Spare to a toy bear?
King Charles III might be estranged from his “spare” son Prince Harry — but he’s never without his beloved teddy bear, according to his tattletale son.
Harry, 38, confirmed in “Spare” that his monarch dad has long been obsessed with a teddy bear, one he first clung to as a boy to survive getting bullied at boarding school.
“Teddy went everywhere with Pa,” Harry recalled of his dad.
“It was a pitiful object, with broken arms and dangly threads, holes patched up here and there. It looked, I imagined, like Pa might have after the bullies had finished with him.
“Teddy expressed eloquently, better than Pa ever could, the essential loneliness of his childhood,” the king’s estranged son wrote.
The teddy talk is one of many intimate secrets Harry dished on in the book supposedly aimed at setting the record straight in protest at having his own privacy invaded.
Harry was specifically recalling the period before his dad married current Queen Consort Camilla in 2005. But biographer Christopher Andersen previously revealed in “The King: The Life of Charles III” that the monarch still “travels with a childhood teddy bear.”
It is cared for by the king’s most trusted valet, Michael Fawcett, and repaired by his childhood nanny, Mabel Anderson.
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“Every time that teddy needed to be repaired, you would think it was his own child having major surgery,” Fawcett says in the book.
The king is not the only royal with a soft spot for soft toys.
His disgraced brother Prince Andrew, 60, reportedly has a collection of 72 teddy bears that he orders staff to set out in exacting order.
Their late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, was also close with an even more famous bear — Paddington.
The Peruvian bear famously had tea with the longest-serving monarch for a skit marking her 70th year on the throne, with the pair jokingly bonding over a mutual love for marmalade sandwiches.
Toy Paddingtons then became a symbol in many tributes after the queen’s death last September aged 96.
