They got the wrong idea in Australia, too. Newspaper reports and television shows were deluged with complaints about the anticipated £240,000 cost to them of helping his own protection officers guard the Prince. Public opinion was that his stint as a farmhand would be no more than a glorified holiday, as it might have been had Harry had his way.
Alas, the stint did not start well. No sooner had he got to know his five fellow jackaroos on the 40,000-acre Tooloombilla station in north-eastern Australia than he realised they were not the only company he would be having in the outback. Reporters and cameramen arrived in droves, all hoping to get the scoop of the ‘spoiled Prince’ getting humiliated down on the ranch. At one point he threatened to end his Queensland country experience and seats were booked for him and his bodyguards on an early morning flight out of Roma airport. ‘I can’t do what I came here to do so I might as well go home,’ he told one of his new farmhouse friends. The negative PR backlash of such a move, however, was clear to see: the Australian press had licence to label him a whinging Pom and Prince Philip sent word that at home his quitting would be likened to Prince Edward’s walking out on the Royal Marines because of the discipline he simply could not take.
It took a call from Buckingham Palace to oblige Queensland’s Premier, Peter Beattie, to make an official statement: Harry was still on the property – but a prisoner in the ranch house, restricted to watching videos instead of getting on with the work he had been sent to do, so leave him alone. Nevertheless a trip to the nearby Mitchell rodeo had to be called off when it was realised that, despite the Prime Minister’s plea, the army of newsmen threatening to descend on them was simply too large for the local security forces to handle.
Even his influential employer/hosts, Annie and Noel Hill – Annie had been an Earls Court flatmate of Diana’s and her husband was the son of the wealthy polo star Sinclair Hill, who was Charles’s polo coach – could do nothing to stem the media ambush. Press secretary Colleen Davis’s pleas for the journalists and photographers to leave him to get on with his work also fell on deaf ears. She was later replaced by the lofty but softly spoken Paddy Haverson, an army colonel’s son who had managed to end the feud between Alex Ferguson and David Beckham when he was press officer at Manchester United (although that was by prior arrangement).
It took a heartfelt appeal from Charles’s former equerry Mark Dyer, who was a sort of male Tiggy during Harry’s stay, to bring the charade to an end. ‘I’ve got a young man here in pieces,’ he told the hunting pack. After agreeing that there would be later photo opportunities the newsmen backed off, freeing Harry to get on with his chores, rising at seven each morning and working through till early evening with a two-hour break for lunch when the Australian heat is at its fiercest – 40 degrees in the shade.
And that, as it turns out, was the moment Dyer – himself a hard-living ex-Welsh Guards officer – became Harry’s hero for life. The Prince could see that Dyer was not only a great diplomat, but also that no one would mess with him. Within days the Prince was able to slip into a bull-riding competition in the tiny nearby town of Injune (population 362). He wandered up to the ticket booth and paid his $10 entrance fee to gain admission to the Queensland Rodeo Association state finals. Then, sitting on a grass hill, he videoed the event and – aware that his father was scrutinising reports of his activities – sipped a soft drink rather than the beer most around him were enjoying.
He declined an invitation to ride a steer but good naturedly accepted some friendly ribbing; Jamie Johnson, president of the Injune Rodeo Association, called him ‘a useless pommy jackaroo like all of them that come out here’.
Harry had been warned by his father in advance that when speaking to people he should do his best to avoid any trace of upper-crust English accent. When he was in Australia many years earlier Charles was being driven through the outback when he spotted a gang of labourers working on the road in the blistering heat and seemingly hundreds of miles from anywhere. He ordered his driver to stop so he might step out of the limousine and speak to them. It was, to say the least, a stilted conversation: once they had told him they had been away from their homes for weeks he asked them, ‘And what about your wives?’ Unfortunately the Windsor pronunciation of ‘wives’ left them nonplussed and after he had repeated the question three times to the puzzled group, one of the gang turned to his fellows and said, ‘I think he wants us to wave,’ and a red-faced Charles, watched by his policeman, the aptly named Paul Officer, stood on the roadside facing a handful of men waving at him just as the crowds had done in Sydney.
Two months after the media fracas, Harry honoured the deal Dyer had made for him. The media were allowed to film and photograph the nineteen-year-old as, dressed in open-neck blue shirt, jeans, donning a brown Akubra hat, he rode a chestnut horse called Guardsman and guided a herd of thirty Shorthorn and Shorthorn Charolais cattle around part of the property. It was a very different Harry from the young man who had arrived in the country just nine weeks earlier and sulked his way through a media baptism by fire. He had also been able to indulge his twin passions of polo and rugby, travelling to Sydney to lead his Young England team to a 4–6 victory over Young Australia Polo. Next he was in the stadium to witness the successful World Cup campaign of the England rugby team, joining his cousin Zara Phillips and her future husband Mike Tindall for an appropriate celebration in some of the city’s wilder bars.
There was no longer any danger of ‘whinging Pom’ accusations. At home, after Mark Dyer had called him with an extremely favourable report of the second son’s transformation, Prince Charles celebrated the success of his plan with champagne, declaring, ‘It’s working.’ His boy, it seemed, was becoming a man. Alas, if he thought the troubles were fixed then he would have another think coming in the months to follow: his high-spirited son’s hard-drinking, partying days were far from over.
For the time being, however, all seemed well and Charles was much relieved for he had problems of his own to deal with. Still bereft at the loss in March 2002 of his beloved grandmother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, he had consoled himself with the thought that he could perpetuate her memory by moving from St James’s Palace into her London residence, Clarence House, just as she had wished. Then one of his closest friends, Emilie van Cutsem, had asked him: ‘What about Camilla?’ The Camilla Question remained unresolved despite the fact that she had been divorced from her husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, for years and had even discussed the subject of marriage to Charles with the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey. It would be improper, his closest friends counselled, for him to be living in sin in his grandmother’s old house. Van Cutsem told him: ‘You must decide whether to marry her or let her go.’ After the house had been renovated at great public expense, however, Charles and Camilla moved in together and shared a bedroom but he did nothing about their marital status.
The most insurmountable obstacle standing in the way of their marriage was not the attitude of the Queen or Prince Philip, his brothers and sister, the Anglican Synod or its members, but the implacable opposition of the Catholic Church, of which she was very much a member. Catholic hostility to divorcee Camilla led to an embarrassing incident when the ecumenically minded Prince was invited to attend a service at Westminster Cathedral in early 2004. Camilla wanted to accompany him and a phone call was made on her behalf from St James’s Palace to the cathedral. The monsignor who took the call said he would have to refer the request to the Archbishop. The reply to the Palace was that the Archbishop could not agree to such a suggestion. Charles had to make the visit to the cathedral on his own.
The truth was that Charles needed his mistress more than ever, as a couple of moments of Goonish farce at the royal European premiere of film Cold Mountain, starring Nicole Kidman, in a wintry London in 2003 had demonstrated. When Charles was being introduced to members of the cast in the traditional pre-screening line-up, it became apparent that he had no idea of the identity of the shortish, shaven-headed chap in a sui
t who introduced him with such easy familiarity to Kidman, Jude Law and Ray Winstone. Charles chatted to each of the stars in turn, starting with Winstone. When he reached Kidman, Charles asked whether she had been in the movie Enigma. Realising he had mixed her up with Kate Winslet, Nicole smiled: ‘No.’
Charles added: ‘You’ve done a bit since then … Moulin Rouge.’
‘Yes,’ replied Nicole, growing increasingly uncomfortable, ‘a few things.’
As the man who had been making the introductions hovered at his side, the Prince whispered to an aide: ‘Who is this chap?’
‘He,’ the Prince was informed, ‘is Anthony Minghella, the director of the film.’
‘Oh God,’ said Charles, ‘the ice-cream man from the Isle of Wight!’
This was a reference to the trade formerly practised by Minghella’s hard-working parents. ‘Charles had not done his homework,’ the aide admits. ‘That’s the sort of thing Harry could have helped him with. He was always up to date with such things and would have made sure his father knew exactly who he was meeting had he been there.’ With Harry absent, Charles needed Camilla by his side.
On 13 February 2004 Harry was despatched to the Kingdom of Lesotho, a 12,000-square mile landlocked enclave totally surrounded by South Africa, which it supplies with water from the huge quantities garnered by its lush mountain region. Although Lesotho (which translates as ‘the land of the people who speak Sesotho’) is also rich in diamonds, 40 per cent of its people live below the poverty line and it has the third-highest rate of AIDS in the world. Charles chose it as a country badly in need of the kind of charitable work Diana had undertaken in the latter years of her life. Harry would learn that AIDS was responsible for the colossal number of orphans he would encounter during his stay in the country and, more importantly, that he could bring smiles to their sad faces.
Upon his arrival, Harry was met in the capital Maseru by Lesotho’s Prince Seeiso, the brother of King Letsie III. The country’s government is a modified form of a constitutional monarchy, the Prime Minister is the head of government and the monarch serves in a ceremonial capacity only. But this was no royal tour even though Seeiso stayed with him for much of his time there and introduced him to many of the people. Hard work lay ahead. Just outside the town of Mokhotlong, Harry was handed a set of tools and told to get stuck in with those labouring to create the foundations for a new health clinic. He hardly had time to draw breath before he found himself working as part of a gang on a road bridge over the Sanqebethu River.
He helped dig trenches to divert water away from the crop fields at Ha Moeketsane and spent time sowing vegetable seeds for the garden at an orphanage. It brought back to him another saying he had heard from a counsellor at the Featherstone Lodge rehab when an addict was bemoaning the fact that he was low on self-worth: ‘If you want to regain self-worth go out and do something worthy.’
Accompanying a doctor on his rounds in the village of Matsieng, he saw the horrifying extent of the AIDS pandemic that gripped much of the country. The young Prince could not do enough for the victims. When his working day was over he taught the children to play touch rugby and painted their barren rooms for them. He discovered that, in addition to those suffering as a result of AIDS, there were children known locally as ‘herd boys’, boys as young as five who had been sent by their families to look after livestock in remote locations on their own. These children have to fend for themselves and many do not survive.
To draw attention to the efforts of the British Red Cross in Lesotho he made a television documentary, The Forgotten Kingdom, which also raised more than £500,000 for the cause. Then, in partnership with Prince Seeiso, he founded a new charity: ‘Sentebale [Forget me not – a veiled reference to his mother and her charity work], the Princes’ fund for Lesotho’. The charity had four programmes: one to provide management advice and funding to care for children who are orphaned or disabled; another to arrange regular camps for children aware of their HIV status; a third to make education available to children who live in remote mountainous areas and finally what Harry calls the Letsema network – a collaborative online network encouraging people to congregate and ‘discuss topical matters concerning children in their care’. One of his main problems has been to raise international awareness of Lesotho’s plight and, as a remedy, he came up with a number of promotional ideas including the Sentebale Polo Cup which moves to a different location around the globe each year.
Pledging to support the cause for the rest of his days, Harry said with obvious conviction:
I met so many children whose lives had been shattered following the death of their parents – they were so vulnerable and in need of care and attention. It’s time to follow on – well, as much as I can – to try to keep my mother’s legacy going. I believe I’ve got a lot of my mother in me and I think she’d want my brother and I to do this. Obviously it’s not as easy for William as it is for me. I’ve got more time on my hands to be able to help. I always wanted to go to an AIDS country to carry on my mother’s legacy.
Not everyone took him at his word. His heartfelt statement fell on deaf ears, for example, when it came to the Daily Express’s acerbic columnist Carol Sarler. She wrote a piece describing him as a ‘horrible young man … a national disgrace who rarely lifted a finger unless it’s to feel up a cheap tart in a nightclub’. She described his gap year as a space between no work whatsoever at school and utter privilege at Sandhurst. As for his spell in Australia, she claimed he had spent it ‘slumped in front of the television waiting to behave badly at the next available rugby match’ and in Lesotho she said he was spending eight lavish weeks, during which ‘he has reluctantly agreed to spend a bit of the trip staring at poor people’. Harry’s new press guardian, Paddy Haverson, replied in detail pointing out that Sarler had, in effect, used her poison pen to put down a diligent, hard-working young man without having a clue as to what he was really like or what he was doing during his gap years. The Palace had had enough, just as the Daily Express would have done had anyone dared to describe one of their own in similar terms.
A leading London psychiatrist who had once treated his mother, says:
Forget the critics: I think the Lesotho experience turned young Henry’s [he insists on calling him by the name he was christened with] life around. For the first time in his life he saw desperate poverty, terrible suffering. I remember Diana telling me how she took him to visit the poor and the prostitutes in London in the hope that it would stir his conscience, but they were brief visits to places surrounded by wealth and luxury. He would not have been able to understand why those surrounding these unfortunates could not take care of them, plus he was obviously aware that there is a welfare state and no one in the UK need die of hunger or lack of any medical treatment. In Africa he saw people who had nothing and little chance of getting anything. Now that did wake his conscience and I think if Diana were alive today she would be greatly relieved by this turnaround in him.
His subsequent insistence on going to war and living under those dangerous and uncomfortable conditions in Afghanistan also speaks volumes about wanting to gain experience outside his upbringing. To be honest, I think he was bored with the way the royals live and what they expect the world to provide for them. He never consulted me, of course, but from a distance I can see nothing in him of the terrible paranoia poor Diana suffered. There were times when I thought she might end her life; Harry lives his to the full. Now she couldn’t do that and I suspect that she would have been unwell whoever she was married to. Prince Charles may have exasperated her, but take it from me he did not cause her underlying illness.
The unfortunate orphans of Lesotho were not the only ones Harry met during his stay in Africa for it was there that he re-encountered the girl who was to become the love of his life: Chelsy Davy, a girl who had first aroused his interest when they met during her time as a student at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, close to Highgrove and its Club H. Chelsy was a lively blonde just a year younger than H
arry and the attraction was as instantaneous as it was mutual. A close friend says: ‘Because she is so attractive Chelsy has had many male admirers, but from the way she talked about Harry we all believed that this was the one she would end up marrying.’ It has to be said, though, that Harry was not the only thing Ms Davy had on her mind: as fiercely ambitious as she is intelligent, she was heading for a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from the University of Cape Town and had her sights set on a career in law. Fresh from his ditch-digging tasks, Harry was overawed by this particular beauty’s intellect, but their love of clubs, parties and vodka meant they had a great deal in common. During their early courting period, Harry got to know her parents when he went to stay with the family in Durban and once he had won Mr and Mrs Davy’s confidence the couple went off to stay in their seafront apartment at Camps Bay where the relationship developed despite the chaperoning presence of Chelsy’s brother Shaun.
In a letter home to a former school friend Harry wrote that Chelsy was ‘the love of my life – this one’s unreal’. Initially Chelsy was puzzled by his insistence that they keep their fledgling romance a secret: she soon found out why. They had been enjoying a peaceful relationship until the day they let their guard down and were photographed kissing at a polo field in Durban in 2004; from that moment on Chelsy discovered what it was like to be public property and how the fledgling relationship was destined to change her life. Gone were the days when they could camp out and watch the wildlife on exotic safaris. From the moment she followed him back to the UK, however, Miss Davy felt at ease in royal circles. She would become close friends with the Duchess of York’s daughters Beatrice and Eugenie, and Prince William’s wife-to-be Kate and her sister Pippa Middleton. Her Facebook pages read like a who’s who of British society. She accompanied Harry to royal weddings and enjoyed nights out sipping vodka with him in London’s most exclusive – and expensive – nightclubs. She shared Harry’s annoyance when they were shadowed by the paparazzi, whom Harry called ‘the tossers’ – a phrase he had learned from his mother. It was to be a tempestuous affair, however, and several times they walked away from each other only to be subsequently reunited. Clearly devoted to her, Harry describes Chelsy as being as gaffe-prone as George Bush ‘but better looking’ and says it was the Essex-girl mentality in her that forced him to take her to the X Factor studios even though he had no great regard for the programme’s creator Simon Cowell, who had once had the audacity to say to him, ‘If you ever get tired of running the country, you can come and work for me.’
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