Harry

by Chris Hutchins

  It was a shopping venture William would never have dared to carry out but it presented no problem for Harry, who has long hankered after a normal life. He told an old friend later that he and the Cambridges had ‘shared a lot of laughs’ as they watched ongoing coverage of the Olympics on television. William reminded Harry of how, straight-faced, he had told TV interviewer Sue Barker at an earlier athletics event how he and Kate would be running in the London marathon. When Barker – seemingly believing she had just got herself an amazing exclusive – asked if that was really going to happen, Harry burst her bubble when he responded, ‘Well, they’ll have to now, won’t they?’

  Harry is not the only one of Charles’s sons with a sense of humour, though William’s is usually expressed in private since he is well aware that anything said in fun by a future king is more likely to be taken the wrong way. He did nothing to detract from those who question Harry’s paternity however, when during a visit to Bacon’s College in east London the next day, he and Harry were asked, ‘Are you two brothers?’ William jokingly replied, ‘We’re not sure.’

  Although he applauded all the athletes, it was Harry himself who proved to be the star of the show when he took centre stage on the closing night of the Olympic Games. Appointed by the Queen to be the royal figurehead for the spectacular farewell to the Games, it was his most important royal engagement to date. William had returned to north Wales to continue his day job as an RAF search-and-rescue pilot and the Queen and her husband had left for their summer sojourn at Balmoral, having agreed to step back and allow Harry to give the occasion the modern majesty it deserved. As the national anthem was played when he stepped on to the stage, 80,000 people rose to their feet. He did not disappoint them. Looking every inch king material, he made a stirring speech congratulating all the competitors and referring to the spirit of the Olympics as ‘a magnificent force for positive change’. Once again his father, watching the ceremony on television at Birkhall, his own Scottish summer holiday retreat, had reason to be proud: here was a son who could shoulder a hefty chunk of the royal burden he himself had never been comfortable with.

  So it was with Charles’s approval that within hours of his final royal duty of the summer, Harry went off on holiday. With Cressida and a bunch of pals in tow including Inskip and Arthur Landon, who inherited more than £200 million from his father, a brigadier who was advisor to the Sultan of Oman, he set off for Necker, Sir Richard Branson’s Caribbean island on which he had spent memorable holidays with his mother and brother. Enjoying absolute privacy, he was able to let his hair down as they celebrated the twenty-seventh birthday of Branson’s son Sam. Pictures subsequently posted on Facebook showed members of the group wearing wigs and fancy dress and covered in body paint, lying passed out in the sand after nights of heavy drinking.

  It was his next move that was to cause the problem. From out of the blue Harry received a call: how would he like to extend his break with a few days in Las Vegas? Harry and Inskip were up for it but others – including Ms Bonas – had commitments in the UK to return to. Having hurriedly packed the small amount of clothing he would require, Harry set off for the Nevada gambling city and duly arrived on the afternoon of Friday 24 August – just twelve days after he had brought that massive crowd to their feet with his stirring speech at the end of the Olympics.

  A Rolls-Royce had been sent to McCarran airport to collect and whisk him to the Wynn resort hotel, where he was taken up to a two-floor apartment in the Encore Tower normally priced at $5,000 a night but provided without cost for ‘the British Prince’ as the owner Steve Wynn referred to him. The 6,000-square-foot apartment consisted of eight rooms including three bedrooms, a billiard room and a bar which could accommodate up to seventy guests as former occupants the singer Beyoncé and her rapper husband Jay-Z could testify. While other hotels offer little more than a box of tissues on the dressing table, Harry discovered that the Wynn had provided him with a complimentary ‘intimacy kit’, a packet of condoms labelled with the message ‘Have fun, play safe’.

  That night Harry went out on the town. He and his now small group were followed from the XS club to a Frank Sinatra-themed restaurant by a group of single – and available – young women, each resembling beauty queens. When they got back to the hotel one of them asked where he was going next; the third in line to the throne replied: ‘Up to the suite. Why, do you want to come?’

  Of course she did and so did her friends. Once there, a session of heavy drinking ensued until one of them – and a Vegas investigator who inquired into the incident ‘on behalf of certain parties in London’ was unable to determine whether it was one of the girls or a member of Harry’s group – suggested they spice up the proceedings with a game of strip pool, to which Harry said, ‘Let’s fucking do it!’ The rules were simple: if you missed a shot you had to take off an item of clothing. By this time Harry was wearing only his shorts and a necklace which had been given to him by a Botswana shaman to protect him from evil spirits; it came as no surprise when he missed his first shot.

  He either didn’t notice or, more likely, didn’t care when the camera phones came out and his nakedness was recorded for posterity. In the event several girls – including at least one who wasn’t even there – offered to sell their stories … and their pictures.

  The following morning the party continued for Harry. He was rejoined by Arthur Landon, who had flown from Los Angeles where he was working on a film. In a scene reminiscent of The Hangover, Harry, still drinking heavily, went to the Wet Republic pool party at the MGM Grand Hotel and the following night to the XS club where he encountered a group of Essex boys, one of whom tweeted, ‘He kissed me on the lips. Haha! I can’t describe how that night was with Harry!!’ Having failed to locate one of his favourite singers, Jennifer Lopez, at a pool party the following day, the Prince, much the worse for wear, sought out the Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte whom he challenged to a race in the pool, before diving in still wearing his jeans.

  Clearly he is attractive to the opposite sex and never more so than when he is partying. ‘I was in Vegas at the Encore before the pool incident and it was amazing to see the number of beauties who followed him around,’ says American music executive Herb Goldfarb. ‘If he didn’t have another job this young man could have made it big in Hollywood. Take it from me; Prince Harry is Britain’s answer to Brad Pitt. And he has an advantage – he’s available!’

  Alas, the Prince had no idea of the storm that was to break and, according to an aide, was ‘deeply shocked’ when told that not only had he been photographed in the nude with at least one disrobed woman but the grainy pictures were being posted on TMZ, one of America’s most popular entertainment news sites which had paid $200,000 for just two of them.

  Harry’s unusual, to say the least, party was the kind of thing that goes on every night in Las Vegas, but was the Prince set up? His pal Arthur Landon denied that it was a friend who took the pictures and said that whoever had taken and sold them was abusing Harry’s hospitality and that the mischievous act had ‘put a real dampener on their trip’. But was he missing the point?

  Although Harry has never revealed just who it was who invited him to a weekend at Sin City’s Wynn resort in the first place, he blames no one but himself for what occurred there. He delivered the well-tuned line (‘and he came up with it himself too’, says the friendly Palace aide): ‘It was a classic example of me probably being too much army and not enough Prince.’ He added:

  My father’s always trying to remind me about who I am and stuff like that. But it’s very easy to forget about who I am when I am in the army. Everyone’s wearing the same uniform and doing the same kind of thing. I get on well with the lads and I enjoy my job. It’s as simple as that.

  However, there is good reason to believe that there is an anti-British-monarchy group constantly at work and always on the lookout for opportunities to besmirch the royals’ reputations. There was the deliberate leak about the Duchess of York’s extramarital affair wit
h the Texan oil billionaire’s son Steve Wyatt, and did the broadcast of Charles and Camilla’s intimate conversation – Camillagate – really just happen to be heard by someone in Liverpool who was testing an electronic-honing device? And how about that revealing ‘Squidgy’ chat between Diana and James Gilbey? Was the acquisition of that and its subsequent broadcast merely a quirk of fate? Diana thought not and told Harry so when he asked on one occasion why the carpets in their Kensington Palace apartment had been taken up. She told him that anti-bugging experts were searching beneath the floors for the listening devices she was convinced had been planted.

  Harry was never going to subscribe to the conspiracy theory. He was – and remains – a normal human being who does what many other men do, especially in the wild atmosphere that prevails in Las Vegas. Not for nothing is the town known to many as Lost Wages. Nevertheless he was crestfallen when he returned to the UK after performing so well on the Caribbean tour and at the Olympics, to receive a stern lecture from his father at Balmoral before setting off for the seclusion the grand Alnwick estate in Northumberland had to offer.

  Harry Wales is a brave soldier as well as a deeply compassionate man and his fun-loving excesses should not detract from his enormous qualities. He loves children and works hard to support a number of charities that help the disadvantaged ones.

  Not for nothing does he have the respect of fellow servicemen and women – 12,000 of them around the world posed naked for the cameras after the Vegas incident to demonstrate that they supported him, rather than condemning him for his uninhibited behaviour. His postbag at St James’s Palace bulged with mail – more than 90 per cent of it positive.

  In certain quarters he was criticised for choosing ‘the wrong friends’ – people who had become a bad influence on him. But Harry knows he is free to befriend whomever he wishes and he is too strong a character to be told what to do – or, indeed, what not to do – by any of them. In a discussion on the subject with his grandfather following his return from America he was told by Prince Philip ‘familiarity breeds contempt’. He listened and nodded affirmatively, but paid little heed to the message.

  Harry has done everything he can to be ordinary, to have a normal life. He shops at Marks & Spencer in Kensington High Street when he fancies a sandwich and in Ipswich he is a regular at the Tesco store close to his airbase. No other royal does that, with the exception of the Duchess of York, who has on occasions been spotted picking out special offers in her local Asda.

  When he invited a pal to join him for lunch at the Waterman’s Arms in Pembroke, west Wales, Harry took advantage of the pub’s midweek ‘buy two meals for a tenner’ promotion. And during his US sojourn he loaded a trolley with frozen pizzas, beer and bananas at a Walmart supermarket. Inevitably, in the background, there is always the shadowy figure of a royal protection officer and, despite the ubiquitous baseball hat pulled down to hide his face, he is frequently recognised, stared at and followed by other shoppers surprised by seeing a royal in their midst. Being ‘ordinary’, when his life is shaped by what he refers to as ‘an accident of birth’, is no easy feat. However, Harry does not allow his position to get in the way of his desire to lead a near-normal life.

  Harry returned to Afghanistan in the autumn of 2012 to serve with 622 Squadron, 3 Regiment Army Air Corps in Camp Bastion. A far bigger base than FOB Delhi where he spent much of his first tour of duty, Bastion is home to 4,000 British troops (a number which will have halved before 2013 ends), 4,350 contractors and 2,000 civilians, and has spread to a town roughly the size of Reading. The Prince’s new home was a shared room in an accommodation block made of modified shipping containers.

  Harry’s second tour of duty was always going to be quite different from his first: there was no secrecy this time around, no ban on media coverage and he posed – perhaps reluctantly – for photographers as he made coffee and stood in line to collect his meal. Unlike his previous tour when he shared a curried goat for his Christmas lunch with Lt Colonel Bill Connor, this time he had a proper seasonal meal and an accompanying cameraman was allowed to photograph him wearing a Santa hat complete with blonde plaits. He talked freely about the adrenalin rush he got each time he ran to his helicopter, adding: ‘Once you’re in the aircraft you’ve got to try and slow yourself down because otherwise you’re going to miss something.’

  Sometime after his return he was reported – many would say irresponsibly – by The Sun to have achieved the kind of ‘success’ his father had dreaded by wiping out a Taliban commander. Ignoring General Dannatt’s earlier call for a blackout of Harry’s activities in war zones and despite criticisms of press behaviour in the recent past, the Murdoch paper carried a story headlined HARRY KILLS TALIBAN CHIEF. According to the report, British troops had been tracking a vehicle in which they knew the enemy leader was travelling and they called for a helicopter.

  We were on patrol and the Apache helicopters were called in. We heard this posh voice come over the radio and knew it was Big H. They were tracking a Taliban leader – he was commander level. The Apache then let off some Hellfire missiles and it’s 30mm cannon and ‘boom’. It was Big H all the way.

  Needless to say, the MoD declined to discuss the matter.

  Whether true or false, few reports could have more incensed the enemy to avenge the death of one of their own heroes by stepping up their efforts to capture or kill the British hero The Sun had deliberately named as being the man responsible. The report put the lives of Harry and his comrades even more at risk when a foreign newspaper followed up the report by apparently claiming that

  When he got back to the base he wasn’t overjoyed but very serious and said something like, ‘That’s one for Liam [Riley]’, his mate who the Taliban had killed nearly three years earlier. Then he collected a mug of coffee for himself and everybody was patting him on the back. We were all reminded that it was not information we should convey home but I believe Big H later called his father with the news. From what we’ve read before I think his dad would have received that particular news with mixed feelings, but, as H has said before, ‘This is war.’

  Harry let himself down somewhat when, in an interview he gave for transmission following his return, he made some ill-advised comments about killing Taliban fighters. He likened pressing the buttons which released his Apache’s Hellfire missiles and 30mm cannon on scores of missions, to computer-game-playing off-duty, saying it was ‘a joy … because I’m one of those people who loves playing PlayStation and Xbox, so with my thumbs I like to think that I’m probably quite useful’. He compounded the offence by referring to destruction of his opponents as a matter of ‘taking them out of the game’.

  No one was shocked by the news that he had killed many of the enemy during his stint – after all, this was war and that is part and parcel of a soldier’s job, especially when handed the controls of such a lethal machine as the Apache. But he seemed to be revelling in it, resulting in headlines such as I’VE KILLED TALIBAN FIGHTERS, SAYS HARRY (Daily Telegraph). His boast – and that’s how it was perceived by many – raised fears for his safety and brought about an upgrade in his security. Among his critics was Dai Davies, a former head of the Metropolitan Police Royal Protection Squad who said:

  Purely from a protection point of view, I think it was highly inadvisable for Prince Harry to draw attention to himself. It may be the reality that he killed insurgents, but saying this publicly just increases the likelihood of some lunatic trying to take revenge on him. It does not seem to have occurred to this young man that he has responsibility not only to himself, but also to those who guard him.

  And another former senior officer, Glen Smyth, added: ‘I think it would have been better for Prince Harry to have simply said he had been deployed in an operational capacity and to have left it at that. What he has said has undoubtedly increased his value as a terrorist target.’

  He further incensed his critics when he complained that life in the army was ‘as normal as it was going to get… For me it’s
not that normal because I go into the cookhouse and everyone has a good old gawp, and that’s one thing I dislike about being here.’ A ‘senior officer’ who refused to give his name told the Sunday Telegraph that Captain Wales had adopted the language of a ‘spoiled, truculent teenager’ and sounded more like ‘a disgruntled soldier than an Army officer’. Harry was learning yet again that you can please some of the people some of the time…

  One of his close circle said the day after his comments about killing Taliban were broadcast:

  Oh dear, there’s Harry going over the top again. It’s a shame because he had done a brilliant job out there. He’s bound to blame the newspapers for making so much of it but he has only himself to blame. I reckon he’s going to be pretty cross, but not as much as his father. Someone should have been there to guide him when he gave that interview. He deserves better advice. It gave a totally wrong impression of the Harry I know.

  A Palace source confirms that Prince Charles simply shook his head and said, ‘This should never have happened. Harry needs some lessons in PR.’ Following his subsequent return to the UK, Harry went to the Fulham home of his stalwart friend Mark Dyer before going to Highgrove for a man-to-man chat with his father.

  However, the impression that he spent all of his precious spare time between his arduous duties engaged in war games on his PlayStation was totally misguided. Something he would have been justified in boasting about was how much of that time he sacrificed to sustain his work for Sentebale in far-away Lesotho. From the battlefield he had also laid careful plans for the charity to expand its work into other countries in need of similar help in his beloved southern Africa. Maintaining regular email contact with Sentebale’s chief executive, Cathy Ferrier, from Camp Bastion, he urged her to help him come up with ways of raising more money since the £2 million a year it was collecting was inadequate to finance his ambitious expansion scheme.