by Penny Junor
“HARRY THE NAZI” declared the Sun headline over the offending shot—and, of course, true to form, he was holding a drink and a cigarette. Unhappily, the Holocaust Memorial Day, in which the Royal Family was taking a leading role, was just days away. Clarence House immediately issued a statement. “Prince Harry has apologized for any offence or embarrassment he has caused. He realizes it was a poor choice of costume.” There were calls for him to make an apology in person, and Doug Henderson MP, a former Armed Forces minister, said he was unfit to attend Sandhurst. “If it was anyone else,” he said, “the application wouldn’t be considered. It should be withdrawn immediately.” The outrage was understandable; there’s no denying what Prince Harry did, given who he is, was crass, particularly in the lead-up to the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, but the media onslaught against Harry outweighed the crime.
“Harry was in bits,” says a former member of the Household. “It was a very bad lapse of judgment, which he knew straightaway, and he apologized. Then all hell broke loose with the media because they can’t just move on; they have to have days and days of drama. He had the whole world turned against him. The Italian prime minister; the Japanese prime minister was in London and was asked about it, everyone just took the chance to have a pop. Michael Howard, who was leader of the Tory Party, was demanding things. His father weighs in. I don’t know about this grandmother but his father wants to know and talk about it. Harry said ‘Sorry, I’m a fool.’ That was it. It was a young man’s mistake, thoughtless. He was upset because he realized he’d made a mistake and here was this pack baying for his blood. Rightly so, in a way, but as ever these things are enormous storms and you have to weather them. Young people make mistakes but his mistakes are on the front page. And a great media trick is you have to apologize publicly, prostrate yourself in front of the cameras for it to be meaningful. Why can’t it be meaningful if he just says, ‘I’m sorry, it was a mistake?’
“ ‘Should there have been someone there to advise him?’ they said. But on a Saturday night members of the Household are not going to a party with them. There were protection officers, but their job is to protect them from harm, not to say what the Princes should and shouldn’t do; and the relationship between them becomes impossible if they become their nannies and protectors of their morals. The policemen have to have a clear job to do. William probably reflected on whether he might have said something.”
William was back at St. Andrews when the storm hit, with the first set of his final exams looming, and it is a measure of how affected he was by his brother’s distress and embarrassment that it was interfering with his work. He spoke to John Walden, his geography tutor, and told him he was “having a bit of a crisis” and was worried about his exams. “He was really wound up about the way the press was treating his brother,” says John. “It was obvious that he was very upset.”
A WINDSOR WEDDING
As the media were sating themselves on the story of Harry’s Nazi armband, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton was wondering what he had let himself in for. He had just agreed to take on the job of Private Secretary to both William and Harry, and was horrified by the thought that he might have to deal with this kind of thing every day. His first meeting with Harry had been at the Troubadour, one of the last remaining 1950s coffee houses in London, in the Old Brompton Road. It was owned by Simon Thornhill, a former Scots Guards officer who now sports a pigtail and earrings. He was an old mate and a good friend of Mark Dyer’s, and Harry was DJ-ing in the club in the basement. Mark, who was also a friend of Jamie’s, suggested he come along and have a beer with the Prince. It was very late at night and Harry was busy with his music. Their second meeting over tea at Highgrove was altogether more conventional, and William was there too.
Some things about Harry, he says, have remained exactly the same since that first meeting. “He’s always been incredibly polite and thoughtful about people and their feelings, to the extent that when I arrived he was courteous to a fault. I knew I hadn’t got under the skin of him, because he was so charming and so polite and always telling his brother to say thank you to me when his brother was saying thank you. That hasn’t changed and is a pretty good underlay.” By the time he arrived in May to take up his position, the storm about the armband had blown over, William was in his last term at St. Andrews and Harry was just about to begin Sandhurst.
Mark Dyer had been invaluable; he had done a superb job in supporting and guiding both Princes through their adolescence and showing them something of the world—also introducing them to Africa—and he remains a firm friend and steadying influence. As someone who knows both Mark and Harry well says, “Mark Dyer is incredibly good for him because he’s one of the few people who talks some sense into him at times. One of the most absurdly inaccurate things that’s ever been written is that Mark Dyer is in some way a bad influence on him; that’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard.” But Mark had a business to run and needed to get on with his life. He had been with them on a part-time basis for eight years and, like so many people who work for the Prince of Wales, he had done it for love, not money. Now both boys were about to begin their careers, they needed more than a big brother to advise and guide. Jamie was the man selected for the task of taking them on to the next stage in their lives.
The only other person working exclusively for William and Harry when Jamie arrived was Helen Asprey, a member of the jewelry family, who had previously worked as a PA in the Lord Chamberlain’s office and then for the Duke of Edinburgh. She had been brought in to organize their diaries and their personal lives and to answer their correspondence. She was young, pretty and less intimidating than anyone from their father’s office. She is what a friend describes as “very old school, very formal, very Buckingham Palace,” but also very good fun and utterly devoted to William and Harry, as they are to her. She organized house parties, shooting weekends and birthday parties; she managed big events for them and polo matches; booked flights and holidays; fixed dentists’ and doctors’ appointments; did their shopping, handled personal invitations, liaised with the police about their plans and helped in their relationships with family friends and other foreign royal families. Moreover, when they first started doing official engagements, she went with them. More than ten years later, she still keeps their personal diaries and manages their personal lives—with such discretion that most of time not even their Private Secretaries know what they are doing in their own time.
Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, who is a former SAS man, was in his mid-forties when he arrived at St. James’s Palace, and could not have been better suited to mentor two Princes about to go into the military. He is an Old Etonian, married with three young children (one of whom was a page boy at William’s wedding) and he had been a professional soldier for twenty years. He had served in the first Iraq War and in the Balkans, and had won an MBE in the early 1990s busting drug cartels for the government in Colombia. Those who served alongside him say he was “completely brilliant.” As a bonus, he already knew the Prince of Wales and was familiar with Court life, having been one of the Queen Mother’s favorite Equerries. No doubt his stories about their great-grandmother will have endeared him to William and Harry; also the fact that he was a friend of Mark Dyer’s.
He tells the story of how, as a twenty-three year old, he had been dozing in a frozen trench with a fellow Irish Guardsman somewhere between West and East Germany, when he got a call telling him he had been chosen for the job at Clarence House. Within forty-eight hours he was sitting down to lunch with the Queen Mother, nervously discussing how best to judge distance when flicking peas into a crystal chandelier with a fork. Some time later, after a boisterous stag party, he invited all his friends back to his Equerry’s room (with free bar) at Clarence House. It was the night before the Trooping the Colour ceremony, so the Queen Mother was in residence. “The next morning,” he says, “with the Private Secretary eyeing me darkly, and my room strewn with empty bottles and glasses, I crawled into my u
niform just in time to attend Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother as she mounted the carriage to take her to Horse Guards. ‘Did you have a party here last night, Jamie?’ I stared at my boots and mumbled, ‘Ma’am, I’m terribly sorry. I hope we didn’t disturb you,’ knowing full well we had. ‘I’m so glad to see the place being properly used,’ Her Majesty sparked, hopping into the carriage.”
William and Harry had both been involved in Jamie’s selection, but the first time he had any dealings with Harry on his own was at a meeting the Prince was chairing with the Red Cross at Clarence House. He and Prince Seeiso had talked about starting a charity together, but nothing had yet been finalized. In the meantime, the ITV program on Harry’s trip, The Forgotten Kingdom, had raised a million pounds, which needed to be distributed. The Red Cross came to their aid and set up a Lesotho Fund to administer the money. Jamie had to leave the meeting early, so he excused himself, said goodbye to everyone—”all those very frightening, grand people of the Red Cross”—and set off for what he thought was the door, but which turned out to be a cupboard. “I went as far as almost closing the door behind me and thought, what do I do here? Do I stay in the cupboard and risk someone at the end of lunch following me and finding me standing there in the dark, or do I come out; so I came out of the cupboard and said, ‘It’s a cupboard’ and everyone roared with laughter and Harry, with brilliant timing, said, ‘Don’t worry, he’s new.’ ”
It was the start of an extraordinary working relationship. Jamie has always said that, had he still been running a Special Forces squadron in Hereford, he would have had Harry in it any day. “He’s always been a soldier,” he says. “At the end of the day, whether he’s on a hill in Scotland or out in the middle of nowhere and it’s raining and blustery and cold and miserable and wet, Harry will stay out there because he revels in that sort of environment, physical challenge; he’s a tough chap, a natural soldier.”
Before Sandhurst, Harry had his father’s wedding to attend. More than thirty years after the Prince of Wales had first fallen in love with Camilla Parker Bowles, he finally married her on 9 April 2005 in the Guildhall at Windsor. The Queen had taken a long time to come round to giving her consent. Their relationship had brought the monarchy close to its knees, and while she had no personal animosity towards Camilla, life would have been very much easier for everyone without her. But Charles, normally duty personified, had insisted that Camilla was “non-negotiable.” He loved her and he needed her and, as everyone who has known him any length of time will say, he is a different man now that he is married to her; he’s happy, relaxed, utterly transformed.
But it was never going to be a straightforward affair. As one of his Household says, “Their marriage was a matter of huge constitutional and political importance and you had to court the approval of the Queen, Number Ten, the Archbishop of Canterbury and arguably a few others besides.” Top of the list of the “others besides” were William and Harry, and concern for their feelings was one of the principal reasons why, even after the Queen was on his side, the Prince had taken so long to make Camilla his wife. Mark Bolland had worked so tirelessly (if riskily—sometimes seeming to promote his boss at the expense of other members of the Royal Family) during his six years with the Prince of Wales to make their marriage acceptable to the British public, and had been so successful that large sections of them were baying for him to make an honest woman of Camilla after all these years.
The boys had been unashamedly used as part of the process. William’s first meeting with Camilla on 12 June 1998 was leaked to the press, which caused a surge in her popularity. The meeting was known to have been amicable, and Harry’s meeting with her a few weeks later was also known to have gone well. The next move was for Charles and Camilla to be seen in public together. It happened in January 1999, when Camilla’s sister Annabel Elliot was having a fiftieth birthday party at The Ritz Hotel in London. To their great relief, the majority of the British public scarcely turned a hair.
Their next public get-together included Harry, the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and twenty-five of the younger members of the Royal Family. It was the Party at the Palace, in June 2002, the biggest and most revolutionary of all the Queen’s Golden Jubilee events. For the first time, the gardens at Buckingham Palace were opened up to ordinary members of the public—twelve thousand of whom won tickets in a ballot—for a star-studded evening of rock and pop. A million people watched on giant screens in The Mall and Green Park, and a further 200 million watched it on television worldwide. Brian May of Queen started the proceedings, standing on the roof belting out the National Anthem, and it ended with a spectacular pyrotechnic display and a tribute from Prince Charles to his mother, which to deafening cheers began, “Your Majesty… Mummy…”
The Prince’s popularity rating was riding high. At the time of Diana’s death it had plunged to 20 percent; by 2002 it was up to 75 percent. They could have married. There would always have been some people unable to stomach it, but most of the public would have been supportive, as they were when they finally did marry three years later.
The reticence was over William and Harry, whose allegiance was inevitably torn. They had loved their mother and knew that she had been tormented by the woman she saw as her rival. Equally, they could see that their father was lonely and that this woman lit up his life; that he was good fun to be with when she was around, and sank easily into gloom and despondency when she was not. And both of them were old enough to know that nothing was as black and white as it had seemed when they were children.
Camilla had never pushed things. She is a friendly, warm woman; a great giggler, someone who makes life fun for those around her, and who has a capacity to make Charles laugh—at himself as much as anything—and to relax and lighten up. As a mother herself, she knew only too well what William and Harry’s feelings might be towards her, and had no intention of ever trying to be a mother to them.
As Colleen Harris says, “Part of the thinking was that in order for the public to approve of Camilla, she had to be seen with the boys or it wouldn’t work. I think the relationship between them all is warm now but, if I’m honest, it wasn’t then. I think they found it hard when they were little. I remember Harry being uncomfortable and saying something awkward. It was difficult for them; it was a natural thing. You want your mum, you don’t want her, and she had her own family. To be fair to Camilla, she never tried to be Mummy but she was the ‘other woman,’ and she was there and taking Daddy’s time. It wasn’t all happy families for quite a long time, but William and Harry were happy to see their father happy.
“They have had a tough time. They are royal and it’s all lovely but as two young lads it hasn’t been that great. In the early days Sandy was very good and she played a slightly maternal role for a while. Tiggy was great for adding spark; I don’t think she gave guidance but kept them amused and was there for them. Andrew Gailey played an important part, I think I played my little part, a slightly maternal role on occasion and laying the law down. And they had Mark Dyer, a true friend to them. He’s as nutty as a fruitcake but he’s been a real support and a chum to them. One hare-brained scheme after another; he had this bar, then that bar, he’s a live wire character. He is older and has given them that young man steer. And Edward, the big van Cutsem boy, helped. And the Prince of Wales and the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. But at the end of the day there’s no substitute for Mum, and then to have another woman thrust into it and all in the public eye, it’s been very, very hard. It’s great that they have turned out the way they have, but they’ve had a lot of love around them and a lot of support from the staff as well. And their mum did love them and that has stood them in very good stead.”
By the time it came to the wedding, both boys had long since put their own feelings to one side and were simply delighted for their father. They released a joint statement saying, “We are both very happy for our father and Camilla, and we wish them all the luck in the future.”
After a multitude of obstac
les along the way—including postponement for a day because the original date clashed with the funeral of Pope John Paul II in Rome, and arguments about whether it was right or wrong for the country, good or bad for the boys, what kind of service it should be, whether Camilla should be called HRH The Duchess of Cornwall, or something more low key, and what the Princess of Wales would have thought—the marriage finally happened. And, despite their fear that the public would stay away, the streets of Windsor were packed.
Ian Jones was there. “One of the best, best moments was when they came out of the chapel. Having photographed Charles for quite a few years around the world on tours alone, he always seemed to be lacking someone by his side. He was passionate about what he was doing, but he had no one to share it with, no one to appreciate what he was doing and you could see the loneliness. It was so different when she was there with him and able to support him. When you think of all the grief she went through to get to that stage… It was transparent that William was happy for them—and Harry; but more so William. Harry is ‘Yeah fine, get on with it, let’s have a beer,’ but the caring side of William came out and from that first moment, you could see on that wedding day that what mattered to him was the happiness of his father and how good Camilla was for him. You could see the genuine happiness of them all together. There’s a lovely moment when the newlyweds are leaving by car and William and Harry are there seeing them off. There’s real engagement and real confidence between Camilla and the boys.”
During an interview to mark Harry’s twenty-first birthday a few months later, Harry said of Camilla, “To be honest with you, she’s always been very close to me and William… But no, she’s not the wicked stepmother. I’ll say that right now. Everyone has to understand that it’s very hard for her. Look at the position she’s coming into. Don’t always feel sorry for me and William, feel sorry for her. She’s a wonderful woman and she’s made our father very, very happy, which is the most important thing. William and I love her to bits.”
