In a cupboard upstairs I have a CD single (remember them?) titled Wibling Rivalry. It was released in 1995, has a picture of the Kray twins on the cover and is credited to a band called Oas*s. The asterisk is relevant.

The CD would never have seen the light of day had journalist John Harris, then writing for the NME, not found his interview with Oasis mainstays Noel and Liam Gallagher degenerating into the mother of all profanity-strewn sibling spats. To cut a long story short, Harris pretty much gave up on the interview and released the recording as a single instead. There’s a Noel ‘side’ and a Liam ‘side’ and a lot of it centres on how and why the younger Gallagher started a drunken fight on an overnight ferry to Holland resulting in the entire band (except goody-goody Noel) getting banged up in a Dutch jail.

In what is probably the lowest insult one Mancunian can throw at another, Noel at one point accuses Liam of behaving like a Scouser.

Ouch.

Reach back as far as you like into the annals of time, even further back than the mid-1990s, and you find brothers in conflict. Rock music has plenty besides the Gallaghers. Ray and Dave Davies of The Kinks, for example. They fought on stage (and were banned from the US as a result). They fought in recording studios (everyone else would go for a smoke until the argument had burned out or the brothers had exhausted themselves). And they were at it even at Dave’s 50th birthday party (Ray threw the cake on the floor and stamped on it). The Everly Brothers, Don and Phil, weren’t much better, and the Jacksons had their moments too.

If your Biblical or historical knowledge is sharper than your grasp of rock lore, you’ll know there is one very famous example in the Good Book – Cain and Abel – and loads more in the back catalogues of the Romans, Greeks, Borgias, Plantagenets, Lannisters etc.

Which brings us to another royal house, the Windsors. Unless you’ve been off-planet or stranded in a strike-affected train station or Elon Musk has kicked you off Twitter, you’ll know all about the fight between Princes Harry and William. Or Harold and Willy, as we now know they call each other.

The top-line revelation from Harold’s soon-to-be-published memoir, Spare, is that a confrontation between the brothers in 2019 resulted in him being “grabbed by the collar” and thrown to the floor. This resulted in a ripped “necklace” (one among many curious details) and came after an argument in which Willy described Harold’s wife Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, as “difficult”, “rude” and “abrasive”. Harold first told his therapist about this encounter, then confessed to his wife when she saw the marks on his back.

I’m going to hang off buying Spare until the first copies hit the charity shops. That’ll be around Pancake Day, I reckon. Definitely well ahead of King Charles’s coronation in May. For the rest of you with Christmas book tokens to spend, it’s published on Tuesday. However, thanks to the efforts of some over-enthusiastic shelf stackers at a Spanish book chain it actually went on sale in the land of paella and tiki taka approach play last week. It was quickly re-boxed again, but not before copies had fallen into the hands of the British tabloid press who immediately ran it through Google Translate (that’s probably how Harold ended up wearing a “necklace”) and uploaded the results to their respective websites faster than you can say: ‘What’s the Spanish for spare?’.

Since you ask, the Spanish for spare is repuesto. However you could use libre instead, which has the added meaning of loose, idle, vacant and unoccupied. It’s just a hunch – or maybe blind prejudice – but the second might be a more appropriate description of the author in this case. What do you think? In the end the Spanish publishers went for En La Sombra. It means in the shade, something there’s quite a lot of in the lush Californian garden which surrounds Harold’s plush Californian home.

The Herald: READ MORE: IS HARRY & MEGHAN BORING OR BRILLIANT? 

There were a great many more revelations than the one about the fight. We learned about Harold’s past drug use (cocaine and marijuana). About the time he got frost bite on his actual willy during a trip to Antarctica. About his kill count in Afghanistan (25). About how Willy and Kate encouraged him to wear that now-infamous Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party in 2005 and laughed when he modelled it for them. About the don’t-call-her-a-medium he once visited and who told him his mother was watching over him. “The minute we sat down together I felt an energy around her,” he reportedly writes. The woman told him Diana was present (and giggling) when Harold’s son, Archie, broke a Christmas tree decoration in the shape of the late Queen.

Oh, and we learned about how and where he lost his virginity. Cover your eyes now if you’re squeamish. All set? Let’s go. It happened in a field behind a busy pub, and with an older woman. She treated him like a “young stallion”, apparently, and he “mounted her quickly, after which she spanked my ass and sent me away.”

Where is the lucky lady today? It’s probably not a hypothetical question. Even now tabloid reporters will be running down contacts and combing the village pubs of England for traces of the unknown ass-spanker.

Though I do use my Queen Elizabeth II 1977 Silver Jubilee commemorative mug for holding Sharpies I’m not much of a collector of royal memorabilia. But how I would love to get my hands on the dog bowl Harold broke when he fell on it after being pushed by his brother. If the smashed guitar which finally caused Oasis to split can sell for £325,000 at auction – a red Gibson ES-355, one of two broken in a backstage contretemps in Paris in 2009 – then that broken bowl must be worth a fortune. I hope it didn’t end up in the bin.

For many, the bin is where Harold is headed himself. At least reputationally. At least on this side of the Pond. Spare will net him millions, sure, a nice pile to add to the cash earned from the recent Netflix series. But unless an unusually attractive olive branch is brandished in tonight’s heavily trailed, 100-minute interview with Tom Bradby (STV, 9pm: don’t pretend you won’t be watching) it’s hard to see a way back for the Sussexes – if by ‘back’ we mean not getting lamped by Charles/Willy/Kate/Camilla/someone else at the next family wedding.

“A human hand grenade” is how Harold was described on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme by Tina Brown, former editor of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Tatler and the author of two books on the royals. Speaking on Newsnight, former royal press aide Dicky Arbiter referred to the Duke’s claims of being briefed against as “balderdash”, referred to Spare as “the Gospel According to Saint Harry” and said the Netflix series contained “untruths”. The Daily Telegraph’s Camilla Tominey didn't mince her words either. To her eyes the Duke is “an over-pampered prince wanting all the privileges but none of the responsibility of royal life … Rather than taking ownership of his actions, everything is everyone else’s fault.”

All that negativity adds up.

For those of us with no skin in the game (essentially every Briton who isn’t related to the royals or employed by them) this is another one of those times when you reach for the popcorn, settle down to watch the spectacle unfold and wonder whether Tolstoy had it right in the opening lines of Anna Karenina – “All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” – or whether Oasis nailed it better in Married With Children. “I hate the way that even though you know you’re wrong you say you’re right,” Liam sings. “I hate the books you read and all your friends, your music’s s**** it keeps me up all night.”