Harry showed that he was still contemplating leaving the army if it meant sitting on his ‘arse back home’. ‘I feel,’ he said ‘that if I’m going to cause this much chaos to a lot of people, then I should bow out, and not just for my own sake, for everyone’s sake.’ It was at this point that he was privately assured he would see active service but next time there would be no publicity ahead of his deployment. The MoD gathered the media’s most senior executives – owners as well as editors – to get them to agree to a complete news blackout when the time came for Harry to go to war. Although one or two argued that this amounted to press censorship the majority persuaded them to agree to what amounted to a demand rather than a request although it fell short of the kind of D-Notice issued during Prince Andrew’s service in the Falklands War.
Harry, his deployment to Iraq on hold indefinitely, was obliged to join his brother in a holding unit of the Household Cavalry while William was training to fly helicopters. To distract himself from the bitter disappointment, he had to find other things to concentrate his active mind on. There were, for example, royal matters to attend to.
As the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death approached, Harry learned that his press office had been inundated with requests for him to bare all to the media. So in April 2007 he persuaded William that they should accept one of the many invitations Clarence House had received for both princes to be interviewed on television principally about their mother. They chose the American network NBC and the fortunate interviewer was one Matt Lauer who travelled to London to perform his privileged task in the princes’ familiar surroundings, Clarence House. Lauer began by reminding them that since one of Diana’s main concerns was that they be able to live as normal lives as possible, would she be happy with the result ten years later? While William hesitated over his response, Harry dived in: ‘I think she’d be happy in the way that we’re going about it but slightly unhappy about the way other people were going about it.’ And in response to a remark Prince Andrew had once made to them – ‘Look, you’re not normal so stop trying to be normal. You’ve got certain responsibilities.’ Harry looked somewhat bemused as William made his response: ‘Obviously we know we have certain responsibilities. But within our private lives and within certain other parts of our lives we want to be as normal as possible. And yes, it’s hard because to a certain respect we never will be normal.’
Lauer, clearly unaware of how close the two of them are, and always have been, probed Harry about their relationship with each other.
You can’t ask [us] that because I’m his brother so I see a different side of him… He enjoys himself more than people think… But as long as we want to be fools we can… You know he works very hard. He’s definitely the more intelligent one of the two of us.
William smiled and said of his brother, ‘Oh, he’s a wild thing all right.’
Harry was back in serious mood when he said how slowly the ten years had passed for him:
It’s weird because when she passed away there was never that time, there was never that sort of lull. There was never that sort of peace and quiet for any of us due to the fact that her face was always spattered over the papers the whole time. Over the past ten years I personally feel she has been … she’s always there. She’s always been a constant reminder to both of us and everybody else. And therefore I think when you’re being reminded about it, it does take a lot longer and it’s a bit slower… You know when people think about [her], they think about her death. They think, you know, how wrong it was. They think whatever happened. I don’t know, for me personally, what happened, you know, that night. Whatever happened in that tunnel, no one will ever know. I’m sure people will always think about it the whole time. I’ve never stopped wondering… There’s a lot of people wondering, I’ll never stop … I can’t ever stop [the public fascination] ever ending. I think there may be certain sort of times when there’s nothing to write about or when they’re working towards something new. But I think people will always have a fascination about her… You know, it still upsets me now, the fact that we didn’t have as much of a chance as other children to spend time with her.
Among the many nicknames Diana gave them was Wombat for William and Ginger for Harry, which the Queen regarded as a little unfair. As he grew older Harry’s hair turned to the sandy colour it is now, and no one could call him ginger these days. Harry makes the point that his mother
wasn’t always herself in front of the cameras. She was more natural behind the scenes when there was no one else there and she could be herself. I don’t know whether it’s the right thing to say, but she was quite good at acting. She wasn’t acting as though she was trying to be someone different. But very much trying to appear as normal as she could in front of the cameras which she hated so much.
They said they knew when she had been placed under pressure or chased down the street by the mood she was in when she came home to them. How upset she was when she was criticised about her body – especially when it was insinuated that she had cellulite: ‘For any woman it’s outrageous that these people sit behind their desks and make such comments … there were many times when we had to cheer her up and tell her that she was the best thing ever.’
‘After our mother’s death,’ said Harry,
there was so much of us being in the public eye and then seeing stuff on TV and in the papers saying ‘Oh, they show no emotion’, that sort of stuff. But that’s our public side. If we don’t feel comfortable crying our eyes out in front of thousands of people, then that’s our problem. You know, we’ve got each other to talk to… We are both very grateful that each of us has the other’s shoulder to cry on when required.
Of the negative publicity he had received over incidents like smoking marijuana in his Eton days, drinking and brawling with photographers, Harry said people generally seemed pleasantly surprised when they met him and said, ‘Oh, you’re so not what I thought you were. They believed what they’d read … [what’s written] is just poisonous.’
And when Lauer compared their fame to that of a pop star or a sporting celebrity, Harry delivered a surprising response, pointing out the difference between them and people who strive for fame: ‘If you’re born into it as we were, I think it’s normal to feel as though you don’t really want it [whereas] they choose it or they’re just so naturally talented at a sport and they’ve got to deal with it like David Beckham,’ at which point William – known to be less of a Beckham fan than his brother – interrupted, ‘But he likes selling himself, so he’s fine with it.’
Both princes agreed they were very guarded about people they chose to befriend, that they didn’t want sycophantic people around them. However, Harry was quick to point out: ‘But at the same time you’ve got to understand that it’s just as difficult for our friends as it is for us… There’s a massive element of trust. Our friends have to put up with a lot when it comes to us.’
When it came to his relationship with Chelsy Davy and their recent holiday together in the Caribbean, Harry avoided mentioning her by name in his reply but admitted his unwanted fame made relationships difficult: ‘You always find yourself hiding somewhere and doing something that you don’t really want to be doing. Why? Because you just don’t want to get photographed doing [what you’d like to be doing] because of what will be written about it.’
Perhaps there was a suggestion of his intention of eventually settling down with her when he answered a question from Lauer about what he would do and where he would be if he wasn’t a prince but a plain ordinary citizen. Lauer got the same response as a number of Harry’s friends had given me when I put the same question to them about Harry: ‘I’d probably live in Africa. I’d like to spend all my time out there. As a job I’d probably be a safari guide… If I became normal tomorrow, then I’d help Lesotho more.’ But, he said with what sounded like just a tinge of regret, ‘I feel abnormal.’ (A Palace source attempted to qualify that by saying ‘Yes, he loves Africa and I’m sure that given the chance to liv
e and work there he would have taken it, but he’s very conscious of the fact that he has a royal role which requires him to live in England.’)
In what seemed like a veiled reference to James Hewitt, Paul Burrell and one or two others of their ilk, William declared: ‘Harry and I are both quite upset about it, that our mother’s trust has been betrayed and that even now she’s still being exploited. There’s always people out there who want to make money. And that’s their certain choice and method to do it this way.’
The time was fast approaching for decisions to be made – both by the MoD and by Harry – about where his military options lay. Suggestions by some minions that he be sent to Bosnia or ‘somewhere in Africa’ as part of a United Nations peacekeeping force were dismissed by Harry as cop-outs. He wanted to be on the front line of a war zone or he would find employment elsewhere. ‘He could make a fortune as a mercenary,’ someone declared at a meeting chaired by General Dannatt. Nobody laughed. This was a now-or-never situation. Having reached his agreement with the media bosses that in no way would the enemy be alerted, it was decided that he would serve in a conflict zone – Afghanistan – but in a new capacity: he would be retrained as a battlefield air controller. But no one could know other than the couple of dozen media executives sworn to secrecy in return for a certain amount of access to Harry, though nothing was to be published or televised until he had returned from his tour of duty. ‘You could be risking his life if this got out,’ they were warned. For the first, but not the last time, he was referred to as a ‘bullet magnet’.
However, it seemed pretty obvious that he was bound somewhere for action when he flew to the British Army Training Unit at Suffield in Alberta, Canada, an area used for British armoured vehicles to practise operations with live ammunition just like the equipment his regiment were using in Iraq. The people at Clarence House were happy, Chelsy was happy. What mischief could Harry get up to in the backwaters of Canada? They hadn’t reckoned on the Calgary Cowboys bar where Harry flirted outrageously with a provocatively dressed barmaid/hostess called Cherie Cymbalisty to whom he called himself Gary and in the next breath asked her if she was wearing any underwear. Despite a necking session the 22-year-old declined his offer of a trip to the nearby barracks but – according to her – the next morning she claims he sent the following text message to the mobile phone number she had given him: ‘What happened to you last night babe? U disappeared. We waited for you outside coz apparently u were keen to come back to party?! Loser. Guess you didn’t have the stamina, hey?!!!! We went all night and u were v missed X.’
When it was reported, Chelsy got angry: ‘her’ man was at it again. Once more their relationship was seriously strained.
It had been Harry’s idea to stage a massive concert in memory of his mother’s death some ten years earlier. On 1 July 2007 it would have been Diana’s forty-sixth birthday and the Queen had suggested a private dinner for relatives and a couple of dozen close friends at Buckingham Palace. But Harry had other ideas. He persuaded William – who normally did his best to honour his grandmother’s wishes – that a quiet palace dinner was no way to celebrate such an occasion: Wembley Stadium should be the venue and they could have not dozens but tens of thousands of people there to share the day at a big concert. In the event 63,000 turned up in person and an estimated 500 million watched it in the 140 countries it was transmitted to. The princes delivered a ‘night of energy and fun’ to remember Diana’s joie de vivre. The Queen watched it on TV and later told Harry he had been right to choose the public option; she was beginning to see that his forward thinking was pointing the Royal Family in a new, modern, direction. It was a direction she could never expect Charles to follow.
‘This event is about all what our mother loved in life – her music, her dancing, her charities and her family and friends,’ Harry told the massive audience. ‘She would have been the first up and out of her seat.’ Then he added mischievously: ‘When we first had the idea we forgot we would end up standing here desperately trying to think of something funny to say so we’ll leave that to the funny people … and Ricky Gervais.’
On a more serious note he addressed a special message to his Household Cavalry squadron serving in Iraq, which was listening to a live simulcast: ‘I wish I was there with you. I’m sorry I can’t be. But to all of those on operations at the moment – stay safe.’
An anticipated comeback appearance by his once favourite group, the Spice Girls, failed to happen. Their non-appearance, however, did nothing to dampen the spirits of the massive crowd who had paid £45 each for their tickets (the profits were to be divided between three charities – Sentebale, the Diana Memorial Fund and Centrepoint) for there was a vast array of entertainment to come, provided by Sir Elton John, Duran Duran, Status Quo, Sir Tom Jones, Lily Allen, P. Diddy, the Black Eyed Peas, Fergie, James Morrison, Joss Stone, Natasha Bedingfield, Andrea Bocelli, Sarah Brightman and Donny Osmond. Not forgetting Diana’s love of dancing there were performances by the English National Ballet, of which she was a patron, as well as a medley of musicals created by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Just two months after the fun and games of the massive Wembley concert, Harry found a more sombre occasion to honour his mother’s memory. Needless to say the Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks in Knightsbridge could accommodate only a tiny fraction of the number who attended the Wembley event, but 500 people packed the chapel for a special service to mark the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death. Despite the difference in numbers Harry said he felt ‘a hundred times’ more nervous walking up the aisle to the strains of ‘The Londonderry Air’, than he had facing the 63,000 crowd at Wembley cheering on Status Quo.
Because the organisers feared that ever-sensitive William might break down while addressing a congregation that included his grandmother, grandfather, father (without Camilla, whom Diana had always referred to as ‘his lady’) and the Prime Minister, it fell to Harry to make the toughest speech of his life and he did it with great aplomb. He spoke of Diana’s ‘unrivalled love of life, laughter, fun and folly’ and pointed out that she had been ‘our guardian, friend and protector … never once allowing her unfaltering love for us to go unspoken or undemonstrated’.
The Queen, with William at her side on the front pew, blinked when her grandson said of the woman who had been stripped of her royal title:
She will always be remembered for her amazing public work. But behind the media glare to us, just two loving children, she was quite simply the best mother in the world. We would say that, wouldn’t we? But we miss her. Put simply, she made us and so many other people happy. May this be the way that she is remembered?
It was moving stuff and many gathered outside the chapel wept as Harry delivered with great dignity the most moving tribute to the late Princess anyone could remember – a far cry from the bitter eulogy Charles Spencer had proffered at his sister’s funeral.
It was at the brothers’ request that the Bishop of London made an appeal in his address for the gossips to cease their endless repetition of stories about Diana’s amorous adventures:
It is easy to lose the real person in the image, to insist that all is darkness or all is light. Still, ten years after her tragic death, there are regular reports of ‘fury’ at this or that incident and the Princess’s memory is used for scoring points. Let it end here. Let this service mark the point at which we let her rest in peace and dwell on her memory with thanksgiving and compassion.
Sporting his regimental tie, Harry stood with his head held high as the congregation sang his choice of closing hymn, ‘I Vow to Thee, My Country’ (a favourite of Diana’s), before launching into a specially stalwart rendition of the national anthem.
Those assembled in the chapel – and they included the singing knights Elton John and Cliff Richard – had seen a new Harry emerge that day and, had they not felt it inappropriate, they would surely have given him a standing ovation. As it was he got something even better: in a rare public display of family affection the Que
en, dressed in vivid purple for the occasion, gave him a hug.
It gave him the strength for what lay ahead: the inquests into Diana’s death, an inquiry which delved into the darkest corners of her troubled life. The Bishop of London’s words had fallen on a number of deaf (though in many cases eminent) ears.
Harry made a pledge to himself from the outset that he simply would not read newspaper reports of the hearing into both his mother’s and Dodi’s deaths in the Paris tunnel. Just as well; the ‘evidence’ presented – much of it at the instigation of lawyers acting for Dodi’s father Mohamed Al Fayed – included the most personal details of Diana’s life and health. There was even a shocking allegation that their maternal grandmother, Frances Shand Kydd, had called her a ‘whore’ for her involvement with Muslim men, but then Mrs Shand Kydd was not a well woman at the time and those caring for her were concerned about the level of instability she displayed from time to time.
The two princes survived the inquiries, recriminations and emotional hand-wringing that surrounded the tenth anniversary of their mother’s death. The pair had supported each other throughout and grown extremely close during the ensuing decade. They had also galvanised royal reputation and prestige in the eyes of an intrusive and demanding twenty-first century public, as well as providing a touchstone for what had, at times, been a much-beleaguered monarchy.
The morning after the July 2007 bombings in which fifty-two people lost their lives in central London, an extraordinary scene was witnessed by a man well known in royal circles:
I was walking down Bury Street and about to turn into St James’s Square when I spotted Harry and William walking towards me. They were being quite noisy and making exaggerated gestures with their hands which made it quite obvious that they wanted to be noticed. But what shocked me was that there wasn’t a close protection officer in sight – and this was less than twenty-four hours after the carnage which had taken place nearby; Blair and his Cabinet had got out of London almost immediately and yet these two heirs to the throne were out walking the capital’s streets. I telephoned someone I knew who is close enough to the Royal Family to know what on earth was going on and he said, quite calmly, they were ‘princing’. He explained, ‘It was a deliberate exercise to demonstrate to the people that there was nothing to worry about. It goes back to the kings and princes Shakespeare wrote about who led their armies into battle rather than send other mortals off to do it while they sought refuge in their castles.’
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