, one must wonder if those children have any chance at all of being happy in life.