by Penny Junor
The friend confirms. “They will never get over that anger; I think it burns as strongly in them now as it ever did. They hate the press; they always have and they always will. Everyone who works with them will tell you, ‘Oh no it’s not like that, they’ve come to terms with it, they’re fine with it. Bollocks. In a way they’ve got good reason; somewhere in the last thirty years journalism became very corrupted as a profession and that’s the reality. That Diana period was one of the most exciting in the history of the popular press.
“What an unbelievable period; a story that the public cared passionately about. They come through this toxic, spectacular divorce, the two sides get down and play dirty with the media in their own separate ways; that whole business of the gay rape tape and the recording, George Smith’s testimony in the Priory. If you were writing fiction no one would believe it. The whole business of phone hacking, that was in the foothills; how did those Tampax and Squidgygate tapes get out there? A radio ham by accident. That’s the most ridiculous explanation I’ve heard for anything. At some point in that period, journalism lost its moral compass on a whole bunch of things. So William and Harry grew up in a world where anything they did, anything they said, any friendship they had, any relationship they had was considered fair game by any means possible and they’ve got a lifetime’s disillusionment with journalists and their morals and their motives as a result of it and, fine, that isn’t happening anymore, but they still wake up and read shit.”
THWARTED
“The best thing that ever happened to Prince Harry in a military sense,” says one of his team, “was his commanding officer of the Household Cavalry at Windsor, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Smyth-Osbourne, a Lifeguards officer and former member of the SAS. Ed would kill me because he’s a very self-effacing bloke, but he was brilliant, and he was turning the Household Cavalry into something really quite exciting. He was one of those paragons who got Harry and Harry got him—and William as well—and he really took Harry under his wing. His regiment was one of the few in the Army that was permanently deployed in Afghanistan or Iraq throughout his two-and-a-half-year tour as Harry’s boss; he had two Princes dropped in on him and he didn’t even break step. He dealt with them in a brilliant way and is still a father figure to them; an amazing man.”
The set-up of the regiment is quite unusual, as the team member explains. “The Household Cavalry is a combination of Blues and Royals and Lifeguards, which is based permanently at Windsor, and they have their offshoot which is the Mounted Regiment at Knightsbridge. It sort of falls between infantry soldiering—down and dirty in the hills—and being an armored regiment with tanks and things. They’re a reconnaissance regiment so they do a bit of sneaking around and checking out where the enemy lines are. I was always quite surprised that Harry chose to go into that rather than a down-and-dirty infantry regiment which would have tested his stalker skills, but it was quite a good choice because he got the best of both worlds: he could play his polo, which the Household Cavalry are the best in the Army at, and he could also do the tough bit.”
Shaun Pickford was the Regimental Corporal Major, which is the senior soldier of the other ranks, the conduit between them and the officers. It was his task to keep new young officers in check. “Some come in cocky and some don’t. Harry didn’t. He was a down-to-earth and a soldiers’ officer from day one. He was interested in the guys, in what they’d done, what they wanted to do. He wanted to lead them, that’s what really stood out with him from when he first joined the regiment. From day one Harry wanted to go to the front line.”
Harry was commissioned at the famous Passing Out ceremony, in April 2006, as a Second Lieutenant in the Household Cavalry (Blues and Royals). His grandmother took the Sovereign’s Parade in person for the first time in fifteen years, and whatever she said to him when she inspected the rows of newly commissioned officers made his face light up in a broad grin. His brother—a mere cadet for the time being—his father, stepmother, Tiggy Pettifer and Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton were all there to celebrate his success. Chelsy stayed away from the formal part of the day but joined him for the Sandhurst Ball in the evening, as did William’s girlfriend, Kate Middleton, when at midnight the pips on the shoulders of the newly commissioned officers, signifying their rank, are traditionally uncovered.
After a short break, Harry arrived at the barracks in Windsor in May and almost immediately went off to Bovington Camp in Dorset for five months of specialist training to qualify as an Armoured Reconnaissance Troop Leader. He had joined A Squadron, which was due to deploy to Iraq the following year, so most of the remainder of that year and the first three months of 2007 were spent training for operations with his men, team building and team bonding (evenings in the pub), as well as the more obvious physical fitness training, planning exercises, maintaining the vehicles—four light tanks—and getting them and the whole troop of eleven men, three to a tank, ready for combat. As Shaun Pickford says, “You’re going to serve with these individuals so you need to know them outside of work as well as inside. It’s knowing your blokes on every level.” That Christmas, while his brother and the rest of the Royal Family gathered at Sandringham, Harry was on duty. “He was in the cookhouse at brunch when I walked in and there he was behind the counter cooking his own breakfast. He wasn’t expecting anything any different than the blokes and was just accepting he was on duty and you just got on with it.
“His time at night was his own like anyone in the military. It is an eight-to-five job unless you’re on exercises. He would work hard and also play hard—so there was a good balance of doing what he should and what he shouldn’t. He was a young guy, no different from some of the troops going downtown getting in trouble—but they wouldn’t hit the front pages of the papers whereas he would. What he did was nothing to do with us unless the papers reported they’d seen him.”
If so, there would be a flurry of phone calls—usually on a Sunday morning, to Harry’s PPOs, to establish where he had been the night before and whether there was any truth in any story that had appeared. The punishment would be “extras”—inspecting the guns, being in at six o’clock, staying in camp overnight and being on call as point of command for any security incident or trouble—in a sense, he was grounded.
In April 2007, it looked as though all the training and hard work had paid off. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Clarence House issued a joint statement confirming that Cornet Harry, his regimental title, would be deploying to Iraq in May or June.
General Sir Richard Dannatt, then Chief of General Staff (now Lord Dannatt), had inherited an agreement made by his predecessor, whereby if the Army decided to deploy either of the two Princes, the decision would be entirely his, as Chief of General Staff, in consultation with the Queen and the Prince of Wales. Dannatt had identified a remote desert area in Maysan Province, on the border between Iraq and Iran, a very inhospitable place, which saw a lot of cross-border smuggling and illegal activity. A reconnaissance regiment like Harry’s had been there the year before and Dannatt thought it the perfect place for Harry to be able to command his troop effectively without putting him or his men in excessive danger. The Queen and the Prince of Wales had accepted it was a reasonable risk; it was in Harry’s interests to deploy with his regiment and it was a good thing for the Royal Family.
As soon as his deployment was made public, the media began to speculate, “and their speculation added up, eventually, to being absolutely right,” says Dannatt. “The practice at the time was for the Secretary of State for Defence to announce in Parliament that the next deployment of troops to Iraq would be x brigade made up of these units and deploying in November or March or whenever. So it was a matter of public knowledge that the Household Cavalry regiment would be deploying, and you only had to look up what sort of vehicles they operated in and do your own homework to know that that kind of regiment would be taking over from a similar kind of regiment and that regiment was deployed in Maysan. So it was quite possible to join the dots and they pretty
much worked out what he’d be wearing, what his vehicle would look like, what he’d be doing. At about the same time the security in that part of Iraq deteriorated; so we came to the conclusion we couldn’t send him.”
It was the Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, who pulled the plug—just three days before the regiment was due to deploy—and, according to Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, “Harry went boiling mad.” Having trained and prepared so intensively with his men, after all the exercises and nights spent sleeping in ditches in the rain, he had to stand back and watch them go off to Iraq and the dangers of war without him. “He went wild, let off steam in a major way, and my God, I understood that. Any soldier who’s been on operations would have understood that; your boys are going off and you’re not going with them. One of the really dark times for him.” He even contemplated leaving the Army, as he later confessed. “I did very much feel like, well if I’m going to cause this much chaos to a lot of people then maybe I should just, well, bow out and not just for my own sake, for everyone else’s sake.”
“The man who picked him up out of the gutter,” says Jamie, “was Ed Smyth-Osbourne. He said to Harry, ‘You’re coming to Afghanistan with me’—before he even had the basis for saying it. He would have gone the whole way and probably resigned, he’s that sort of chap. He said, ‘I know you haven’t been able to go to Iraq but I’m going to make damn sure that you get to Afghanistan, so hang in there,’ and he took him under his wing and really looked after him.
Richard Dannatt gave Harry an undertaking that he would try and create another opportunity to get him to the front line, but says that was only half of the problem. The other was coming to some sort of accommodation with the media. After much head-scratching at the MoD, he decided to invite the editors into the building, pose the problem and ask for their suggestions about how Harry might get there without the enemy knowing about it. Thirty or forty media executives duly arrived and the conversation went round in circles for fifteen or twenty minutes until Dannatt had an idea.
“I said, ‘Look, it seems to me that what you want to do is to be able to report about Prince Harry on operations. What I want to do is get him there. The problem is, if you speculate and get it right as you did last time, I can’t get him there, so you don’t get your story. So the trick we’ve got to try and work through is, how we get him there so you can get your story?’ We came up with a suggestion that if we committed to giving them access to him before, during his training, while he was there and afterwards—and that material was made available to the media at large but through a selected team—and none of it was used until he came back, then they would have their stories; but if anyone broke ranks they would get nothing. ‘That won’t work.’ ‘Let’s give it a try.’ A very nice chap who was head of the Society of Editors undertook to draw up an agreement that they all signed up to. He duly deployed.”
Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton reflects on Dannatt’s skills. “Richard Dannatt was brilliant at stamping his foot and making sure at high levels of power that the logic of why Harry going to Afghanistan was different to the last time,” says Jamie. “There was no greater supporter of Harry going operational; he stuck his own neck on the line, he was brave as a lion, completely morally motivated—as you’d expect from him.”
Meanwhile another of Harry’s advocates and close supporters was also making plans: the Commanding Officer of the Household Cavalry Regiment, Major General Edward Smyth-Osbourne. Smyth-Osbourne’s genius was in sending him as close to the front as he could, which meant retraining him and sending him as a Joint Terminal Attack Controller, known as a JTAC.
“A lesser man than Ed would have wrapped him up in cotton wool. As a JTAC you’re really doing the business right at the front where there are no journalists, day in day out in the frontline trench. The moral courage of a commanding officer in whose charge the third in line to the throne has been placed, to do that is extraordinary. He and Dannatt both had a huge part to play, but very different parts, and both of them we owe a huge debt to.”
“I thought the definition of success was getting him to Afghanistan,” says Dannatt. “Complete success was keeping him there for a month so he could get his medal, and anything beyond that was a complete bonus. As we know, he was there for about ten weeks, which was complete bonus category.”
The Queen and the Prince of Wales had been consulted and were both very supportive. Other than that, the MoD was very selective about who they told. “We told the Secretary of State for Defence,” says Dannatt, “we told the Prime Minister; we didn’t tell the Ambassador in Kabul. The Secretary of State, Des Brown, said ‘You’ll never get away with this’; I said, ‘Well let’s give it a try.’ He didn’t think the media agreement would hold. The Queen and Prince Charles thought it was certainly worth giving it a go.
“We always knew the risk with the media was that we had made the agreement with the British media; the foreign media we couldn’t control. And of course, when it came to it, it was an Australian magazine first of all and then a blogger in the U.S. [who blew the whistle]. I was in Pakistan when it broke. I got a call to say it’s breaking on Sky News. I sat up most of the night watching it in my hotel trying to work out whether we could ride the storm, as it were, or whether Harry had to come out. Although technically it was my decision, Jock Stirrup, Chief of Defence Staff was in London and monitoring it as well, and it was quite clear to both of us that he had to come out, so word was passed that he had to be extracted at the first convenient moment. And he came back.”
Had the plan not worked, or had two lesser, more cautious people been involved, Harry might have been a very different Prince today. Jamie has always felt that the most important part of his job was to enable both William and Harry to achieve their personal goals in life—” to get it right in here,” he’s prone to say, passionately thumping his chest—before knuckling down to decades of royal duties. “They both needed to have ‘Known the days,’ as the Irish say, and they have.”
If Harry had been thwarted from serving on the front line, he would have left the Army. “We’d have had a really shattered, disgruntled, sapped—morale-wise—individual on our hands who can kick up and be dangerous if he wants to be. A really, really desperate situation, I think for him psychologically and in actuality—and for the monarchy too. He wouldn’t have been the great asset he has been; he’d have been completely the opposite. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have come out of it because he’s a robust type of character, but I think the last four or five years would have been a disaster. It was a high-octane, high-risk situation, but with people like Richard Dannatt and Ed Smyth-Osbourne there that risk was mitigated because they’ve got courage.”
TEN YEARS ON
As the tenth anniversary of their mother’s death loomed, William and Harry began planning some kind of memorial, which they hoped might be, as well as a spectacular celebration of Diana’s life and achievements, a means too of drawing a line under her death and finally persuading people to move on. They had first implored people to move on after the first anniversary, but there had been little let-up. Scarcely a week went by without some excuse for the media to mention Diana and reproduce her photograph. They had grown used to it but it can’t have been easy.
The year before there had been an official inquiry led by Lord Stevens, former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. After three years, four hundred witnesses and several million pounds, it had concluded, in December 2006, that the Princess had died in “a tragic accident.” She hadn’t been pregnant, she hadn’t been about to marry Dodi Fayed and “there was no conspiracy to murder any of the occupants of that car.”
Clarence House issued a statement saying that both Princes hoped the “conclusive findings” would be the end of the speculation about her death, but their hopes were premature. There was still an inquest led by Lord Justice Scott Baker to come. That opened at the Royal Courts of Justice in October 2007 and gave the media another six months’ worth of stories as the evi
dence was presented. Sir Max Hastings, writing in the Guardian at the time, summed it up to perfection.
“The inquest into the death of Princess Diana is providing a circus for the prurient, a dirty-raincoat show for the world, of a kind that makes many of us reach for a waxed bag.
“Day after day for almost three months, a procession of charlatans, spivs, fantasists, retired policemen, royal hangers-on and servants who make Iago [Shakespeare’s scheming character in Othello] seem a model of loyalty has occupied the witness box at the law courts in the Strand. They have itemized the Princess’s alleged lovers, her supposed opinions of the Royal Family (and vice versa), her contraceptive practices and her menstrual cycle.
“The business of an inquest is to examine the cause of a death. In the case of the Princess, we might assume that this would focus exclusively upon what did, or did not, happen in a Paris tunnel more than a decade ago. It should not have been difficult to conclude such an inquiry in a matter of days. Every police officer, French and British, who has examined the case since 1997 has reported that the Princess’s death was the result of a tragic accident.”
When it finally came to an end in April 2008, the jury returned a majority verdict that Diana and Dodi had been unlawfully killed by the “grossly negligent driving of the following vehicles and of the Mercedes,” adding that additional factors were “the impairment of the judgment of the driver of the Mercedes through alcohol”; and the deaths were caused or contributed to by the fact that the deceased were not wearing seat belts, also “the fact that the Mercedes struck the pillar in the Alma Tunnel, rather than colliding with something else.”
It had not been a comfortable period for William and Harry, but it was something that had to be endured if their mother’s memory was ever to be allowed to rest in peace. When it was over, they released a statement thanking the jurors:
