Harry

by Chris Hutchins

  Although happy that his daughter had met ‘someone’, Charles Davy found himself the recipient of some unwelcome press attention when a newspaper claimed to have uncovered many misdeeds including an unsavoury friendship with the internationally despised President Mugabe. Davy vehemently denied all the allegations made against him and asserted that he had never even met Mugabe. In any event, Davy had other things to worry about when his royal guest started a major security alert by leaving the family ranch without informing anyone after having drunk ‘one too many’.

  It was July before Harry returned to the UK and revealed to his father that he was in love. Charles listened attentively but reminded him that he had his final Sandhurst entrance exams to study for and encouraged him to help out on a Duchy of Cornwall farm and to train with the Rugby Football Union as a rugby development officer. Charles was pleased that his son seemed to have changed his ways: Lesotho had made a difference; younger people were now his focus. He was told that girlfriends and what he called ‘emotional baggage’ would have to take a back seat. But Harry could never stop thinking about Chelsy and the two remained in close touch by telephone.

  Meanwhile, James Hewitt wasn’t having the best of summers: to Harry’s amusement his mother’s former lover was arrested in July 2004 at the Cactus Blue bar in Chelsea on suspicion of possessing cocaine. The former cavalry officer, nicknamed Timeshare for his many dalliances, was with TV and radio presenter Alison Bell, who was also accused. Hewitt was locked in a cell at Notting Hill police station to sober up before he could be interviewed the following day. He could have faced a jail sentence of up to seven years if convicted, and Ms Bell (a former girlfriend of Prince Edward) a life term for the even more serious offence of supply, but the authorities smiled on the pair, letting Hewitt off with a warning (though he lost his gun licence after police found a disassembled shotgun on his living room floor) and Bell without charge.

  Harry did not see a great deal of his father that summer. Charles had taken Camilla to Birkhall, the Queen Mother’s former house on the Balmoral estate. Rupert Lendrum, who worked as Charles’s major-domo at St James’s Palace, Clarence House and Highgrove, as well as Birkhall, says that the Scottish house is by far the Prince’s favourite. ‘It’s a very big house, very big but not grand in the sense that some royal homes are,’ he says.

  He worked terribly hard on the boxes of stuff we sent up to him during summer. He starts at breakfast and is often still at it at midnight. Sometimes we would think twice about including something in a box and think does he really need to read this, perhaps I should just ring him up and say ‘Look here, sir…’ but he likes to see everything in writing so the boxes just swell.

  No one at Clarence House is sure of the exact date in the autumn of 2004 when Charles made his decision, but make it he did. He was going to marry Camilla and as soon as possible. It would have to be a civil ceremony since the Church of England – of which he will one day be the Supreme Governor – disapproves of remarriage of divorced people in church. In addition, a high-placed official of the Catholic Church pointed out that Camilla was not only a divorcee but the husband she divorced in 1995 was still alive. Clarence House, nevertheless, said the ceremony would take place in the Windsor Castle chapel, St George’s (a statement it later had to revise as the pair married in a civil ceremony in Windsor Guildhall before a service of blessing at the castle chapel). Camilla would never be Queen but maybe that was no bad thing. Meanwhile, Queen Elizabeth is said to have sighed deeply when asked if it could be made known that not only was she very happy for them both but that the marriage had her blessing.

  Charles broke the news to Harry on his return to the UK. It was never going to be an easy task for a man to tell his son that the woman blamed for the break-up of the marriage to his mother was to become his stepmother. But she had been that in all but name for a long while and she made Charles happy. What’s more, Harry had grown to like her, to love her even, and was bound even closer to her by the public criticism and negative comment she had received: ‘She’s not a wicked stepmother, she’s a wonderful woman,’ he said in one emotional outburst. And he meant it.

  After the historic father–son chat and a brief discussion about how and when the marriage would be announced, Harry decided it was time to rejoin the real world and he took himself and William off to the Chinawhite club in Mayfair. Somehow a glamour model, one Lauren Pope, managed to inveigle herself into the VIP area where she made a beeline for the princes, leaping on to Harry’s lap and planting kisses on his cheek. For once he did not welcome the attention from a young woman, probably anticipating the publicity it would create for the Page 3 girl who was later to join the cast of the bawdy television show, The Only Way Is Essex. Sure enough she subsequently gave interviews claiming that he spent hours chatting with her and later telephoned her for a date. Harry’s friend says: ‘Sorry, Miss Pope, but you are definitely not the Prince’s type. This was never going to be a Cinderella moment.’

  There were more nightclub incidents during his UK stay as this was, after all, the double-gap year, the extended period in which Prince Charles hoped that Harry would get his wild days out of the way. But now, it was time for him to go back to work.

  If Charles was burying himself in his work in the hope that the issue of his recent engagement to Camilla would go away, then he needed to think again. At a New York dinner party Prince Andrew had let his fellow diners know in no uncertain terms that he was not enamored by the thought of Camilla becoming his sister-in-law and perhaps Her Royal Highness or, heaven forbid, Queen Camilla, but the gap between brothers had never been wider. It was clear that no matter what the public or Prince Andrew might think, Prince Charles needed her at his side. This was one battle Andrew would have to fight on his own. Harry was acutely aware that his father and uncle were not on the best of terms. On hearing of unsavoury goings-on in New York, Charles had asked his youngest brother to use a useful show-business contact he had in Manhattan to investigate. The information that Prince Edward brought back about certain individuals did not please Charles, and Harry had to put up with his father brooding over the matter at a time when he was doing his best to get his own life together.

  In September Harry breezed through his Sandhurst exam but just as Charles was beginning to believe his younger son’s wild days really were over, the young Prince found himself back in trouble. After the highly successful summer PR offensive, he ‘lost it’ leaving the West End nightclub Pangaea, close to Piccadilly, at 3 a.m. on an October night. Despite his awareness of the part pursuing paparazzi had played in his mother’s death, he seemed, up to this point, to have found acceptance in the knowledge that the photographers would always be on his tail. That night, however, acceptance seemed to have deserted him. He had failed to accept the rejection of an aspiring actress called Anne-Marie Mogg, whose stunning appearance had attracted his attention. He made the mistake of sending a flunky over to ask her and her friend Josephine to join him at his table. The flunky bungled it by saying, ‘Harry would like to invite you to join him – that’s Harry as in Prince Harry.’ Ms Mogg declined the invitation declaring, ‘I wasn’t going to give him any special treatment because he was a royal. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a very good-looking guy. He’s much taller and stronger-looking than I thought from his photographs. If he hadn’t been a royal I probably would have gone over.’ No way was this one going to be a groupie and Harry’s mood blackened as he downed his vodka, failing to appreciate the joke when his male companions chided him about being too shy to approach her himself. Finally he left the club at around 3 a.m. in a foul temper.

  Outside he climbed into the car that had been waiting to transport him the short distance home when his eyes focused on Chris Uncle, a photographer working for the Big Pictures agency. ‘Suddenly he burst out of the car,’ says Uncle,

  and lunged towards me as I was still taking pictures. He lashed out and then deliberately pushed my camera into my face. The base of the camera struck me and cut my
bottom lip. At the same time he was repeatedly saying, ‘Why are you doing this? Why don’t you leave me alone?’

  Another photographer, Charlie Pycraft, told BBC News that Harry had indeed attacked Uncle: ‘He was half-way getting into the back of the car when he suddenly reacted and lunged at him, grabbed his camera and pushed him against the wall.’

  While the Prince used his best soldier-speak expletives during the altercation, his protection officer, helped by the two club doormen, pulled him off and pushed him into the back of the car which then sped away. Giving Harry’s version of events the following day a Clarence House spokesman said that even though it was Uncle who sported the evidence of a cut lip from the altercation, it was the Prince who had been hit in the face. Harry was fortunate that Uncle did not press charges for assault. No one is on record as saying whether he was inebriated on that occasion, but then again, who sits in a nightclub until three in the morning without consuming a fair amount of alcohol? Certainly not Harry Wales.

  Once more, it was time to move on and the Queen made her feelings known to Charles, suggesting he make it clear to Harry that he was a royal not a selfish, arrogant movie star. He was into his second gap year and there were more good works to be done … and, yes, more nightclubs, at safe distances from London, deserving of a royal visit. So off he went, this time to Argentina, but Harry’s insatiable appetite for the wild life – something most twenty-year-olds would appreciate –was to get him into trouble yet again during his stay there. He had arranged to stay on the El Remanso (the Backwater) estate with friends Mark and Luke Tomlinson (sons of Prince Charles’s friends Simon and Claire Tomlinson). The estate was owned by Major Christopher Hanbury, polo patron, racehorse owner and for two decades an aide to once the world’s wealthiest man, the Sultan of Brunei. El Remanso’s own polo grounds were still under construction so Harry planned to practise each day at the nearby La Alegria estate but residence at Hanbury’s spread ensured him close proximity to the world’s best polo player, Adolfo Cambiaso, from whom he expected to learn much.

  Alas, his plans were thwarted by a knee injury which prevented him from riding let along playing polo. Instead he made frequent visits to the nearby town of Lobos where he drank beer and played pool with men who lived and breathed horses specially bred for polo, before moving on to the clubs favoured by local girls. He became extremely popular with the townspeople, who marvelled at his lack of airs and graces but the popularity did not extend to those charged with protecting him. According to one newspaper report the adventure-seeking playboy Prince ‘escaped on a motorbike with four Scotland Yard bodyguards having to chase him. For the police Harry became a real headache.’

  Frustrated by being unable to ride, he tried on more than one occasion to slip away with his friends on fishing trips but, to his annoyance, the over-enthusiastic local police insisted on following him. The final straw came when a newspaper reported that a murder suspect had told a journalist that underworld characters were planning to kidnap Harry when he next visited the Bar Nievas in the one-street town of Salvador Maria, a rough bar frequented by hoodlums and bandits. The bar could not have been more different than the London night spots Harry had become used to where champagne can cost £1,000 a bottle. With its bare walls and crude wooden tables, Omar Nievas’s establishment discourages women customers, preferring to serve their card-playing menfolk the local Quilmes beer at thirty pence a bottle.

  The Nievas security scare was enough and Argentine authorities told Harry’s detectives they could no longer guarantee his safety in their country. What was always thought to have been planned as a six-week ‘working trip’ was to be cut short, with the media throughout South America reporting that the Prince was being sent home in disgrace. After the Buenos Aires daily Página 12 claimed that Harry had returned to his hosts’ estate from one night of partying in town in ‘quite bad condition given his uncontrolled consumption of alcohol’, it was agreed that this was time to call it a night. Despite obvious heightened security at Ezeiza airport at the start of his journey home, Buckingham Palace insisted he was returning on exactly the date that had been scheduled. Whichever way, that particular party was over. And anyway, Christmas was coming.

  It was a quiet Christmas with his father and brother under the Queen’s roof at Sandringham – the traditional break Diana dreaded each year. The princes stayed for the traditional New Year shoots but sped off to Highgrove as soon as good manners would allow. Harry was presented with an opportunity to redeem himself. The earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean that exploded into being on Boxing Day morning just off the coast of Indonesia was the longest-lasting faulting ever known. It caused a series of tsunamis in the area that killed more than 230,000 people; Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand were the hardest-hit countries but the devastation spread across large swathes of the eastern hemisphere.

  After watching a documentary about the pitiful plight of the tens of thousands of children orphaned, the brothers asked what they could do to help. They were told there was a warehouse at nearby Warmley where volunteers were preparing and packing hygiene packs for the Red Cross to despatch to the Maldives where more than 15,000 people had been made homeless. The princes wasted no time in joining the volunteer force. Harry said later: ‘It’s been by far the worst thing I’ve ever seen. We’re not exempt from what everybody else does. We just wanted to be hands on. We didn’t want to sit back.’

  Alas, his halo slipped a bit just twenty-four hours later. Harry had been invited to join 250 guests at a party at the Chippenham home of the Olympic triple gold medallist Richard Meade to celebrate the twenty-second birthday of the showjumper’s son, also called Harry. It was a fancy dress party with a colonial theme and Prince William delighted others by dressing as a lion. It was Prince Harry’s choice of costume that caused a furore: he went as a Nazi to try and outdo his devil-may-care friend Guy Pelly who said he was going as the Queen.

  Harry had on a jacket with the German flag on one arm and when he removed it, it revealed that he was wearing the desert uniform of General Rommel’s Afrika Korps with a badge of the Wehrmacht on the collar. Most of those present – many of them, like Prince Charles, members of the Beaufort Hunt – would have kept quiet but one of the guests took a photograph and sold it to The Sun, which published it a few days later under the front-page headline HARRY THE NAZI. The picture showed the third in line holding a drink and smoking a cigarette while bedecked in a shirt altered to look like a German uniform by the addition of the collar flashes and an eagle insignia on the chest. The part of the amateurish ensemble which caused most offence, however, was a red, white and black swastika armband. He’d hired the outfit from Maud’s Cotswold Costumes in nearby Nailsworth where no questions were asked although, apparently, eyebrows were raised. No one has been able to explain how he managed to leave Highgrove without anyone spotting him so attired – Prince Charles was still in Scotland where he had seen the New Year in. But it is a sign of Harry’s determination not to be overruled by his brother that William was unable to persuade him that the outfit was, at least, unsuitable for a British prince – and a potential British Army cadet at that – to wear, even to a fancy dress party.

  The incident caused international outrage in the Jewish community which was preparing to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and there was even a call from a former armed forces minister for Harry to be stripped of his place at Sandhurst, saying that the picture showed he was unsuitable for the prestigious military academy. Fortunately that didn’t happen but Harry was obliged by his father to make a humiliating formal apology, albeit via a press spokesman, who said the Prince was very sorry if his poor choice of costume had caused any offence or embarrassment to anyone. The Conservative leader Michael Howard said he should have made the apology in person rather than through a spokesman. A leading Jewish figure said his father – who had already made him atone for the offence by swilling out the pigs on his farm – should compel him to attend a forthcoming cerem
ony at the death camp Auschwitz later that month.

  Never mind death camp, for Harry it was clearly time for boot camp.

  9

  SOLDIER BOY

  The obvious answer to Harry’s problems was to get him into the army at the earliest opportunity. That was his wish in any case. Whereas his brother’s choice of toys in the days of the Highgrove nursery were usually games, puzzles and Dinky cars, Harry’s most treasured possessions were a complete set of lead toy soldiers and, ironically, the model of a Panzer tank, developed in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. He would play noisily with those for what seemed like hours while William pitted his early affinity for business against his mother over a game of Monopoly, neither boy paying attention to the wooden rocking horse (a present from Nancy Reagan) which stood in the corner alongside a miniature antique piano that had been a christening gift for Harry from Barry Manilow.