by Penny Junor
From Lesotho, they flew to Cape Town for the football, but combined it with a visit to the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital, the only dedicated children’s hospital in sub-Saharan Africa. Some of the children were asked if they would like a visit from one of the Princes. A young boy with muscular dystrophy, who was undergoing treatment for lung problems, said through his breathing mask, “I want the naughty one.” His day was made when Harry sat on his bed for a happy chat, his face just inches from the little boy’s.
England’s 0-0 draw against Algeria was, according to Simon Johnson, Chief Operating Officer of England’s 2018 bid, “One of the worst games of football any of us have ever seen. England played terribly and at the end of it were booed off—and we didn’t know it at the time, but Wayne Rooney, on his way off, spoke into the lens of one of the TV cameras and insulted the people booing.” Simon was sitting with William and Harry throughout the match, after which, William, as President of the FA, wanted to go down to speak to the team. “The drill we’d arranged was I would phone the team’s administrator to check if it was all right for William to come down,” said Simon. “He said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, it’s a very bad dressing room down there.’ So I said to William, ‘Do you want to go?’ ‘Only if it’s okay with Fabio [Capello, England’s coach].’ ‘Well, I think they’re having a bit of an inquest at the moment.’ ‘Well then, no, no, no, I don’t want to go; I don’t want to interfere, they’ve got another game to play.’ I’m not sure Harry was of the same view. He said, ‘Come on, we should go down.’ I thought people were being a little bit protective of the team so I phoned the administrator and said, ‘They’re coming down, you’ve got five seconds to tell me if it’s not okay.’
“William and Harry already had a rapport with David Beckham, and he introduced them to everybody. When they came out after about twenty minutes, I asked William how he thought it had gone and he said, ‘They were fairly upset with how they played, but we tried to raise their spirits… I used some of my analogies from the military: they’ve got more to go, they’re strong players. I did my best to gee them up.’ To which Prince Harry said, ‘Oh, they’ll have really enjoyed that—being told how to play better by a posh soldier!’ ”
A GENUINE PASSION
It is often said that Harry is an Arsenal supporter but football is not really his game. He much prefers rugby and can often be spotted among the crowds at Twickenham, with a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, enjoying an afternoon with his mates. During his gap year, he took official RFU coaching qualifications and helped coach in five different state schools dotted about the country—during which he further injured his already damaged left knee. So when he was approached by the English Rugby Football Union to become vice patron, there was not much to mull over before accepting; his grandmother is patron.
“The great thing about Harry’s involvement with rugby,” says Ian Ritchie, CEO, “is clearly he loves it. When you talk to him about it you know he’s a fan, you know he’s interested and understands it. It’s a genuine passion. When he was out in Afghanistan he was talking about sitting watching the England rugby team play; when you’re in the middle of Camp Bastion I can imagine it is quite an emotional thing, it’s fantastic. The good thing about it is there are all sorts of obvious areas of connection. The services all play a lot of rugby. We had the Army-Navy game playing here last year; 74,000 people came to watch. There are connections into Harry’s charitable activities: like everybody else, we do things for Help for Heroes or the various services organizations as well which, again, is a happy symbiosis and that’s what we’re all looking for.”
Rugby is a team sport just like football, but because it has only been professional since 1995, most of the players earn in a year about as much as the top footballers earn in a week. Bad behavior is not tolerated. “The current England head coach has made it very clear,” says Ian. “When we were going to South Africa in 2012, he was asked, ‘What if any of the players are off-message?’ And he said, ‘They’re off the tour.’ They all know that, you can’t have that sort of thing.” He believes that what distinguishes rugby as a game is a combination of the camaraderie that attaches to it, and the core values it espouses of teamwork, respect, enjoyment, discipline and sportsmanship.
“I went up to Chesterfield to a club when I was just two weeks into the job,” says Ian, “and a man comes up to me and he says, ‘Are you from the RFU?’ and I thought, this is not going to be a happy conversation. ‘Yes.’ ‘What do you do at the RFU?’ ‘I’m the Chief Executive.’ So he says, ‘Come down this corridor with me’ and he points to the ‘Core Values’ on the dressing room wall and he says, ‘See these? That’s why my eight-year-old son is playing rugby,’ and I said, “Wow.’ And I came back and said to everyone here, ‘Those should not just be for playing rugby, these should be the core values that we—as an organization—espouse. That sort of culture—the way in which you deal with people, in which you act with each other, the teamwork, the respect, the enjoyment—apply in a business as well.’
“Harry fits very well into all of those sort of feelings, those core values, all the resonance around rugby; I think he genuinely feels very comfortable within that and therefore comfortable encouraging people to be involved and to play.”
In October 2013, he became patron of the RFU’s All Schools Program, which is trying to introduce rugby into state secondary schools that don’t currently play it, and took part in a coaching session for a group of school children, declaring he was already “past it.” Red-faced, out of breath and dripping with sweat, he was tackled by the former England captain, Jason Robinson, who joked that Harry could make it into the England team for the World Cup in 2015. “We’re looking for a winger or a full-back,” he said.
Headmasters ring up Ian after Prince Harry has done something like this or been to visit a school and they say, “You can’t begin to understand the impact this has had on the children.” “Sometimes we’re all a bit cynical about these things,” he says, “but I think he is an inspirational figure.”
The physical nature of rugby means that there are occasionally casualties, so in 2008 the RFU set up a charity specifically designed to care for those few players, at any level of the game, whose lives have been catastrophically changed—most commonly by a broken neck, paralysis or brain damage. It is called the Injured Players’ Foundation; the Director is Mike England, a former soldier, a rugby player and a physician, and Harry was asked to be patron.
“One of the fortunate things about rugby,” says Mike, “is you can go anywhere round the world, bump into someone who knows something about rugby and you can start a conversation. So he has that natural affinity with our clients and gosh, does that help.”
The charity is small, it gets on average four new clients a year; within hours of someone being injured and hospitalized, the Foundation is on the case, visiting in hospital, supporting the family, paying any costs if needed, and later sorting out mobility, housing and so on. “We try to make things better in what can be a very distressing and challenging situation,” says Mike.
“We had a player two years ago who was in the Army, came back from six months in Afghanistan, first weekend home, went and played at his local club, suffered a spinal injury, ended up in Stoke Mandeville. They did their bit, got him to the stage where he was in a wheelchair and able to transfer to his bed or into a chair. Over a period of six months we put him through some very intensive specialist neuro-rehab and have got him to the stage now where he can walk with a frame, and stand unsupported. He can now stand at the bar again. It’s a small thing, but for a young man that’s a massive step; not physically but in terms of quality of life and his perception of himself, that’s a massive step.”
The Foundation is largely funded by the RFU, which also provides a corporate box at Twickenham that has been specially adapted for wheelchairs. “When the injured players come here they feel that rugby still cares about them, and at the end of the game the England players of
ten come up to visit the box. And if Harry comes and watches a game he usually comes to the box to meet clients. He spends more time with us than I would expect—he was there for just under an hour after the New Zealand game last season, which I wasn’t prepared for.
“There are very few who look genuinely relaxed with people with disabilities, but with him there’s an instant connection. Part of it is that he loves rugby and these are rugby people whose lives have been changed by the game. I love watching him, he’s so relaxed in the same way he is when meeting children. Usually he comes down to their level, which is a good thing to do on the whole; he’ll get down on one knee and he’s quite comfortable making physical contact. If you touch someone’s hand and the hand doesn’t move it can be quite disconcerting. He doesn’t flinch and he’ll just leave his hand there sometimes, which is fascinating to watch.
“People know Harry loves rugby. When he comes to the box, he will go out on to the balcony so people can see, and all the crowd turn round and start clapping. That’s a very powerful thing for any charity to have. He’s had functions he’s invited some of our clients to, and he makes time to go and talk to the families and that engagement is very personal. We talk about the number of grants we give out, but that’s the sort of thing money can’t buy. That genuine personal engagement from someone in that position to a family which has gone through a whole change in life is priceless.”
GAINING A SISTER
Asked who is the more robust of the brothers, one of their team who knows them both well finds it impossible to say. “It’s very difficult to compare William and Harry because they are so different—emotionally and in their approach to life,” he says. “That’s why they’re such a great team, but the one remarkable thing about them is how they completely complement one another. William’s a steady bloke, unemotional and unflappable. His way of approaching life is considered. Harry’s an adventurer. You just have to look at the helicopters they chose to fly; they sum them up. William was flying a huge mountain of a helicopter that would go through storms and get battered left and right and just keep going; and it was all about working out fuel loads to take him into the Atlantic and how much time they had over the target and every option taken into account, which is exactly how he deals with me and the work we do. Every avenue is considered and, interestingly, he comes in with stuff I haven’t even thought of. Whereas Harry was: turn off the computer, fly the thing at 150 knots over the treetops. It’s an Apache, that’s what it’s all about, it’s completely instinctive. His brain engages in an instinctive way. He will go, ‘Yep, yep, yep, what are you doing here? Ah, okay, yep, yep, yep, done,’ and you can get on and talk about other things. It doesn’t mean he hasn’t thought about it, but he’s got very good instinctive judgment and he’s right 99 percent of the time. And actually, thank God that it’s that way round with the brothers, and we haven’t got to invade France or anything, otherwise it would be quite handy to have Prince Harry in the saddle.”
The brother’s relationship with women could be similarly defined. Harry has been an adventurer. A friend says, “There’s definitely been a period when he’s lived what you can politely call a rock-star lifestyle; and what’s so extraordinary is none of them sold their stories. My impression is, in the years when he was single, he wasn’t spending his time at home twiddling his thumbs. Images that slightly spilled into the public in Las Vegas were not that unusual—only unusual in that they were in that format. Harry is a guy who likes a good time, but you never get women talking about it and I think that’s because he’s very nice; they like him. He’s charming and, even if it was short-lived, they don’t want to dob him in; he’s got something about him that makes people want to do the right thing by him.”
His relationship with Chelsy Davy was different. It was not a short-lived fling and she was not a minor celebrity or a girl on the make. It was his first serious love affair, with someone who had no interest in his royal status and who loved him despite—rather than because of—it.
And Harry was clearly confident enough of what they had together to talk about her briefly in his twenty-first birthday interview, albeit in the context of the media.
“There is truth and there is lies,” he said, “and unfortunately I cannot get the truth across because I don’t have a newspaper column—although I’m thinking of getting one…
“It does irritate me because obviously I get to see how upset she gets and I know the real her but that’s something we deal with on our own time and unfortunately it’s not something I can turn round to people, to the press, and say, ‘She’s not like that, she’s like this.’ That is my private life. I would love to tell everyone how amazing she is, but once I start talking about that, I have left myself open.”
By 2004, Chelsy was in her first year at Cape Town University, studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and living with her younger brother, Shaun. For the next couple of years, while she studied and Harry was at Sandhurst, they conducted a long-range relationship, both flying to see the other as and when possible. But it can’t have been easy to keep things on an even keel, particularly with the tabloids in the mix. “The press has got it so wrong so many times,” says Damian West. “If Harry had been linked to every girl they say, he’d have done nothing else.”
Meanwhile, in Cape Town, Chelsy’s life became intolerable. “It was still, anything goes, pre-the hacking inquiry,” says a friend of Harry’s. “Photographers were putting tracking devices on her car and following her everywhere she went. There was serious intrusion into her life. The escape and evasion that was required when they got together was substantial and she hated all of that. Why wouldn’t you?”
Their relationship lasted on and off for about six years—for three of them she was doing a second degree at Leeds University, in Law—and while it’s obviously impossible to speculate whether it could have lasted longer, there is no doubt that Chelsy hated everything that came with the HRH aspect of Harry. And that would inescapably have been part of any future they might have contemplated together.
Paddy Harverson says, “Some of the stuff poor old Chelsy had to put up with were horrendous. Endless harassment and pursuit by paparazzi and reporters who followed her everywhere she went. She was a student in Cape Town on her own; luckily she had her brother Shaun with her, but they were followed and photographed everywhere. She was a young woman, quite vulnerable, as any young girl would be, and she was followed by burly men in cars and on motorbikes. It’s very intimidating and they never, ever let up. Their tactic is to scream obscenities and abuse at people to force a reaction that produces a better picture. It is a sad reality that people in public life have to cope with that. Harry feels it very deeply, particularly for his friends and family, who get sucked into it by virtue of being his friend.”
William’s relationship with Kate (officially known as Catherine) had also been a bit on and off, but by the time he asked her to marry him, they had known one another for eight years. They had met at St. Andrews; because the PCC Code of Conduct was still loosely in place, they were left alone to get to know one another without the need for subterfuge.
Once they left university and came to London, however, it was a different story. Kate was followed and photographed, criticized, baited and bullied. Not long before the engagement, she was walking through an airport on her own when a couple of paparazzi spotted her. “Bitch!” “Whore!” “Slag, look this way!” they shouted, hoping to provoke some kind of violent reaction. “Ideally they’d love her to slap them,” says Paddy. “It would be a gift to them. Of course, the press never reports that side of pap activity, so you never, ever see it, but that’s how they operate at the rough end. They would have called Chelsy a bitch and whore too—just as they did to Kate.”
Kate was from a solidly decent and happy middle-class family who lived in the pretty Berkshire village of Bucklebury. William loved them. He loved the normality, loved the lack of butlers and footmen, loved sitting around a table with the family over Sun
day lunch or walking the dog across the fields for a pint in the village pub. As an old friend of Diana’s says, after the chaos of his childhood: “It’s safe, and that regularity and consistency, which for someone not in his position might find boring or too ordinary, is balm to his soul. You go there and you know what you’re going to expect, you can predict it. Most of his experiences are unpredictable, uncertain and disturbing.” William could relax with the Middletons, be himself, and the feelings were entirely reciprocated. Michael and Carole immediately welcomed him into the family and there is a very genuine friendship between them all. Kate wasn’t flashy; she wasn’t after the high life, or the fame, or the idea of being a princess in a grand palace—she was as fiercely private as he was. She had fallen in love with the man—a man who during those years at St. Andrews had been through some emotionally tough times—and she had been there for him; she was someone he felt safe enough with to confide in. And through all the ups and downs, including a very public split, and all the provocation from the tabloids, which called her “Waity Katie”; through all the harassment and jokes about her middle-class origins, even the offers of money to talk about him, she never rose to any of it. She kept her counsel and spoke to no one but her family, and they too spoke to no one. She and they proved to be 100 percent trustworthy.
They announced their engagement on 16 November and Harry could not have been more delighted for his brother. He said he “was enormously pleased that William finally popped the question. I’ve known Kate for years and it’s great that she is now becoming a part of the family. I always wished for a sister and now I have one.” He was genuine. William’s friends had at first been a little ambivalent—as with any man who shows signs of settling down before the rest of the herd, he had started to be less fun for the remainder. And the herd blamed the woman, as always happens. They felt she was too clingy, too much of a killjoy, even though all that was happening was that William was growing up.
