There are similarities between the self-righteousness of union leaders and the sanctimony of Prince Harry - David Behrens

Harry’s publisher tried to save face by pointing to record-breaking online sales in audio and Kindle formats. The world had seen nothing like it since Lady Chatterley’s Lover, they implied. But with so much of the content already in the public domain it’s a source of wonder why anyone gave it a second look. Basically, the narrative can be summed up in a single, schoolboy sentence: “Please, Miss, my brother Wills hit me and my wicked stepmother’s been beastly to me.” Spare us all, Harry.

His allegations about Camilla rang particularly hollow. She had sacrificed his interests on the altar of her own need to court popularity, he complained. But what he has failed to recognise is that being part of the Royal family is a job – a very good one but a job nonetheless. And if he was outmanoeuvred by Camilla it means only that she was better at the job than him.

We all rub up at work against people we don’t like, but most of us shut up and get on with it because it’s just a cross we have to bear. We’re kidding ourselves if we think anyone else cares.

And in betraying his stepmother’s confidentiality, and that of the rest of his family, Harry has thrown away any claim to have his own privacy respected. You can’t expect to be left alone if you spend your time lecturing everyone else – especially through the mass media you profess to despise.

At Waterstones, the publicity campaign they dreamed up for Harry was a masterpiece of ambiguity. “The memoir everybody is talking about,” screamed the poster. They are indeed – they’re saying it’s self-pitying twaddle.

But at least this storm in a bone china teacup diverted attention from the week’s other divisive event – the Government’s newly-hatched wheeze to curb the power of trade unions by requiring them to guarantee minimum levels of service when their members go on strike.

The outcry from union leaders who deplored this withdrawal of the licence to behave as they please was entirely predictable. We heard exactly the same arguments back in the 1980s when they were denied the right to mobilise flying pickets at workplaces whose staff were not in dispute.

This latest development, complained the TUC, would “poison industrial relations” – as if relations in unionised sectors were not toxic already. But the poison has been self-administered by shop stewards pursuing “me too” demands out of all proportion to the work at hand.

This is obviously not the case universally. Few of us would begrudge more money for nurses, firefighters, teachers and others whose work is life saving and life enhancing. But elsewhere, some of the unions have been simply taking the rise, as we used to say in Yorkshire – and if the TUC wants someone to blame for the Government’s new curtailment it should look within its own ranks.

It might start with those members in the well-paid rail sector, whose ill-judged war on the travelling public has spoilt the party for everyone else.

There is more than a little in common between the self-righteousness of union leaders and the sanctimony of Prince Harry; each blaming everyone but themselves for misfortunes that are largely of their own making – and each having squandered the considerable public support they used to enjoy.

Minimum service requirements will become a fact of industrial life that the unions will learn to live with, if they are to survive at all – just as they managed without closed shops and secondary pickets.

As for Harry, his appearance or not at his father’s coronation in May will seal his future for the rest of his life. Will he want to fly in from Dollywood, or wherever it is he and Meghan live out their fantasy existence? Will his family let him? Or will the Government come up with another wheeze to keep him away?