Prince Harry has claimed he wasn’t the real best man at William’s wedding.

In the biography, Spare, he says the ruse was carried out to save his brother’s two closest friends, James Meade and Thomas Van Straubenzee, from the attention it would bring to their private lives.

He describes his apparent role in the memoir, which was accidentally released early in Spain, as a ‘bare-faced lie’, adding: ‘Willy didn’t want me giving a best man’s speech.’

The Duke of Sussex also claims his brother was ‘wasted’ on rum hours before his wedding to Kate, and was drunk when he went out to greet people on The Mall before tying the knot.

Having been drinking to calm his nerves, William went to down from Buckingham Palace to greet members of the public who had camped on along the Mall ahead of the ceremony, he said.

Warning his brother he ‘smelled of alcohol’, Harry said he offered him a mint as he lowered the windows of the car to alleviate ‘the aftermath of last night’s rum’ on William’s breath.

Writing about his own wedding seven years later, Harry claims William ordered him to shave his beard as he ‘hated the idea of me enjoying a perk he’d been denied’.

‘At one point he actually ordered me, as the heir speaking to the spare, to shave,’ he claims.

‘Spare’ was released a week early with booksellers in Spain giving the world a premature preview ahead of its global launch on January 10.

It’s title is a reference to the phrase ‘heir and a spare’ said to have been muttered by King Charles to Diane the Princess of Wales, after Harry’s birth.

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The book comes after Harry and Meghan’s Netflix documentary, in which the duke said he was terrified when William screamed and shouted at him during a tense Sandringham summit in 2020.

It is being published four months after the death of Harry’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, and the start of his father’s reign as King, and follows years of turmoil for the royal family amid the Megxit crisis, the Duke of Edinburgh’s death, accusations of racism in the Sussexes’ Oprah interview and the brothers’ long-running feud.

Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace are both said to have refused to engage in a ‘tit-for-tat’ back and forth, with a source claiming the households were ‘beyond weary’ of Harry’s claims.

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