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There are no shortage of revelations in Prince Harry’s memoir, which is due to be released on 10 January, but has already been seen after a bungle in Spain saw it put on bookshelves early.

The Duke of Sussex has used the 550-plus pages of Spare to detail fallouts with his family, the nicknames he and William use for each other – Willy and Harold – and what happened in the wake of Princess Diana’s death.

Watch Sky News special at 7pm tonight – Harry’s Book: The Fallout

Here’s a round-up of the biggest bombshells.

Duke admits to using cocaine

Prince Harry admits for the first time that he has taken cocaine, smoked weed and tried magic mushrooms.

He writes of his experiences as a teenager: “Of course I had been taking cocaine at that time. At someone’s house, during a hunting weekend, I was offered a line, and since then I had consumed some more.

“It wasn’t very fun, and it didn’t make me feel especially happy as seemed to happen to others, but it did make me feel different, and that was my main objective. To feel. To be different.”

He revealed he took magic mushrooms at a party at actress Courtney Cox’s house, washing them down with tequila.

He lost his virginity to an older woman

Harry writes about how he lost his virginity to an “older lady” who “loved horses very much”.

He describes the moment as “a humiliating episode” and says it took place “in a field”.

The excerpt reads: “I mounted her quickly, after which she spanked my ass and held me back… one of my mistakes was letting it happen in a field, just behind a busy pub.

“No doubt someone had seen us.”

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He killed 25 Taliban fighters

The Duke of Sussex spent 10 years in the Army, including two frontline tours to Afghanistan – during which he killed 25 people, he writes in Spare.

He explains that thanks to record-keeping he could “always tell exactly how many enemy combatants I had killed”.

“So my number: twenty-five. It was not something that filled me with satisfaction, but I was not ashamed either.

“Naturally, I would have preferred not to have that figure on my military resume, or in my head, but I would also have preferred to live in a world without the Taliban, a world without war.”

Princes asked Charles not to marry Camilla

Harry and William asked their father not to marry Camilla following the death of their mother.

Speaking about when his father married his second wife, Prince Harry writes: “That’s why when the question came, Willy and I promised our father that we would welcome Camilla to the family.

“The only thing we asked for in return was that he didn’t marry her.

“‘You don’t need to get married again,’ we asked him.”

King Charles was married to his first wife, Princess Diana, for 15 years before the pair separated in 1992. She was killed in a car crash in August 1997. He married Camilla in April 2005.

Britain's Prince of Wales (left) stands with Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall and Princes William and Harry (Right) as they leave the service of celebration to mark the diamond wedding anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey, London.

Kate made Meghan cry

In Spare, Harry elaborates on Meghan’s revelation in their Oprah interview that Kate had made her cry in the run-up to the wedding.

Harry says he came home shortly before the wedding to find Meghan on the floor crying after an argument with her future sister-in-law.

He says they had got into a disagreement over Princess Charlotte’s flower girl dress being too big – an issue Kate wanted Meghan to sort out while she was dealing with the fallout of her father announcing he would not be at the wedding.

Harry confirms what Meghan previously told Oprah, that the following day Kate came over with flowers and an apology card.

Read more:
The moment Harry visited site of Princess Diana’s fatal crash
Prince Harry cuts a sad, self-indulgent and naive figure

Now we know just how deep brothers’ rift runs

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Harry’s memoir: What you need to know

The Nazi costume

Harry puts some of the blame on William and Kate for the Nazi costume he was pictured wearing in 2005.

He says he called the couple for advice on what to wear to a party, from a shortlist of two – and they told him to go for the Nazi outfit, complete with swastika armband.

He claims they “howled” with laughter when they saw the costume and while he flew under the radar at the party, shortly after someone sold photos to the press.

Meghan not invited to Balmoral

The Queen was staying at her Scottish estate when she died last September.

Harry claims he found out his grandmother had died during the plane journey to Balmoral – a trip Charles had warned him Meghan should not go on.

Harry said his father phoned him: “He told me I was welcome at Balmoral, but… without her. He started to explain his reasons, but they didn’t make any sense at all, and it was disrespectful as well. I did not tolerate it from him.

“Don’t even think about talking about my wife like that.

“Repentant, he said, stammering, that he simply didn’t want the place to be full of people. Nobody’s wife was going to go, not even Kate, he told me, so Meg shouldn’t either.”

Harry recreated Diana’s final journey

Prince Harry says he asked a driver to replicate his mother’s final journey in Paris – travelling through the tunnel where the fatal crash took place at 105kph (65mph).

He describes being in Paris at the age of 23 and asking a driver to take him through the Pont de l’Alma tunnel at the same speed as the car carrying his mother when it crashed in August 1997.

He writes there was “no reason anyone should ever die inside the tunnel”, adding the drive was a “terrible idea”.

“I told myself I was only doing it to close that chapter, but it was not true.”

The Princess of Wales with her younger son Prince Harry during the second day of celebrations commemorating the 50th anniversary of VE day in Hyde Park, London.

Claims brother attacked him

Harry alleges the Prince of Wales grabbed his brother and ripped his necklace before knocking him to the floor.

He says “Willy” called his wife Meghan “difficult”, “rude” and “abrupt”.

“Everything happened so fast. Really, really fast. He grabbed me by the collar of my shirt, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor.

“I fell on top of the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces of it cutting into me. I lay on the ground for a few seconds, dazed, then got up and told him to leave.”

The incident allegedly took place at Nottingham Cottage when Harry was living there in 2019.

Push for investigation into Diana’s death

The duke called the report into his mother’s death an “insult”, saying the conclusion that the crash was due to the driver being drunk was “simplistic and absurd”.

“Even if the man had been drinking, even if he had been drunk, he wouldn’t have had any problem driving through such a short tunnel. Unless paparazzi were following him and dazzled him,” he writes.

“Why had those paparazzi got off lightly? Why weren’t they in prison? Who had sent them? And why weren’t those people in jail either? What other reason could there be apart from corruption and cover-ups being the order of the day?”

He says he and his brother agreed on those questions and planned to issue a statement asking for the investigation to be reopened.

“Those who decided dissuaded us,” he wrote.

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Police investigating historical sex offence allegations against Russell Brand understood to have handed file to CPS

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Police investigating historical sex offence allegations against Russell Brand understood to have handed file to CPS

Police investigating historical sex offence allegations against Russell Brand have handed a file of evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), it is understood.

A statement from the Metropolitan Police said: “Following an investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches and The Sunday Times in September 2023, the Met received a number of reports of sexual offences from women in London and elsewhere in the country.

“A file of evidence has now been passed to the CPS for their consideration.

“As part of the investigation, a man in his 40s has been interviewed by officers under caution on three separate occasions.

“These interviews related to a number of non-recent sexual offences which are alleged to have taken place both in and outside of London.

“Officers continue to support the CPS as part of their investigation.”

Detective Superintendent Andy Furphy, whose team is leading the investigation, said: “We have a team of dedicated officers providing specialist support to the women who have come forward.

“We are committed to investigating sexual offences, no matter how long ago they are alleged to have taken place.”

Brand has denied the allegations against him and said his relationships were “always consensual”.

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Kemi Badenoch profile: Combative past of new Tory leader

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Kemi Badenoch profile: Combative past of new Tory leader

Many leading politicians are fond of talking about having been on a journey. But Kemi Badenoch’s journey has been longer and more eventful than most.

From the leafy London suburb of Wimbledon to Nigeria in West Africa and back to south London, and from the socialist hotbed of Sussex University to the rural idyll of Saffron Walden in Essex, she will hope her journey will ultimately take her to 10 Downing Street.

Along the way, this battling Boudica of the Conservative Party has earned a reputation for a combative and at times abrasive style of politics, aggressive even: someone who’d cross the road to have a fight.

Politics live: Reaction after new leader of opposition elected

“I am somebody who is very blunt,” she admitted when challenged about this reputation by Sophy Ridge on Sky News this week.

“I’m very forthright and I’m very confident as well. I’m not a wallflower.”

Now the Conservative Party members have voted to elect her as leader after strong performances in hustings and a TV debate which saw her recover from a gaffe-prone party conference.

In the three stages of the leadership contest, she gained momentum at the right time. Robert Jenrick was the candidate with momentum in the early rounds of voting by MPs in September.

James Cleverly then had it after he stole the show at the conference “beauty contest”. But as party members cast their votes, the momentum appeared to be with Ms Badenoch.

It did not look that way at the conference in Birmingham, when she clumsily declared maternity pay was “excessive” and said some civil servants were so bad 10% of them should be in prison.

Ironically, given her maternity pay gaffe, the mother-of-three has benefited from a row over veteran Tory MP Sir Christopher Chope, a Jenrick backer, declaring: “You can’t spend all your time with your family at the same time being leader of the opposition.”

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Badenoch elected Conservative leader

Wimbledon to Nigeria – and back again

Ms Badenoch’s background, however, is literally miles away – more than 3,000, in fact – from those of typical Conservative politicians. Her early years were spent in Nigeria, controversially described by David Cameron in 2016 as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

Her Nigerian parents were comfortably middle class, “with a car and a driver”, she says. Father Femi was a GP with his own clinic, and her mother Feyi was an academic at the University of Lagos college of medicine.

But Ms Badenoch – full name Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke – was born in the private St Teresa’s Hospital in Wimbledon in January 1980 after her parents travelled to Britain and paid for private healthcare. It meant she had a British passport.

She then lived in Lagos until she was 16, when she returned to Wimbledon to take her A levels, in maths, biology and chemistry, living with her mother’s best friend “for a better future”, after arriving in the UK with just £100.

So she worked part-time in Wimbledon’s McDonald’s, cleaning toilets and “flipping burgers”, she says. Yet last month she was ridiculed by Labour MPs after saying: “I became working class when I was 16 working at McDonald’s.”

Next on her journey was Sussex University and a computer course. Here she had no time for the left-wing students she called “stupid lefty white kids” and later denounced Bob Geldof’s 2005 Live 8 charity concerts as patronising to Africans.

Working in banking, she joined the Conservative Party in that year, and though she was a massive Margaret Thatcher fan she became an early Cameroon.

She was on her way, becoming a member of the London Assembly and fighting Dulwich and West Norwood against Labour’s Tessa Jowell in the 2010 general election, coming third behind the Liberal Democrats.

Kemi Badenoch. Pic: PA
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Kemi Badenoch has spoken of her admiration for Mrs Thatcher. Pic: PA

Just like Mrs Thatcher nearly 60 years earlier, it was when she was a parliamentary candidate that Kemi met her husband, Cambridge-educated banker and party activist Hamish Badenoch.

He had been head boy at Ampleforth College, the catholic public school, a councillor in Merton, south London, and Conservative candidate in Foyle, in Northern Ireland, in the 2015 general election.

They were both born at the same hospital in Wimbledon, St Teresa’s, a year apart. After university Hamish worked in Malawi, Nigeria and Kenya before returning to London and Barclays, before his current job at Deutsche Bank.

Read more on Kemi Badenoch:
Pragmatist wins Tory leadership TV showdown
Badenoch will need to go beyond ‘diehard Tories’

Badenoch rejects bullying accusations as ‘utterly false

Entry into politics

But the noughties saw two potentially embarrassing blemishes on Ms Badenoch’s upwardly mobile CV. One was her widely reported hacking of Harriet Harman’s website, revealed shortly after she became MP for Saffron Walden in 2017.

These days, she regards the incident as relatively trivial. “It was a summary offence at the time, the same as a speeding ticket,” she told Sophy Ridge this week. “It was actually something quite different from what the law is now.

“And this was something that happened ten years before I was a member of parliament. It was very amusing at the time. Now that I’m an MP, it’s a lot less amusing.”

The other, described in Lord Ashcroft’s biography, Blue Ambition, was a near-fight with a member of the public at Oxford Town Hall in 2006 during a Conservative party event.

After an argument between the pair, the woman slapped Ms Badenoch and then ran off. Ms Badenoch then chased her up some stairs and grabbed her by the hair and pulled her back, before letting go and the woman ran out of the town hall.

“I never saw her again, thank goodness,” she said, recalling the incident years later.

Once in parliament with a safe seat, now called North West Essex, Brexiteer Badenoch’s ascent up the ministerial ladder was swift: party vice-chair, children and families, international trade, Treasury, equalities and local government, before joining Liz Truss’s cabinet and continuing under Rishi Sunak.

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‘I will swing back’

In the 2019 Tory leadership contest, she backed Michael Gove, widely viewed by MPs as her long-term mentor. Then in 2022, after quitting along with umpteen other ministers triggering Boris Johnson’s downfall, she stood herself, coming fourth. But she had put down a marker.

As a cabinet minister, covering business and equalities at the same time, she has lived up to her reputation as a blunt-speaking – critics would say rude – political scrapper, with some fiery clashes with opponents, some Tories and even Dr Who.

Her handling of the Post Office Horizon scandal was fiercely criticised after she controversially sacked Post Office chairman Henry Staunton when he claimed he was told to “stall” compensation payments – and then had a public row with him.

Courting controversy

One of her most high-profile spats was with former Doctor Who star David Tennant, after he said at the British LGBT awards: “Until we wake up and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist any more – I don’t wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up.”

She hit back on X: “I will not shut up. A rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology he can’t see the optics of attacking the only black woman in government by calling publicly for my existence to end.”

She has also been reprimanded by Caroline Nokes, then chair of the equalities committee and now – ominously for Ms Badenoch – a Commons deputy speaker.

Kemi Badenoch speaks to the media at the Conservative Party Conference.
Pic: Reuters
Image:
Pic: Reuters

During a bad-tempered and shouty row at a hearing of Ms Nokes’ committee, Ms Badenoch accused the left-wing Labour MP Kate Osborne of lying in a row about trans issues.

Last year she infuriated Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle by issuing a written statement on scrapping EU laws after Brexit rather than making a full Commons statement to MPs.

After she told the speaker she was sorry the timing of the announcement was “not to your satisfaction”, Sir Lindsay bellowed at her: “Who do you think you’re speaking to?”

It’s clashes like these on her long political journey that have led to claims that Ms Badenoch could start a fight in an empty room.

She is, after all, an aggressive, confrontational anti-woke crusader who takes no prisoners. And that’s just what her supporters say!

Sir Keir Starmer, beware.

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Four girls suffer ‘potentially life-changing injuries’ in bathroom of Brighton fast-food restaurant

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Four girls suffer 'potentially life-changing injuries' in bathroom of Brighton fast-food restaurant

Four girls have suffered serious burns in the bathroom of a Brighton fast-food restaurant. 

Emergency services were called at 8.28pm on Thursday, which was also Halloween, to reports of a fire at a Wendy’s restaurant on Western Road, Brighton.

The four 12-year-old girls suffered “potentially life-changing” injuries, according to Sussex police, and were taken to hospital.

They remain in serious but stable conditions.

Sussex Police and the fire service are still looking into the cause of the incident, but said no fireworks were involved.

The incident was accidental, according to the fire and rescue service, and members of the public were not at risk.

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Three fire engines, an aerial appliance and specialist officers attended.

The police force said they would not release more information at this time as they are “being sensitive towards the injuries of the people involved”.

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“Our thoughts are with those recovering from this incident in our Brighton restaurant,” a spokesperson for Wendy’s said.

“The safety of our customers and employees is our highest priority. We are continuing to work with the local police authorities on their investigation.”

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