Prince Harry

by Penny Junor

  It must have been a relief to Tiggy to have someone to share the responsibility with. Tiggy had a nose for trouble. She had already been rapped over the knuckles by the Prince of Wales for a paparazzi shot of her driving her car with a cigarette in her mouth while Harry hung out of the passenger window shooting rabbits; but when the News of the World published a dramatic photo of Harry abseiling down a dam wall in Wales, wearing no safety gear, they were both in hot water. “MADNESS!” screeched the headline. “The boy dangling 100 feet up with no helmet or safety line is PRINCE HARRY.” As Sandy says, “Tiggy and Mark got the bollocking of a lifetime and were told this must never happen again.”

  Sandy had taken a call from Clive Goodman, the News of the World royal editor, saying he had a set of photos and wanted her to comment on them. They had been taken by a tourist at the Grwyne Fawr dam in Monmouthshire, near Tiggy’s family estate at Crickhowell, where she often took the boys. She insisted he bike them over so she could see them for herself first. “An hour or so later, I see them,” she recalls. “No crash helmet, no safety line and I’m thinking, Oh my God. First of all, get hold of Tiggy. ‘Tiggy.’ ‘Yes, Granny,’ which was their nickname for me, ‘what have I done now?’ ‘I don’t know yet but I want to know the circumstances behind these photos,’ and she said, ‘Mmmmmm, yes we were there.’ So I said, ‘Where was bloody Mark Dyer? He’s supposed to be in there acting like the big brother and sorting all this stuff out,’ and she said, ‘He was asleep on a rock somewhere.’ That’s a fat lot of good.”

  Since November 1997 there had been new rules of engagement for the press. The day Diana’s brother had heard the news of her death he had said, “I always believed the press would kill her in the end but not even I could imagine that they would take such a direct hand in her death as seems to be the case.” At the time it was thought the paparazzi were entirely responsible for the accident and he went on to say that the editors and proprietors of every newspaper that had paid money for intrusive pictures of his sister had “blood on their hands.” The paparazzi were subsequently exonerated but the industry took the message to heart and, after much debate, opted for self-regulation rather than a privacy law. The Press Complaints Commission, previously regarded as toothless, drew up a strict Code of Conduct designed to prevent all the excesses of the previous ten years and to guarantee the boys’ privacy during their school years. The abseiling photos were clearly in breach of the privacy rules but they did demonstrate that those responsible for the Princes’ safety were failing to protect them. Sandy’s dilemma was that, if she suppressed them, a more damaging story could have followed.

  It was not always Tiggy and Mark who were in loco parentis. After the breakup of their parents’ marriage, Hugh van Cutsem, an old university friend of the Prince of Wales, and his wife Emilie, had scooped up William and Harry, and they were there for them again now. The Princes slipped seamlessly into their family; the four van Cutsems sons—Edward, Hugh, Nicholas and William—all a little older than William and Harry, were like brothers to them. Hugh was a wealthy banker and businessman, but also a passionate countryman and conservationist, and one of the best shots in the country.

  When the Princes first used to go and stay in the 1990s, the van Cutsems were renting Anmer Hall from the Queen, the ten-bedroom Georgian house on the Sandringham estate that was refurbished for William, Kate and Prince George to live in. They then built a magnificent neo-Palladian house on a big estate about twenty-five miles away, near Swaffham, where there were big shoots that Harry enjoyed. As a passionate conservationist, it was not surprising that, after Diana’s death, Hugh van Cutsem chose to take his family, including its two honorary members, on holiday to a pioneering wildlife conservancy in Kenya. Called Lewa, and owned by the Craig family, it lies on the northern foothills of Mount Kenya.

  Their guide was Geoffrey Kent, a polo-playing friend of the Prince of Wales and founder of the luxury travel company Abercrombie and Kent. He had grown up in Kenya and knew the country and Ian Craig and his family well. It was on this holiday that William first met Jecca Craig, Ian’s daughter, with whose name his was intermittently linked before his marriage to Kate.

  Southern Africa is a very special part of the world, as Harry had already discovered. Now it was William’s turn to fall in love with it. They stayed in a tented camp—canvas tents raised up on stone decks, luxuriously equipped yet just feet from the bush, where some of nature’s most magnificent creatures roamed free. Each morning before dawn they set off in open-topped jeeps, wrapped in blankets against the cold, looking for game before the heat of the sun drove them and the animals they sought in search of shade, and in their case, breakfast and a day in the swimming pool. In the evening, animals and the jeeps set out again.

  One day Charlie Wheeler, one of Ian Craig’s colleagues on Lewa, took them out on foot on a camel safari—the camels carry the lunch. When they stopped at noon in the middle of nowhere, a makeshift camp was fleetingly erected (from the backs of the camels) and lunch was served as it might have been in a five-star hotel, with a troop of servants to prepare and serve it.

  There is no twilight in Kenya—when the sun goes down it is pitch dark and it happens with astonishing speed. On their way back, the sun set and, in the darkness, they walked into a herd of elephants. It’s the sort of experience that either thrills or terrifies. William was exhilarated; Harry, still only thirteen, clung to Charlie’s shirt, wisely sticking close to the expert, not to say the man with the gun. The night was saved when they rendezvoused with some vehicles and were driven safely back to camp, to enjoy supper under the stars round the blazing fire.

  The whole trip was a great adventure. Out there in the bush, no one knew or cared who they were, and the press was nowhere to be seen. It was a revelation and a liberation for the Princes. The anonymity they enjoy there is a significant part of their passion for Africa to this day.

  MRS. PB

  The newspaper-reading public knew about Camilla Parker Bowles—more, probably, than she would have liked—but William and Harry knew surprisingly little. They knew their mother’s view of her, and that inevitably colored their own view, but they had never met her. Charles had deliberately bided his time for the right moment. However, in the summer of 1997, two months before Diana’s death, when the relationship between him and his ex-wife had become more civilized, the Prince of Wales felt the time had come. He sat both boys down and tried to explain a bit about the situation, but they were very quiet, and it was clear to him that William, in particular, didn’t want to know; and so he left it.

  Since the divorce, he had begun the slow process of trying to restore his tattered reputation, and gradually to introduce Camilla, known by most of the Prince’s staff as “Mrs. PB,” to the public. To this end, in July 1996, he had taken on Mark Bolland, to whom he had been introduced by Camilla’s divorce lawyer, Hilary Browne-Wilkinson. Mark was thirty years old and had been head of the Press Complaints Commission for five years. He was very impressive: clever, confident and entertaining—also very single-minded. William and Harry referred to him as “Blackadder” after the scheming character played by Rowan Atkinson in the television series of the same name. For the next six years, Bolland was the Prince’s blue-eyed boy, who could do no wrong. His methods caused havoc but he achieved what he set out to do and, without him, it is unlikely that the Prince of Wales would now be enjoying such widespread popularity and be happily married to the woman who so many people believed had broken up the royal marriage.

  “Mark had incredible contacts,” says Sandy Henney, “and balls to do some of the things he did. Whether or not you agreed with some of his methods, he got results. He was incredible fun to work with. He had an incisive brain, which made him very scary sometimes. My view of him was that he was working primarily for Mrs. Parker Bowles and then the Prince. He wanted to make Mrs. Parker Bowles acceptable; but you can’t treat the institution of monarchy as individuals, you need to treat it as a whole. They weathered the storm and the damage
is behind them now but at the time, the public became almost indifferent to the institution and some of the stuff was very damaging.”

  Colleen Harris, who joined the press office as Sandy’s deputy early in 1998—the first black member of the Household—agrees. “Mark was a spin master, but if you look at what he inherited and where the Prince was, in terms of reputation, image etc., he had to turn it around and he did turn it. It wasn’t easy some of the time and some of our decisions in the press office may have caused some emotional upheaval, but I don’t think the Prince of Wales could have married Camilla without that groundwork. There’s payback each time—and sometimes we got that a bit out of kilter.”

  But, as she says, “Without Mark, the Prince would have been unhappy and the boys would have been unhappy as a consequence, and it would have been damaging to the monarchy as a whole, so he did help.”

  After Diana’s death that process had to be put on hold. Charles had openly held a big, glitzy party at Highgrove for Camilla’s fiftieth birthday in July 1997 (when the boys were with their mother), and there had been plans for them to be seen together for the first time in public in September at a big National Osteoporosis fundraising event, but that had to be scrapped; and while the nation and the family mourned for the Princess, Camilla remained very firmly out of sight. Charles knew that any move to introduce her to William and Harry must now wait until they initiated it. He did, however, invite her children, Tom and Laura, to stay with him and the boys when they were at Birkhall, the Queen Mother’s house, in Scotland during the Easter holidays in 1998; another house guest was Ted Hughes, the Poet Laureate. The young people had got on well together and are very good friends to this day.

  Also early in 1998, William and Harry began plotting a surprise fiftieth birthday party for their father. His birthday is in November, but they decided to hold the party on 31 July in the school holidays before the summer migration to Balmoral. It started out as a party for his godchildren and their parents; they decided that if Camilla was, therefore, going to be a guest because Tom was a godson, they should meet her beforehand. William was the first. They met in his flat at York House one Saturday afternoon, 13 June, when he was home from school. A month later, Sandy had a call from Rebekah Wade (now Brooks), then Deputy Editor of the Sun (and one of the defendants who was acquitted in the 2014 trial for conspiracy to hack phones). She had heard there had been a meeting. “Rebekah, I’m not going to deny it,” said Sandy, “but the shit’s going to hit the proverbial fan when the young man finds out about this because he will think that someone’s been spying on him. And anything we’ve done in terms of trying to persuade him that the media has a place, etc… it ain’t going to work. I’m really pissed off with this.” A couple of hours before the Sun went to press, she had another call from Piers Morgan, editor of the Daily Mirror who, like Wade, was a good friend of Mark Bolland’s.

  When the story appeared, an internal inquiry was launched. Ten days later, Camilla’s PA, Amanda McManus, whose husband was a Times executive (owned, like the Sun, by News International), fell on her sword. Sandy had told William the full story and how they might limit the damage. He wasn’t happy, but she was impressed by how grown-up he was. “He could have gone into a real teenage-boy sulk but no—he said, ‘I understand’ and accepted it.” But she was dismayed that he should have been used so cynically: if William likes Camilla, then the public will like her too.

  Harry was much less tortured about the whole process. He met her a few weeks later over tea at Highgrove with Tom and Laura one Sunday afternoon. It would be wrong to think that after one or two meetings they were all the best of friends, but it was a start. “Harry was just Harry,” says a friend of the meeting. He just got on with life. He had no qualms about meeting Camilla.

  The birthday party wasn’t quite the surprise they had planned. One of the guests inadvertently tipped off the Sunday Mirror, but despite that disappointment, it was a huge success. Guests partied until 4 a.m., and, while Tiggy and the Prince’s former valet, Michael Fawcett, helped bring it all together, the evening was entirely driven by William and Harry. The highlight of the evening was a review—their own take on Blackadder—in which both brothers appeared, alongside actors Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson and Rowan Atkinson, whose help they had enlisted. The stars were all friends of the Prince of Wales through the work they’d done for the Prince’s Trust.

  At the end of the evening, their father, who was moved to tears by the whole event, gave an emotional vote of thanks to them and to everyone involved. What touched him most was their acceptance of Camilla. They had seated her in pride of place. They couldn’t have given him a more precious birthday present.

  Tiggy was only around in an official capacity for another year after the party. In October 1999, she married Charles Pettifer, a former soldier, and now runs a bed and breakfast business in Wales, but she has been there at all the major events in their lives and she and the Princes are still the best of friends. She’s still that big sister, particularly to Harry, who is godfather to her eldest son, Fred.

  THE PLAYING FIELDS OF ETON

  On the first anniversary of Diana’s death, in August 1998, there was to be a service of remembrance for her at Crathie Church, which would be the focus of the day’s media coverage. As well as the Queen and senior members of the Royal Family, Tony Blair and his wife Cherie were to attend. William was adamant that if the press were going to be there, he didn’t want to go. Sandy understood his position, but it was inevitable that the press would be there. “The Prince of Wales asked me whether I would come and talk to them both,” she says. “I said, ‘Okay, but I’m not going to say “You’ve got to go.” I’ll give the pros and cons to them but they make up their own minds.’

  “We went for a walk round Loch Muick and I said, ‘Okay guys, why don’t you want to go?’ ‘Well, you know, the press are going to be there and we don’t want to be gawped at.’ This was a year after their mum died and bloody right boys, but then you say, ‘Well don’t you think it would be a bit funny if everyone else turns up for a remembrance service for your mum and you don’t?’ ‘Well, yes,’ says William, ‘but I still don’t want to go.’ ‘Okay, but this is how it’s going to be played out in the newspapers, but it’s up to you to decide. I’m not telling you either way.’ And it was Harry who said, ‘I think we should go. We need to be there and we need to support Papa and to support everyone else. I think I’m going to go, William,’ and William then said, ‘Yes you’re right.’ I left them and said to the Prince, ‘I’ve talked to them and they may well go but, if so, it’s their choice; no one will ever say they were forced into doing it.’ ”

  They weren’t forced, but William did make one condition. He would go, he said, if Sandy would issue an announcement calling for an end to the mourning. In this both boys were united. They agreed a text with her and she read it out on their behalf during the photo call on the first day of the Michaelmas Half, on 2 September 1998, the day Harry joined his brother as a pupil at Eton College.

  “They have asked me to say that they believe their mother would want people now to move on—because she would have known that constant reminders of her death can create nothing but pain to those she left behind. They therefore hope very much that their mother and her memory will now finally be allowed to rest in peace.”

  Eton was the school that Diana had chosen for her sons. Founded in the fifteenth century, it boasts an impressive list of old boys; Diana’s own father and brother had been there. By now almost fourteen, Harry was more than ready to move on from Ludgrove, but with 1,200 pupils and buildings that were spread across an entire town, it was a big change. And with that change came a new vocabulary that needed to be learned: a “Half” was a term (actually one of three in a year), a “school” was a class but more commonly called a “div,” a teacher was a “beak,” homework was an “EW,” “chambers” were elevenses, and the blazer and trousers he wore when he arrived on his first day, marked with his name and laundry numbe
r, were called “formal change,” although they were actually less formal than the outfit he would wear for lessons. That was called “school dress,” and consisted of a black tailcoat, waistcoat, a stiff white collar with a paper tie and pinstriped trousers, which were adopted to mourn the death of George III in 1820.

  Eton is one of the wealthiest schools in Britain and has educated some of the wealthiest and most privileged boys in its long history. Ironic really, given that the school was founded by King Henry VI in 1440 to provide free education to seventy poor boys, who would then go on to King’s College, Cambridge, which Henry also founded. By the time Harry arrived, there were around 1,300 boys, most of them paying nearly £30,000 a year (before the cost of uniform and extras); although there were still seventy who were King’s Scholars, attending on scholarships. By then, the focus was very much on academic excellence, but there were also great sporting facilities and clubs to cater for every interest and activity known to boy, and it had strong links with the military. The school has produced an astonishing roll call of prime ministers, statesmen, diplomats, actors, artists, directors, writers, soldiers and adventurers—and the City of London is thick with Old Etonians. It has also educated a fair number of princes from around the world.

  Charles and Diana had agreed on the choice of Eton for their sons. The Prince of Wales had been sent to Gordonstoun, in the north of Scotland, his father’s old school, where he had been bitterly unhappy. He was not going to subject his sons to that. But he had liked his English and drama teacher at Gordonstoun, Dr. Eric Anderson, who had gone on to become Head Master at Eton and then Provost of the school, and they had remained in touch. He and Diana both had friends and knew sons of friends who had been to Eton, and Tom Parker Bowles had just left. Before making their final decision they had canvassed opinion from a range of people connected with the school, asking about the teachers (beaks), the boys and, most particularly, the privacy. One of those they asked was Lord Hurd, then Foreign Secretary, who “was struck,” he says, “that they were both, separately singing from the same hymn sheet.”