Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter Never Sat Down With Him

A ghostwriter who penned Prince Harry’s contribution to a best-selling book about his walk to the North Pole has revealed a promised meeting with the prince never materialized, and he had to make do with a 15-minute video message from the royal instead.

Although the content of the message was “hardly illuminating,” ghostwriter Mark McCrum wrote in the Daily Mail that he still managed to generate “a thoughtful chapter, which then had to get copy approval from Clarence House.”

He added that he had “no idea” whether Harry ever read “his” contribution to the best-selling book which followed the stories of four wounded soldiers who trekked across the ice to the North Pole with Harry.

McCrum, who is campaigning for ghostwriters to be given proper recognition by the celebrities who use their services, said that when the project first began there was “talk of me flying to Tromsǿ in Norway, to sit down with him for an hour or so while he was en route to join the soldiers who made that extraordinary trip to the North Pole in 2011.”

However, the sit down never happened and instead, he “was sent a video of him out on the ice, enthusing about the beauty of the landscape and the bravery of his companions. For 15 minutes, Harry trekked across the ice grinning a lot in full polar kit. It was recorded just for me but hardly illuminating. The word ‘amazing’ featured a lot, I remember.”

McCrum did not get the job to write Harry’s best-selling memoir, Spare, with that task falling to Hollywood favorite J.R. Moehringer, who also wrote Andre Agassi’s widely praised memoir Open.

Moehringer spoke candidly about the ups and downs of ghostwriting for Harry in an article for the New Yorker.

In one section he described how he became so “exasperated with Prince Harry” that he ended up shouting at him while reviewing edits “in a middle-of-the-night Zoom session.”