Prince Harry

by Duncan Larcombe

  Yes, we had pictured him and Chelsy in Botswana, but we pulled out after one hit and informed the palace that we were being careful not to spoil his well-earned holiday. With all these things considered, it sounded to me like Harry was just being over-sensitive and more than a little unfair in aiming his anger at me and my paper.

  Despite the effects of an entire day of drinking, Harry now started to list in great detail stories that had been written about him in the preceding weeks and months. I was astonished by how he was able to reel them off one by one as though he had been checking the cuts just minutes before meeting me that night.

  Fortunately for me, each story he mentioned had been written by rivals. Every time he mentioned a story I was able to honestly argue that I was not the author, nor did those tales appear in The Sun. Until eventually he came to the story I had written about him being dyslexic.

  A few months earlier Harry had been on a fishing trip with the former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson. They had met while on holiday in Barbados and agreed to spend the day together on a boat fishing off the coast of the Caribbean island. During the fishing trip Harry had told Clarkson about his dyslexia, perhaps forgetting that besides being a TV presenter he also worked as a columnist for The Sun. When Clarkson had returned from his holiday he wrote about his day out with Harry in his column, and I had been asked to write a news story in the same edition based on the dyslexia line.

  To my relief Harry seemed reassured by my responses to his attack on the press. He even apologized for being angry and for taking it out on me. It seemed as though he felt better for having got a few things off his chest, and we continued to chat for what must have been a further half an hour. We talked about his mother’s inquest result, his time away in Afghanistan and his hopes for the rest of his military career.

  Much of what he said was too private to share, but it gave me an incredible insight into what made the young prince tick. It was clear that deep down he felt very trapped by his life as a senior Royal. He seemed torn between the demands placed on him as a Royal, and his desire to be a normal Army officer who enjoyed a drink and winning the respect of his men.

  What I heard from him that evening enabled me to understand where he was coming from, and it also served as a reminder that when you write stories about a famous person, deep down they are just ordinary people living in a set of extraordinary circumstances. Harry may have learned to deal with a life lived in a goldfish bowl, but he remained incredibly sensitive about the things that were written about him, especially if they were inaccurate or unfair.

  We shook hands and I thanked him for giving me the chance to defend myself. I then headed back to my hotel, still thinking about all the things he had said.

  To this day I still respect the fact that Harry not only felt able to try and defend himself but was also man enough to accept where he was perhaps being a little harsh. That long conversation cleared the air and in no small part contributed to a far closer relationship between myself and the person whose job it was for me to write about.

  The following day I told the office about our chat but deliberately held back the details in case they instructed me to write a story and betray Harry’s trust. We wrote up our stories from the stag weekend and the editors were delighted with the pictures of Peter Phillips on the yacht and enjoying his ‘last weekend of freedom’.

  On the ferry on the way back to the mainland the next day I had a call from Harry’s head of communications at Clarence House. He had heard about my ‘pleasant chat’ with the prince and was just checking that I had no intention of publishing the full extent of our conversation.

  There are times when you have to try and play the long game as a specialist reporter. It is not my job to hold back information the public have a right to read, but at the same time it is important to balance this against the need to maintain a good relationship with the palace.

  This balancing act was at the forefront of my mind when I reflected on everything I had seen and heard over the weekend. While it was, in my view, right to withhold details of my chat with Harry, it was going to be far more difficult to ignore the snippet of information I had heard when talking at the bar with Peter’s friends.

  There was no ignoring what they had said. William and Harry’s arrival on the Isle of Wight in an RAF Chinook helicopter raised all kinds of serious questions. These vast machines cost thousands of pounds an hour to fly, and because they belong to the military the ultimate bill would fall to the taxpayer.

  After putting a call into the Ministry of Defence, we were soon able to establish that it was absolutely true that both brothers had arrived on the island on Friday afternoon in a Chinook. William had left his RAF base and flown the chopper down to London to the barracks where Harry was working. The two princes then flew to a small airfield on the Isle of Wight, thus avoiding a journey of three or four hours by car and ferry.

  Meanwhile the boys’ protection officers had driven all the way down – again at taxpayer’s expense – to ensure they were in position to collect William and Harry when the helicopter landed.

  It was clear before we had even written a word of the story for the next day’s paper that this was going to land both boys in a great deal of hot water. The last time Harry had climbed in and out of a Chinook, it had taken him away from the front line in Afghanistan. This time it had delivered him to his cousin’s stag party and a weekend of boozing and high jinks.

  It was a classic example of that balancing act you have to play as a journalist. We had no right to prevent the public from reading about the wasteful trip and I had to put my feelings about the weekend to one side. In the end we wrote the story very straight, and it was printed without much prominence at the bottom of an inside page. But the following day the ‘outrage’ of William and Harry’s pleasure trip was splashed over the front pages of both the Mirror and the Daily Mail.

  To make matters worse, it was then revealed that during his helicopter training with the RAF, William had made a number of flights which should have raised eyebrows. Although he was expected to spend a set number of hours flying Chinooks as part of his training at RAF Odium in Hampshire, it emerged that he and his instructors had made some very bad decisions about where these sorties had taken him.

  On one occasion William had flown over the Queen’s private Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, and he had flown down to his father’s home at Highgrove in Gloucestershire. Even more controversially, he had also landed in fields next to the Berkshire home of the parents of his then girlfriend Kate Middleton. On a final occasion William had even flown to a private wedding in Northumberland in the north of England, laying himself open to claims he had treated his RAF training mission as a private helicopter taxi service.

  In total it was estimated that the taxpayer had been slapped with a bill of more than £86,000 for the flights. As commentators slammed the prince for his choice of destinations, Clarence House were forced to issue an apology on William’s behalf. And a few weeks later when details of the behind-the-scenes row over the ‘pleasure flights’ were made public it emerged that William’s station commander had been kept in the dark about the ‘true nature’ of the Isle of Wight flight. Several senior officers were taken to task and William himself was forced to accept his part of the responsibility.

  An MoD spokesman said in a statement: ‘In retrospect there was a degree of naivety involved in the planning of these sorties but there is no question that anyone misled anyone.’

  Clarence House said: ‘Prince William accepts that the sorties were naive and accepts his share of the responsibility for what happened.’

  It was one of the rare occasions when William found himself at the centre of a Royal row. The fact that he had inadvertently involved his brother in it by taking him to the stag do must have upset him.

  A senior palace source reflected on the pleasure flights gaffe and told me: ‘It was an unfortunate episode, a silly own goal that could and should have been avoided. It is unlike William
to make such errors of judgement but it really did cause a fuss at the time. It was felt that any criticism of Harry was unfair and William was very sorry that his brother had been dragged into the row. The reality is the boys should have travelled to the stag weekend by road because the risk of the story getting out was too great. The episode was a learning curve for William and as he went on to earn his RAF wings it was a mistake he never repeated.’

  It would be easy to say that William and Harry are able to shrug off these kinds of public rows. But as Harry demonstrated during his time on the Isle of Wight, the pair do take criticism very seriously.

  It must sometimes feel that their public image takes one step forward and two back. Just days before going to the Isle of Wight, both boys had made the well-documented visit to Headley Court to visit wounded troops, including Ben McBean. But it serves as a reminder that if they make the slightest mistake they can find themselves on the front pages for all the wrong reasons. Life as a senior Royal may be marked by great privilege and position, but it can also come with huge costs if you are ever seen to step out of line.

  Harry’s role in the row was only minor on this occasion, but nonetheless he was very upset to find himself and William the focus of such widespread public criticism. In what should have been a period where he kept his head down after returning from Afghanistan early, Harry remained firmly on the front pages.

  Not long after his trip to the Isle of Wight he was planning to use his Royal profile for good. With time on his hands, it was to his beloved AIDS charity that he turned his attention. He spent the following two months planning a trip that would help shed much-needed light on the plight of the forgotten children of Lesotho.

  CHAPTER 10

  LESOTHO

  Being a Royal correspondent inevitably means gaining access to members of a family whose faces and names are famous all over the world. Unlike pop stars, celebrities, politicians or wealthy businessmen, whose pictures fill the pages of magazines and newspapers at the height of their careers, Royalty is a lifelong sentence.

  Public figures come and go. Most are born into obscurity, rise to fame, then their significance fades as they approach the grave. But from when Harry was a bump in his mother’s tummy, to the day when he will be laid to rest, there will always be intense public interest in his life.

  Inevitably working as a Royal journalist means meeting people who are fascinated to hear more about the person they admire as the ‘bad boy’ of the House of Windsor. When people think of Prince Harry they think of his slip-ups, his love of a party, his eye for the ladies and his refreshingly down-to-earth sense of humour. All of the above are indeed characteristics of the prince whose popularity as a Royal is eclipsed only by the Queen herself. His astonishing journey since leaving school has placed Harry in the hearts of millions of people all over the planet.

  Gaffes litter Harry’s CV like chocolate chips in a cookie. Chocolate chips because for most people they simply make him seem more delicious, a character with flaws but whose heart is firmly in the right place. The reality is that in these days of the cult of the celebrity we don’t warm to people who are flawless. We like our famous people to slip up, to struggle with the things that we struggle with. It is only then that we can identify with the lives of those who dominate our newspapers and magazines.

  I doubt Harry gets drunk anywhere near as often as most other young men. He probably attends fewer parties in the average year, and his list of ex-girlfriends would look very modest when placed next to that of the average Premiership footballer or reality TV star. So why does he have this reputation? Why does a simple Google search for ‘Prince Harry booze’ produce 628,000 hits?

  Much of his hard-living reputation stems from the two years between leaving school and knuckling down to a military career. Yet these years, which he appeared to waste, also gave him an experience which has had one of the largest impacts in shaping his life.

  For two months during his extended gap year, Harry lived in Lesotho, travelling across the tiny kingdom and coming face-to-face with the man-made epidemic that had wreaked disaster on one of the world’s least known countries. Most of the trip took place well away from the cameras as Harry visited orphanages, medical centres and volunteers trying to cope with an AIDS epidemic which had claimed the lives of a third of Lesotho’s population.

  What was intended to be a low-key experience sandwiched into his gap year was to have a far more profound impact on the unsuspecting teenage prince. On that 2004 visit the young Harry would undergo a eureka moment which all these years later is still having an impact. He went to Lesotho as a fresh-faced 19-year-old keen to learn more about the lives of those whose accidents of birth were a million miles from his own. It turned into a visit and experience that was to change his life for ever. It was there that he made a lifelong commitment to use his Royal profile to highlight the plight of the ‘forgotten children of Lesotho’.

  If the young Harry needed to hear horror stories to prompt him into taking action, then sadly Lesotho had an abundance of case studies to shock the prince. A tiny, forgotten country landlocked by South Africa, Lesotho’s beautiful hills and meandering planes may at first glance seemed like Africa at its most idyllic. With its small villages and remote farmlands, it looked like the backdrop to a Hollywood film. But it was impossible for Harry to spend more than a few hours in the country before the reality of its dark secrets would be laid bare.

  Ignorance of the HIV and AIDS virus had taken such a cruel grip on the country that the average person was not expected to live beyond their thirty-fourth birthday. A third of the population had the virus, making Lesotho one of the worst affected countries on the planet. And with little or no awareness of the virus among its people, the prospects were likely to get even worse.

  Harry was instantly struck by the ‘missing generation’ of people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. Children roamed the streets, many of them orphans, the epidemic having claimed the lives of their mothers and fathers.

  The stark contrast between the beauty of the kingdom and the ugly realities of a killer virus that had spiralled out of control was immediately evident for Harry. On his first day in Lesotho he was driven deep into the countryside through the tiny villages and mud huts so many locals called home. While the larger villages may have boasted a makeshift grocery shop, a petrol station and police house, the one thing all of them had was a large undertakers surrounded by sprawling graveyards. The virus was so prevalent that funeral parlours were the only booming businesses away from the towns.

  Harry joined volunteers based on the ground and was taken to meet some of the people worst affected by the swelling disaster. While he met many orphans on his visit, it was the experience of meeting two young children in particular that shocked him to the core.

  The first was a 10-month-old baby girl who was being cared for by volunteer nurses in squalid conditions two hours from the country’s capital, Maseru. One of the volunteers led him to a cot to see the little girl for the first time, and Harry listened in horror to the account of her life. Her emotionless eyes were fixed on the ceiling as he was told of her plight. She had been raped by her stepfather, so brutally abused that the doctors had already had to remove her tiny womb. The trauma of her ordeal was etched on a face that should have been bubbling like that of any other 10-month-old infant. Astonishingly, she had become the innocent victim of the epidemic because of the ignorant belief that one way a male could cure himself of AIDS was to have sex with a baby.

  Later in his visit Harry decided to be filmed with the little girl in a bid to draw attention to just how hideously the children of Lesotho were suffering. Sitting on a bunk bed and cradling the infant in his arms, a visibly shaken Harry told ITV’s Tom Bradbury about the first time he had seen her. ‘She was just lying there, staring up at the ceiling, with just no expression whatsoever. She couldn’t even cry. She could barely be fed. It was horrible, especially when we saw the footage the day after we were actually there
and I saw her head in my arms – she couldn’t move, had no expression, no smiling, nothing at all. She was completely emotionless. It was almost as though she knew what had happened. If I can, I would like to try and support her in her growing up.’

  Another child who was to have a lasting impact on the prince was a 4-year-old boy called Mutsu. In the same interview near the end of his two-month visit, Harry recalled: ‘The first day I met him, he came running up and just chucked a ball at me, and that was that, we had a laugh. Then at the photocall he was standing next to me and I asked him if he wanted to help plant a tree. With a bit of help from a translator he said yes. Ever since then he’s been really sweet. He comes up and he’s just a really sweet kid. He was the third youngest in the orphanage, with no father, no mother, a little devil at times, but we just had a really good laugh with him.’

  For one day during Harry’s visit the British press had been invited to Lesotho to see the prince at work with the volunteers. The publicity surrounding the official event had an instant impact on the relief work Harry had been shown. Pictures and footage of Mutsu, seen running about with Harry in a pair of shiny new blue wellies the prince had given him, got coverage back home and in neighbouring South Africa.

  It was off the back of the success of this that Harry decided to go one step further. He invited the crew from ITV News to film a documentary on Lesotho, and in return he agreed to give a long interview. This was one of the first times Harry saw at first hand how his celebrity status could be used to help the plight of others. Until that trip the young prince had nothing but contempt for the media. He hated them. But now he realized how he could use them to the benefit of others.

  What was so clear from the interviews Harry gave during that trip was just how shocked he had been to be confronted by the devastating effects of the out-of-control epidemic.