ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Duncan Larcombe is an award-winning British journalist and commentator who spent more than ten years working as royal editor for the Sun newspaper in London. He also worked as the paper’s defence editor, reporting from the front line with British and American troops in Afghanistan. As well as writing, he is a regular royal commentator with US network ABC. He has been married for sixteen years and is the father of two daughters.
COPYRIGHT
HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
FIRST EDITION
© Duncan Larcombe 2017
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Front cover photographs © Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Duncan Larcombe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008196479
Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008196493
Version: 2017-03-27
DEDICATION
To two legendary royal reporters, Harry Arnold for The Sun and James Whitaker for the Mirror, who were inspirational as both mentors and friends
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
About the Author
Copyright
Dedication
1 DRESSING DOWN
2 THE GAP YEAR
3 THE ROYAL JOB
4 KLOSTERS
5 BOTSWANA
6 IRAQ BLOW
7 THE FLIGHT THAT CHANGED HIS LIFE
8 HARRY’S R&R
9 A RIGHT ROYAL ROW
10 LESOTHO
11 STEALING AWAY
12 HARRY THE PILOT
13 THE ‘PAKI’ ROW
14 CHELSY SPLIT
15 SANDHURST
16 THE WARRIOR PRINCE
17 ROYAL WEDDING
18 HARRY’S OTHER WOMEN
19 THE FIRST SOLO TOUR
20 HARRY IN LAS VEGAS
21 THE WARRIOR PRINCE RETURNS
22 THE START OF THE REST OF HIS LIFE
23 MEGHAN
24 THE FUTURE
Acknowledgements
Picture Section
About the Publisher
CHAPTER 1
DRESSING DOWN
‘Hello, Clarence House Press Office, how can I help?’
It was the sort of call every reporter dreams of making. A world exclusive which would be followed by TV, press and radio outlets in every corner of the planet.
‘Hello, it’s Duncan Larcombe calling from The Sun. We have a picture of Prince Harry wearing a Nazi outfit to a fancy dress party. I’m giving you the heads-up because we’re planning to run the picture in tomorrow’s paper.’
There was an unusually long pause, then the predictable response: ‘We will call you back.’
The picture wasn’t a fake. To everyone in Sun newsroom’s astonishment, the young, popular prince had made one of the biggest gaffes in modern Royal history. To make matters worse for the 20-year-old, his antics at a private party in West Littleton, Wiltshire, in January 2005, coincided with the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis’ notorious Auschwitz death camp. As world leaders, former prisoners and plane-loads of news reporters prepared to descend on Poland to remember the 1.1 million who died at the camp, the young British Royal had given them all something to comment on.
Within twelve hours of that call to Harry’s media advisers, he would find himself in the eye of a global storm of criticism. Everyone knew German blood runs through the veins of the British Royal family. But was this careless choice of outfit finally proof the House of Windsor harboured secret sympathies with the fascist regime all along? At the very least, was Prince Harry’s stupidity a sign of a young Royal who had fallen off the rails and was out of control in the years since his mother’s tragic death? How could a young prince, with an army of media advisers, make such a glaring error of judgement?
Big questions always follow a big exclusive. But Harry will never forget the afternoon of 12 January 2005 when his father’s press adviser called him to break the bad news of The Sun’s scoop.
Over the years Harry has joked about all kinds of stories that have been written about him. His sense of humour is one of his greatest assets. But never once has he made light of, or even discussed off the record, that fateful party and the swastika wrapped around his left arm.
The story sent shockwaves through the palace. Prince Charles was furious with his youngest son. Even the Queen began to question where her grandson’s life was heading. But now, more than a decade since the infamous event, such fears have proved unfounded. Although the Nazi uniform gaffe was by no means the last time the men in grey suits at the palace have had to frantically try to deflect criticism away from Harry, today Prince Harry is the most popular Royal after the Monarch. Despite a string of incidents that would normally be enough to destroy the career of an aspiring public figure, Harry has a mysterious gift. The more scrapes he gets into, the more the public seem to love him. He is the Royal most men would like to have a beer with, and most women would like to mother, or more.
At the Sun offices in Wapping, east London, the morning of 12 January 2005 started like any other. The newsroom was hectic as usual. The newsdesk team were busy answering calls from readers and reporters while trying to prepare for the morning conference with the editor.
Every day at 11.30 a.m. the news editor and other senior staff had to face the dreaded ‘news conference’ with the boss. It was, and still is, the daily meeting they all feared. It was their job to present a list of stories ready for the next day’s paper. Get it wrong, and the editor would hit the roof. If the news list was weak, the news editor would be shouted at, or worse – the news list might be ripped up in front of all the executives. If the news editor was shouted at, the news reporters would get the blame. They would in turn be shouted at, or worse.
That day, like any other, the news list had its usual blend of showbiz stories, crime, health and politics exclusives served up by the forty-strong team of news reporters. There was also a splattering of typically Sun ‘off the wall’ stories aimed at entertaining the readers and making them laugh. The morning conference therefore went OK, with no shouting from the editor, but no real interest in the suggestions for the next day’s paper. A score draw for the news editor and another daily nightmare put to bed.
While the conference had been in full swing one of the juniors on the newsdesk had been manning the phones. He took a call from the paper’s Thames Valley district reporter Jamie Pyatt. A former news editor himself, Pyatt was one of the most respected members of The Sun’s team of reporters, and the desk naturally took tips from him very seriously.
Pyatt recalls: ‘I took a call from one of my long-term contacts. He was a young lad and I knew he was well connected with the princes. He asked if The Sun would be interested in a picture of Prince William wearing a gorilla outfit to a fancy dress party. Ob
viously a picture of the future king in any sort of unusual outfit would be very newsworthy.’
Pyatt arranged to meet the source an hour later and phoned the newsdesk to tell them about the tip. There was nothing unusual about a reporter heading off to meet a source. The newsdesk were all too aware that more often than not the tip would fall down. But they arranged for Pyatt to link up with a photographer to meet his source and kept their fingers crossed the picture would be good enough quality to make the paper. They also knew that as a seasoned and experienced reporter, Pyatt would instantly sense if the picture was part of an elaborate hoax.
When you are dealing with pictures of a Royal, alarm bells always ring. Publishing a picture of a Royal that then turns out to be a hoax could cost even the editor her job. The Royal family is so high profile that if you get it wrong the paper becomes the story. The Sun was famously once hoodwinked by a set of pictures of Princess Diana training at a gym. It was only after the snaps were published that it emerged it wasn’t the Princess of Wales working out. It was a lookalike and the paper had been the victim of an elaborate hoax.
Within an hour Pyatt pulled into a Burger King at a motorway services to meet his source. ‘He was a young lad, just after a few quid to help with his university bills. He had about eleven prints showing a bloke at a party dressed as a gorilla. He insisted it was Prince William but not one of the pictures showed William’s face.
‘I was a bit disappointed, and so was the lad when I explained we couldn’t use the pictures just on his say-so. There is a big difference between a picture of a bloke in a gorilla suit, and a picture that proved the person in the suit was the future king of England.’
As Pyatt prepared to head off back to his office in Windsor, his source tried another tack. He asked: ‘Is a picture of Prince Harry at the same party any good?’
Pyatt replied: ‘Well, that depends on what it shows, what was he dressed as?’
The source then uttered the words that within hours would be repeated by millions of people all over the world.
‘Harry is dressed in a Nazi outfit.’
The source then handed Pyatt the final picture in his set. It showed the third in line to the British throne standing with a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other, surrounded by other partygoers. To Pyatt’s astonishment the young prince was sporting a full German Afrika Korps uniform from the Second World War. On Harry’s left arm, in plain sight, was an armband with the hated Nazi swastika.
There are moments in a reporter’s career when you have to keep calm and not panic the source by letting your true feelings show. The last thing you want is for them to change their mind and decide the impact of the story might be too big, too controversial. Like a car salesman being offered a rare gem, you have to stay calm and keep your poker face on.
‘I couldn’t believe what I was looking at,’ Pyatt recalled. ‘The tipster clearly had no idea what would happen if we published this picture. I knew I needed to stay calm because the last thing I wanted to do was risk him getting cold feet. I was pretty sure he was inside William’s social circle and was obviously taking a gamble by coming to The Sun. If I appeared too keen he might be spooked and refuse to hand over the picture.
‘In my head I could hardly believe what I was looking at. The picture was so clear and the swastika on Harry’s arm just leaped out at me. The hardest thing was to take the picture in my hand without ripping off his arm. I knew at that second I wasn’t leaving Burger King without that picture.’
Pyatt played it cool and said he needed to ring the office to find out whether they were interested. The priority now was for the photographer to copy the picture and send it as soon as possible to the office.
‘I called the office and said what we had. They were expecting a picture of William in a gorilla suit. That would have made a good page lead. But what we were sitting on was a world exclusive. It was very exciting, but the office were terrified this was a sting, that the picture was a hoax. When you get in this situation all kinds of paranoia kicks in. I couldn’t see how the picture could have been altered, but you can never be 100 per cent sure.’
Pyatt was told to get hold of the negatives. These were the days before mobile phones had cameras that were good enough to take digital pictures of the quality needed to put in a newspaper. The photos had been taken on a happy snap camera that used film rather than the modern digital images, and the source had already had them developed, but even pictures printed from negatives could be doctored. It was entirely possible Harry’s head had been cleverly superimposed onto someone else’s body. If The Sun ran a fake picture like that, the editor would almost certainly lose her job.
The young tipster, who remained convinced that the paper would be more interested in the snaps of William, pulled out the negatives and handed them to Pyatt. The photographer then cast his expert eye over them and it all seemed to add up. Still there was hesitation.
‘The office took the view that this picture was too good to be true,’ Pyatt recalled. ‘They kept asking me was I actually holding it in my hand, and did I think it was real.’
Although the morning news conference was over, a story like this needed the editor’s immediate attention. To get this close to a world exclusive and then for things to go wrong fell well beyond the pay grade of the news and picture desks. The editor was informed, and she shared the scepticism of her juniors.
The order came down the line. We had to be 100 per cent sure the picture was not a hoax. The only way this picture could be run was if Harry’s media advisers confirmed its authenticity. Only then could the danger of it being a hoax be eliminated. There was always a risk that by tipping the palace off before publication, they would try and kill the story, maybe even get the lawyers involved to block publication. But the risk of getting it wrong on a story like this far outweighed these concerns. As a result, I was asked to ‘put in the call’ to Clarence House.
In 2005 Harry and William’s press affairs were still dealt with by the Prince of Wales’s media team, a band of highly paid civil servants brought in to oversee and manage the affairs of Clarence House. They were famously fierce.
Only a year earlier The Sun had run a picture of Prince William skiing with his new girlfriend, the middle-class daughter of a former air stewardess. No one had previously used a picture of Kate Middleton, and by running that picture The Sun were breaking an agreement that had stood in place since the fall-out from the death of Princess Diana in 1997. It had been agreed that while the young princes were in full-time education they were ‘off limits’ to the press. In return Clarence House would issue the occasional picture and some words about the boys. The agreement was taken so seriously that national papers, including The Sun, refused to let their reporters and photographers even set foot in St Andrews University in Scotland, where William was studying for his degree.
No one in the media was entirely comfortable with this arrangement. The British Royal family enjoy a position of being ‘above politics’, and this all seemed generally to have the backing of the deeply patriotic British public. But because they are not elected, there is no real way of bringing them to account. So to ban the media from placing any scrutiny on William and Harry was indeed a big call.
The media team at Clarence House knew they were on borrowed time. William was coming to the end of his time at St Andrews. And Harry, whose A level results at Eton had been mediocre, had embarked on an extended ‘gap year’ rather than remain in full-time education. Before long Harry was likely to be seen as ‘fair game’ by the press, and it was the Clarence House team’s job to try and ensure this prospect was delayed for as long as possible. So receiving the Nazi call from Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper had implications that went far beyond what might appear on The Sun’s front page the following day.
As civil servants, the Clarence House press office staff were there to defend the Royals. But they were not there to defend the indefensible. Nor would they risk lying to a journalist. After hearing abou
t my call, the Prince of Wales’s Communications Director, Paddy Harverson, knew what was coming. A former head of media at Manchester United Football Club, Harverson was razor-sharp at protecting his clients by deflecting trouble. But there are times when even a seasoned spin doctor has to hold up his hands and admit defeat. As soon as he had been made aware of the Nazi call, Harverson got in touch with Harry. He needed to know if it was true. If it was, he was going to have to draw on every ounce of his experience to try and limit the damage.
At four o’clock that afternoon my phone rang again. It was Harverson. He confirmed that Harry and his brother had attended a fancy dress party in the sleepy village of West Littleton, Wiltshire, just a few days earlier. And in fairness to Clarence House, a decision had clearly been made to hold up their hands to the gaffe. The only request was for us not to go in ‘too hard’ on the prince, to play the story straight and prominently include a statement issued on his behalf.
Harverson read over the statement from Harry. It ended: ‘I am very sorry if I have caused any offence. It was a poor choice of costume and I apologize.’
I called the office to tell them the story was copper-bottomed. The picture was not a hoax and Harry had issued an immediate apology.
That was it. We had everything we needed. Pyatt had secured the picture, and now we had confirmation it was the real deal. The office immediately went into overdrive; the editor was informed and the genius team of subeditors were put into action to start drawing up the pages for the next day’s paper.
There is an expression in Fleet Street that ‘it’s never easy’. But for once it was. Shortly afterwards, the editor took a call from Harverson. He wanted to know how we were running the picture and reiterated that he hoped The Sun would not to go in too hard on the prince.
That is exactly how the story was put across. Sun readers are generally pro-Royal, and the paper reflects that view. The last thing The Sun wanted to do was plunge the knife into a young Royal who most people back then remembered as a tragic teenager bowing his head at his mother’s funeral. Harry was very popular, even if his reputation as a party-loving prince was growing momentum.
Prince Harry Page 1
