Prince Harry has lambasted a New Zealand-born tabloid journalist in his newly released memoir Spare, who he called a "sad little man" and a "quasi-royal correspondent".
Daniel Wootton was working as the executive director of British tabloid The Sun when he broke that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex would be stepping back from their royal duties and moving to the US in 2020, dubbed Megxit.
The 38-year-old royal dedicates part of Spare, released today, to excoriating the British tabloid press, its enmeshed relationship with the Royal Family and his long-held bitterness towards the industry following the death of his mother, Princess Diana, in a Paris car crash while fleeing paparazzi in 1997.
He then singles out the Lower Hutt-born journalist, who he branded a "sad little man" who was "likely working in concert with the Palace, whose courtiers were determined to get ahead of us and spin the story".
"He'd refashioned himself into some sort of quasi-royal correspondent, largely on the strength of his secret relationship with one particularly close friend of Willy's [Prince William] comms secretary - who fed him trivial (and mostly fake) gossip,” the prince added.
Harry and his wife Meghan sought permission from the late Queen Elizabeth II to release their own statement before the story went public but when they "realised it wasn’t possible", they instead opted to crack open a bottle of wine.
Wootton, now a presenter for GB News, responded to the criticism today in a scathing opinion piece in the Daily Mail.
In it, he described Spare as "shin[ing] a light on a life of ultimate privilege and opportunity most human beings could only dream of that is blighted by constant paranoia, bitter resentments and downright nastiness towards those who do their best to try and save this man child from himself time and again".
He went on to call the prince’s "deranged obsession" with the British media "genuinely a little bit worrying".
Wootton also denied working alongside the Palace to leak the story on Megxit, writing, "I'd given them over a week's notice already by that point."
"It's called journalism, mate, something you clearly don't believe in, given the inaccuracies littered throughout your book," he said.
"The only 'sad little man' is the bloke who has so publicly thrown his own flesh and blood under the bus."
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