by Penny Junor
On another occasion, she was having supper with them and their father at Birkhall, the Queen Mother’s former home in Scotland, which has eleven grandfather clocks in the dining room—along with tartan walls and carpets. Nothing delights the Princes more than watching the reaction of first time visitors when, on the hour, all eleven clocks start chiming at once. At 10 o’clock sharp, Sandy duly jumped out of her skin, while they roared with laughter. William and Harry had invented a card game and after supper they asked her to stay and play. “The idea was you were kneeling on the floor and had to get these cards down as quickly as you could and of course they thought it was just hysterical and William was pushing me out of the way and I went flying at one stage—everyone roaring with laughter at me trying to get back into the game to put my cards down. Are they competitive? Not half; they were really going for it—and mischievous too.”
In the summer of 2000, when Harry was fifteen, Sandy was gone. She had devised a clever way of getting round William’s aversion to the press. Rather than asking him to perform in front of dozens of cameras for his eighteenth birthday, she had hand-picked one photographer and one television cameraman who were both young, sympathetic and good ambassadors for their profession. They got on well with William, worked successfully with him over a period of five months at Eton and produced some intimate and insightful shots that they were to pool with the other print and film media.
Unhappily, the deal with the photographer, Ian Jones, fell apart at the eleventh hour. It was no fault of Sandy’s or Ian’s. His editor, Charles Moore at the Daily Telegraph, had so liked the images that he wanted to break the embargo. Piers Morgan, editor of the Daily Mirror, with scores to settle, wound up the rest of Fleet Street to object, and made life extremely difficult. Sandy had relied on a gentleman’s agreement, only to discover she had not been dealing with gentlemen. And although she had consulted and informed Stephen Lamport, the Prince’s Private Secretary, and Mark Bolland, his Deputy Private Secretary, at every turn, when she offered her resignation, it was accepted. By three o’clock that afternoon, on 9 June 2000, she was gone. The Prince of Wales, for whom she had worked long and unreasonable hours, and been devoted to, didn’t even say goodbye, but Prince William—in the middle of his A-level exams—telephoned right away.
She was too upset to take the call immediately but he rang back three times before she finally picked up. “There was no ‘Poor me, all this horrible publicity and it’s ruined my exams,’ ” she says. “It was, ‘How are you? I am so sorry.’ Total loyalty. I didn’t hear a word from the Prince of Wales—and there’s William, not quite eighteen and in the middle of his A levels, the total opposite.
“I didn’t tell him what happened, it was a convoluted story and anyway it didn’t matter. I was going and that was it—out, gone, clear your desk, away, there’s no looking back—someone else was going to look after him now. The saddest thing was the boys, knowing I would never see them again. I know they’re Princes but they were a huge part of my life; I loved them to bits.”
Colleen was the one left to look after them, but she too was soon gone, in the autumn of 2003, though of her own volition, exhausted by the demands of the job and needing to look after her own teenaged sons. In the meantime, the Prince of Wales had lost Stephen Lamport, who left in the summer of 2002, after nine years, to join the Royal Bank of Scotland, and Mark Bolland, the master of spin, who left the same year to set up his own public relations consultancy—and write a gossipy column in the News of the World under the pseudonym Blackadder. He had done his job; the way was paved for the Prince of Wales to marry Camilla Parker Bowles without there being riots on the streets. Working for the Prince of Wales was never easy, as every past employee will testify. It was not easy being his sons either.
GAP YEAR
Sir Michael Peat, a former partner of KPMG, was appointed the Prince of Wales’s new Private Secretary in summer 2002. He came from Buckingham Palace where, as Keeper of the Privy Purse, he had been the architect of a major modernization program there, and his appointment was seen as a way of repairing the relationship between the two Palaces, a relationship that, to quote one member of the Household, “had been comprehensively bulldozed.”
The man brought in to mastermind the relationship with the press was Paddy Harverson. A former Financial Times sports journalist, he had been at Manchester United since 2000, handling the royalty of the football world—people like David Beckham and Rio Ferdinand—and perpetually managing the tabloids and scandal. He arrived in February 2004 with a brand-new broom and no sense of awe about his employer and his family. Michael Peat’s remit was to get the Prince of Wales’s private life out of the newspapers and his good works into them, and Paddy’s was to rebuild trust and internal bridges. He gives Mark Bolland credit for doing a lot of clever things and achieving what was asked of him, but it did cause damage behind the scenes, and left a sense of mistrust even within William and Harry’s own small team. As a former member says of Mark Bolland, “I went to have lunch with him one day and it was in Richard Kay’s column in the Daily Mail the next day. I can only assume Mark was addicted to the game and it was the only game he knew. He felt that the way to win over the people at the Daily Mail was to keep feeding them stuff so that when the big story came around they’d be on his side.”
Paddy Harverson made it clear from the beginning that he worked differently: there would be no horse-trading, no favors and that the Palace was no longer going to lie down and take whatever the tabloids threw at it. Scarcely were his feet under the desk than he was busy defending William, accused by the Mail on Sunday of spearing and killing a dwarf antelope, known as a dik-dik, during a holiday in Kenya. Clarence House had issued a statement saying the story was untrue but the paper stuck to its guns. So Paddy went on to Radio 4’s Today program to say, “Now, hopefully, they will understand that we do take things seriously and will hold them to account where we feel that they are wrong and have evidence to prove that they are wrong.” He says: “No one had ever stood up for them before.”
When Paddy arrived, Harry was already halfway through his gap year. It had got off to a disastrous start in Australia in September 2003, where republicans had recently lost a referendum on replacing the Queen as Head of State. It began with the obligatory photo call, at Sydney Zoo, where he pulled suitably funny faces for the cameras whilst cuddling up to koala bears and other native species. That all went well enough—and the female teenage population of Australia seemed pleased to see him—but there was controversy from the start about Australia having to foot some of the £600,000 bill for Harry’s security during his stay; particularly since his only official duty was the photo call. Australia was hosting the Rugby World Cup, so the plan was to watch a lot of rugby, and cheer on the England team—which beat Australia in the final. He also played some polo: captaining the Young England team versus the Young Australians in the Ambassador’s Cup. The bulk of the time was to be spent working on a cattle station in the outback. But the paparazzi made life so unbearable for him that, before the first month of his three-month stay was out, he was threatening to come home.
He was based at Tooloombilla Station, a 40,000-acre ranch near Roma in central Queensland, owned by a friend of his mother’s who was married to a polo-playing friend of his father’s, but instead of herding cattle and mending fences and doing all the things he had gone to Australia to do, he was sitting indoors watching videos, a prisoner in the house because he couldn’t leave it without being photographed. “I’ve got a young man in there in pieces,” Mark Dyer told the press. “He can’t do his job as a jackaroo, he can’t go out, he can’t even muster cattle in the yards near the road without having his photo taken.”
In one of her last jobs before leaving St. James’s Palace, Colleen Harris came to the rescue and, to appease the media, persuaded Harry to perform for a second time. The once compliant little boy was grown-up, angry, and no longer so eager to please. He had already endured a photo call in Sydney and expected
that to be that. Begrudgingly he agreed to a second, on the understanding that he would be left alone for the rest of his stay. The media were allowed to film and photograph him as he demonstrated his newfound skills on a horse called Guardsman, but he refused to answer questions. He issued a statement saying, “I have had a great time working out here, meeting people and learning a bit about how to be a jackaroo. And of course the rugby was absolutely fantastic. It’s a great country.” The photo call didn’t go particularly well and there was bad feeling all round, although it did do the trick and he stayed his allotted time until Christmas.
Africa much improved his mood. Harry had longed to go back to Africa. When he’d been plotting his year away, he had said he would like to do something there with children. Mark Dyer had helped him plan the year, and he traveled with him, as he had done with William two years before. Damian West—brother of Dominic West, the actor, and close friend of Mark and Tiggy—had also been involved in the plans. He had known William and Harry for years, through Mark and Tiggy; like Mark, he also knows Africa well. He suggested Harry should go and work with children in the small mountain kingdom of Lesotho, in the middle of South Africa. Lesotho’s population of 1.8 million people has been devastated by HIV/AIDS. The infection rate is the third highest in the world and the disease has virtually wiped out a whole generation and left thousands of children orphaned. In 2000, the King, Letsie III, had declared the AIDS pandemic a “national disaster” and the country’s “number one enemy.”
Damian had been good friends with Letsie and his brother, Crown Prince Seeiso, since their schooldays together at Ampleforth College in Yorkshire. Seeiso was his exact contemporary; they’d first met on the school train from London at the beginning of their first term in the prep school aged seven or eight. “He was a long way from home and he must have been desperately homesick,” says Damian. “His grasp of the English language was quite limited and on his first day at boarding school the first class he was asked to attend was French. It must have been terribly difficult for him. He and his brother were great characters; they were very, very popular. When it first snowed in the middle of north Yorkshire, we all said, ‘Look it’s snow, have you ever seen it before?’ We had no idea that it regularly snows in Lesotho.”
He knew that in Lesotho Harry would be able to lead a normal life. The children he worked with would only know him as their friend Harry and, because of the remoteness of the places where Harry would be working, there would be relative freedom from the press. It was also a good opportunity to put Lesotho on the map. He spoke to Seeiso about the idea. “Mark and I flew over to Lesotho to discuss matters with Seeiso. On arrival we had an audience with HM Queen Mamohato, Seeiso’s mother, who I had known since childhood. She was a wonderful, larger-than-life figure who had been a leader and campaigner in the fight against HIV and in supporting vulnerable children. When I told her what we were hoping to do, she was absolutely thrilled. Sadly, she unexpectedly passed away about a week after we left which was a great shame. It created a huge void in Lesotho and I think Harry came and filled that hole—and what we’ve done since has been remarkable. She was on such fantastic form when we went to see her—and her death was a big shock. She was the life and soul—and she is greatly missed.”
Harry didn’t know what to expect from Lesotho, Damian explains. “He hadn’t really heard of the place, so I was doing it on the basis of: one, I knew there was someone there who could look after him—Seeiso, a trusted friend; and two, that he could go somewhere where people didn’t know who he was, and in a small enough area where he would be left alone. He had the freedom to move and operate and actually get a real feel for the place and it worked very well.
“He had been plagued by the press in Australia, but I didn’t really fear the same, for the simple reason there are only certain places where the press could stay and the rugged country doesn’t lend itself, so everything could be kept in check. People absolutely left him alone in Lesotho; and I think that had a huge effect. He could see things unhindered. When you’re someone like him who has this massive affinity to children—it is fantastic how they react to him, he has an absolute draw. Only children will tell you why, but it is amazing; he’s exceptional at it, he’s brilliant with them—you can slot him in anywhere and away he goes.”
There could not have been a more perfect place nor people to tap into these extraordinary gifts of Harry’s. The experience of his eight weeks working with Lesotho’s orphaned children—of which there are more than 220,000, with a further 700,000 children deemed to be vulnerable—was profoundly affecting. He went all over the country, with Seeiso as his guide, meeting children everywhere he went, but he also got stuck into manual labor at the Mants’ase Children’s Home in Mohale’s Hoek, building rooms, putting up fences, and painting walls. Whatever needed to be done, Harry was game to do it, and the rapport he had with the children was astonishing. He played with them, taught them English and fell in love with them. They all adored him but there was one little four-year-old boy in particular who followed him like a shadow, wearing a pair of big blue wellington boots Harry had given him. In another orphanage, a ten-month-old baby girl lay motionless in his arms. She had been raped by her mother’s boyfriend and so badly damaged it was thought she would have to have her womb removed; witch doctors tell men that they will be cleansed if they rape a child, the younger the better. This little girl was so traumatized she couldn’t even cry. The good news was that when Harry went back to Lesotho four months later, he found she had made a remarkable recovery, surgery hadn’t been necessary and, miraculously, she wasn’t even HIV positive. These were the children that ensured his concern for them was not a five-minute, gap-year wonder. They awakened a genuine passion in Harry that has never diminished and will no doubt, in some form or another, be his lasting legacy.
Lesotho is a beautiful country, but it is also one of the poorest and least developed in the world. It is mostly made up of highlands, with very few—and mainly dirt—roads, so most of the villages can only be reached on foot or horseback. Life is necessarily very simple and education is not a priority. In winter most of the country is covered in snow; in summer, families send their young boys—some as young as five—on their own, up into the hills for months at a time to graze the precious livestock. Life expectancy, at forty-one years, is the lowest in sub-Saharan Africa. The decimation of a whole generation has left the grandparents to cope with the orphaned children. “It is a huge crisis,” says Damian. “So many orphans being cared for in this rather ad hoc way.”
Prince Seeiso had been secretly apprehensive about having to look after Harry for two whole months, but he took to his young guest. He says their relationship got off “to a thunderous start—quite literally.” The storms in Lesotho can be fearsome and they met in the midst of an impressive one. They instantly had a good rapport—Seeiso is eighteen years older than Harry, but he is a very likeable and amusing individual with no great sense of self-importance. And there was plenty to bond them—not least the loss of their mothers who had both been active in the fight against HIV/AIDS—and their legendary fondness for a party.
“Before I met him I had total sympathy for him,” says Seeiso, “because I am a second son as well. And being number two has an effect on you and the way people perceive you. I knew how it felt to be judged against someone who is squeaky clean, quiet, reserved and perfect. My brother, like H’s brother William, ticked all the right boxes, and I ticked all the wrong boxes. Fortunately, we do not have an aggressive media in Lesotho, because I am sure if we had there would have been stories about me rather like the ones printed about H.”
“I remember going to Seeiso,” says Damian, “and saying, ‘We need a program for between one and three months and he sent back one for between one and three days. No, no, didn’t you hear me correctly?’ He would always say he didn’t thank me at all for sending over an eighteen-year-old gap-year student. ‘How on earth am I going to fill the time for this young man? It’s an awful
long time for me to have to entertain someone and organize their program,’ but when the two months came to an end, Seeiso would say, ‘It was only then I realized, when I looked at him work, how wrong I was, this is far too short.’ I think they both saw a huge problem that they could both address.”
To stave off any recurrence of the media fiasco in Australia, Paddy Harverson found himself on a plane to Lesotho with Harry to recce a photo call. “It was not something I expected to do in the first few weeks of my job,” he says. Nevertheless, he found him “incredibly down to earth but with great natural charisma and charm. I remember him helping the ladies do the washing up after dinner the first night and just showing the qualities of a decent kind person with a lot of spirit. He was young, a typical eighteen-year-old, nothing like a fully formed adult, but he had a natural quality that shone through and ease with his emotions. He was being introduced by Seeiso and you could see everywhere he went he got on with everyone. They liked him, they were drawn to him, particularly younger people. He was a very cheerful and positive young man.
It is a testament to those figures like Tiggy Legge-Bourke, Mark Dyer and Andrew Gailey at Eton—and possibly the school itself—who were there to support him during his teenage years, that the Harry that Paddy found himself with on that trip should have left such a favorable impression on him. The eighteen-year-old Harry was not the finished product but the hurt and anger that had initially alienated him from many of his contemporaries at school had been suppressed. The qualities that were most evident were his charm, charisma, impeccable manners and a natural ability to communicate, especially with children.
