Prince Harry did not hold back in his 2023 memoir “Spare,” especially when he revealed that the end of the year at Sandringham felt more like a competition than a family gathering. Back in 2013, the former royal had returned from a South Pole trip, hoping for peace during the year-end family activities. However, he walked straight into royal chaos, revealing that his family had been infected with a “very scary malware” as a nickname for the tense energy at the time.
“My hard drive was cleaned. Alas, my family at that moment was infected with some very scary malware,” he revealed.
What fueled all the holiday tension? The Court Circular, a daily printed record from St. James’s Palace that keeps a record of how many royal duties each member completed. Prince Harry said this report was treated like a leaderboard and that the press would spark comparisons between the members of the royal family. At the end of every year, some would be called “busy,” while others would be deemed “lazy.” And even though the Court Circular didn’t bring the unhealthy competitiveness among the family members, it definitely amplified it, according to Harry. 
He explained that some relatives would even count the smallest interactions as engagements just to boost their numbers. Meanwhile, the real charitable work that he and Prince William did was often awarded zero points. In his words, the system felt “rigged” because the winners simply had to “fly via helicopter to cut a ribbon at a horse farm.” To make things worse, King Charles and Queen Elizabeth were the ones who controlled who got funding to actually do work, so the number of activities they did was not up to them.
Harry linked the obsession over numbers to deeper royal insecurities. After Queen Elizabeth’s passing, he said the family feared the monarchy could someday be shut down for being “outdated” and “costly,” which made them take the Circular even more seriously. Harry officially stepped back from his royal role with his wife, Meghan Markle, in 2020. Today, they live in Montecito with Archie, born May 2019, and Lilibet, born June 2021, choosing private holidays while the royals continue their Sandringham tradition.
