Prince Harry

by Penny Junor

  Sir David Manning believes the whole experience has had a huge impact on Harry. “Nobody expected at the beginning of this venture that he would turn out to be one of the few who is asked to do Apache training, so he wasn’t expecting it, and I’m not sure how welcome it was when it came really [within the Household], but he did it and turned out to be very, very good at flying Apaches, and that experience turned him into a very serious professional officer. He took his flying very seriously, had very high standards. I think it changed him a lot. If you suddenly discover you are very good at something it changes the way you feel about yourself and the world, and certainly Harry was very good at something—and this was a surprise, I suspect, to him and to a lot of other people, but it was for real. You cannot get in an Apache helicopter and fly just because you’re wearing the uniform. Either you can do this stuff or you can’t, and since the Army think these things are the Crown Jewels, they’re not going to put them in the hands of someone who’s going to make a mess of it.

  “I think there was a general perception that he was in his brother’s shadow and that his brother was more able, more talented and more academic than he was, and I think the discovery that he’s one of the very best of his generation, at something that is very difficult that he does very well, is a big watershed, and I suspect will condition what he feels about himself and what he can do for the rest of his life. It has also proved to him—this period—that he can give real leadership. One of the other things that’s very clear is that people relate to him very easily and they really like him and this isn’t just because he’s a sex symbol—there are many more layers than that. He finds a way of talking to people and motivating people and he has this great gift; he’s funny, he’s direct, he’s very quick to respond and that leadership skill, that ability to mobilize people to make a difference is something that if it’s deployed intelligently, will make a big difference.”

  SECRET WEAPON

  The year 2012 was a very good one for Harry, and not just wearing his Army hat. He excelled in his royal role too. And after he and Chelsy had broken up for the last time, he found a new girlfriend in Cressida Bonas. He triumphed in the Caribbean representing the Queen in her Diamond Jubilee Year; then at home, along with his brother and sister-in-law, as ambassadors for Team GB at the Olympic Games. It was a good year for his grandmother, too, with huge outpourings of affection and gratitude for her sixty years on the throne; which served as great affirmation for the monarchy. It was a good year for Britain as a whole, despite the continuing economic hardship. The Jubilee celebrations brought hundreds of thousands of well-wishers on to the streets, undeterred by the terrible weather, and once again there were street parties where strangers greeted strangers and communities pulled together, buoyed up by a sense of national pride.

  The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh confined their travels to the British Isles, leaving the younger members of the family to visit the Commonwealth on her behalf. It was the first time Harry had represented his grandmother, and there was necessarily a fair amount of formality in the program, but he managed to blend it with his inimitable sense of fun, and in two weeks he charmed his way round four countries, winning fans everywhere he went. In a Diamond Jubilee street party in Belize, he drank rum and wowed the locals with his snazzy suits and snappy dance moves. In the Bahamas he attended a service of thanksgiving and delighted 11,000 school children at a youth rally, and in Jamaica he “beat” the fastest man in the world, the Olympic sprint champion, Usain Bolt, and was hugged by the republican Prime Minister, Portia Simpson Miller. She “was reduced to a blushing, hugging schoolgirl at her first meet-and-greet with the Ginger one,” reported the Daily Mail, which hailed Harry “the Royal Family’s secret weapon.” And in Brazil, as an ambassador for British trade and the Olympics, he was mobbed.

  As a former diplomat, Sir David Manning was impressed. “He was very conscious he was representing his grandmother and he certainly reminded me that that was what we were doing; I didn’t have to remind him. He took it very seriously, worked extremely hard, absolutely not the playboy, early to bed and he handled people very well. There was a lot of press speculation about how on earth we were going to manage Jamaica. The Prime Minister had said just before we came that: ‘One of these days we’re going to get rid of the Crown.’ He managed her very well, he managed the whole tour very well; and he decided he was going to send personal messages to the people who had looked after him in each country we left—I didn’t suggest that to him—and I think he genuinely made a big impact. [His note to the Governor General of the Bahamas was typical. “What a fantastic couple of days. I am truly sad to leave and can’t thank you enough for such a memorable tour.”]

  Harry had joked in the interview he gave on his twenty-first birthday that he read everything that was written about him and he took down the names of writers and photographers for later reference. One of the journalists covering the tour for the Mail on Sunday discovered that Harry hadn’t been joking. He took George Arbuthnott to task for giving readers the impression he had been knocking back excessive quantities of rum and lethal Caribbean cocktails. Harry collared George and confronted him. George protested that it had been the headline writers back home who had twisted his story, and the two parted friends; but the point was made.

  Another member of Harry’s team, on the tour, says, “With Prince Harry there is a tendency among people, because his persona is so fun-loving and humorous and quite informal, to underestimate him and assume that he’s somehow quite lightweight as an individual. The opposite is true. He’s incredibly professional; he expects very high standards of his staff and those around him. He is very demanding about the quality of briefing that he gets and the kind of advice. In my view so much of that stems back to that first successful tour in Afghanistan. I think it did the world for him and made him the person he is today. He’s very impressive, and he’s got great emotional intelligence. He knows how to read people and judge them and you can see it in the way that he interacts with children and prime ministers.”

  He had been forewarned that the Prime Minister of Jamaica, for all her republicanism, might go for a hug. “Portia Simpson is, actually, quite well known for it; she has hugged the Prince of Wales before and people [the media] have either chosen to ignore it or not known about it. Father had said to son, ‘By the way, when you meet Portia Simpson there’s a chance she may hug you.’ So I think he was prepared for it, but he read the situation incredibly well and knew how to respond there and it won him a lot of plaudits, deservedly so. The same day that he was running on that track with Usain Bolt, and again reading that situation brilliantly well, generating not just a lot of humor but a real warmth and respect for the people he was meeting. He’d said, ‘On your marks,’ I thought what’s he doing? The idea was they would race one another but jumping the gun was completely off-the-cuff. He hadn’t told any of us he was going to do it. He and his brother are never fake; they are very honest themselves and that enthusiasm you see when they meet people is genuine. I don’t think you can fake that.”

  Even the formal moments had a masterful lightness. Speaking at a State banquet on his last night in Jamaica, he wove a line into his speech from the famous Jamaican singer Bob Marley. “I count it a great privilege to be standing here tonight, representing the Queen in Jamaica on her Diamond Jubilee. Her Majesty has asked me to extend her great good wishes to you all, and is sorry that she can’t be here—so you’re stuck with me… but don’t worry, cos every liddle ting gonna be aright!”

  His grandmother’s lifetime of service had been “an inspiration,” he said, adding, “She combines all her virtues as a leader and as a Head of State, with those of being a wonderful, caring grandmother—to whom we, her grandchildren, are utterly devoted.

  “As for me, I haven’t been here for long, but—wow—if I had, I’m not sure my grandmother would get me back.”

  He had spoken at length to his grandmother and other members of the family beforehand about what a succes
sful Jubilee tour should look like. And he was in regular touch with William throughout the two weeks, both by text and phone. “Both brothers always say,” says an aide, “they are never directed by their father or the Queen. People above them always give advice but never directions. They are very keen for them to find their own way in life and make their own mistakes and find the things that they are good at themselves. There is no sense in which this is the only model and the one you have to follow and if you don’t do this, it’s wrong. They give them quite a bit of latitude.” A former aide concurs. “His father loves both his sons to bits, and takes a paternal interest in everything they do, but he lets them lead their lives.”

  From Jamaica Harry flew to Brazil where he waved the flag on behalf of the British government and celebrated the sporting links between London 2012 and Rio 2016. Once again he cleverly combined the fun with the serious. One minute he was suited and booted and launching the government’s £25 million “GREAT” campaign to promote Britain and encourage Brazilians to visit the UK—the first time he had ever been used in this capacity. He opened a major exhibition of British culture and business on the top of Sugar Loaf Mountain, where he was greeted by screaming girls and samba bands. Introduced by David Beckham via video link, he said, “Everything about Rio makes you want to dance. I’m just so thankful that my brother isn’t here because he might actually do it—and that would not be cool.” The next minute he was larking about barefoot on the beach playing touch rugby and volleyball. And the next, he was immersed in the less glamorous side of Rio. An afternoon was set aside to visit a favela in one of the city’s poorest districts, where he was immediately surrounded by children, while he inspected projects and opened a newly renovated community center.

  “Brazil wasn’t one of the realms,” says Sir David, “but he did a big number there, promoting British trade, and got absolutely mobbed. I think he was a bit shocked at the scale of it—quite uncomfortable. Neither of the Princes wants to be celebrities and I think his worry in Rio is there was a risk of too much celebrity in there and not enough seriousness—although what he was doing in the favelas was incredibly serious. And he did it very well. Like Prince William, he’s good on tour; people respond immediately, they like him, he’s interested in what he’s seeing and doing and it shows; it’s not simulated. He’s in there trying to find out what it’s all about and he’s done his mugging up. These are real assets, these two. Send them out into the wider world and it’s good for UK Ltd.”

  The final day in Brazil was polo—the third Sentebale Polo Cup match, sponsored by Royal Salute in the Campinas district of São Paulo. In 2010, he and Prince Seeiso had launched the event in Barbados as a major annual fundraiser, and each year the great and the good get together for a lavish lunch and an afternoon of top-class polo. In São Paolo there were over five hundred VIPs. “The most important thing for me in life is kids,” Harry told them. “I don’t know whether I got that from my mum and my father. I just have this massive kid inside me. I’ve always had that connection with kids and I always will hopefully.”

  Afterwards he summed up how he and his party felt about the tour, saying to journalists: “I tell you what, it’s been an emotional trip. I’m absolutely exhausted but the warmth of the reception that we’ve received from every single country that we’ve been to—including Brazil—has been utterly amazing. I personally had no idea how much influence the Queen has on all these countries. And to me that’s been very humbling, and I was actually quite choked up at times seeing the way that they’ve celebrated her sixty years. She’s thousands of miles away to some of these countries and yet they celebrated her in the way they did, and made me feel as one of them, so I couldn’t thank them more.”

  He’d spoken to the Queen before he left. “We had a great chat. She wished me luck and she said ‘Enjoy it, I hope you do me proud.’ It was a typical grandmother-to-grandson chat. I just hope that my grandmother is proud of what we’ve done.”

  There was little doubt about that. Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media, the Olympics and Sport, who was also in Rio for the GREAT event said, “Prince Harry has the impact of a thousand politicians. Watching him during his tour of the Caribbean and in Rio de Janeiro, he is becoming an extraordinary phenomenon. He has not been on top of our list before as an ambassador, but seeing the electrifying effect he’s had here, his real connection with children and sport, shows just how he has taken to the role.”

  The Diamond Jubilee celebrations kicked off on Saturday 2 June with a forty-one-gun salute fired at the Tower of London, echoed by gun salutes in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast—and on Epsom Downs in Surrey, with the National Anthem sung by mezzo-soprano Katherine Jenkins; and a startling display from the Red Devils Parachute Team who fell from the sky with a giant Union flag. The Epsom Derby is one of the highlights of the Queen’s diary, and was the perfect place for her and the Duke of Edinburgh to begin four days of celebration.

  A very cold Sunday saw the largest river pageant ever staged anywhere in the world (according to the Guinness Book of Records) and the most spectacular that had been seen on the Thames for 350 years. A thousand boats, from tugs, barges, steamers and pleasure cruisers to dragon boats and kayaks, slowly made their way through driving rain from Albert Bridge to Tower Bridge, a distance of seven miles. Among them was a collection of small ships that were used in the evacuation of stranded troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940, and leading the procession was a ninety-four foot royal row barge, the Gloriana, specially commissioned for the Diamond Jubilee, the first to be built in over a century, at the cost of £1 million. It was powered by eighteen oarsmen, including two Olympic gold medalists, Sirs Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent, three ex-servicemen who lost limbs in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the British Paralympic rowing hopeful Pamela Relph.

  In the midst of the flotilla, following on from the rowing boats, was the royal barge, the Spirit of Chartwell, lavishly and regally decorated in red, gold and purple and adorned with ten thousand flowers from the royal estates. Harry, who since his trip to the Caribbean had been busy with pre-deployment training, joined his grandparents, his father and stepmother and William and Kate on the barge, while other members of the Royal Family and VIPs were accommodated in other boats. The only plan that had to be abandoned because of the weather was a “Diamond Nine” fly-past of Royal Navy helicopters lead by a Swordfish biplane built in 1934, which was to have provided a spectacular grand finale to the pageant. The rain was remorseless, but the crowds were undeterred. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the banks of the river, crowded onto the bridges, and crammed onto balconies and rooftops along the way, cheering, singing and waving flags. And no one looking at the Queen and her party, smiling broadly and enjoying the feast of sights and sounds, would have guessed how cold they all were. At one point the Queen, sensing that her grandchildren were frozen, turned and said, “Look warm! Wave and smile!”

  And so they did. They stood out on deck for more than four hours, marveling at everything around them, chatting cheerfully and waving to the crowds. But when the barge pulled up for forty-five minutes to allow the rest of the procession to pass it, everyone dashed below deck to warm up and revive themselves with a stiff drink. Just as they were putting the glasses to their lips, the music from a choir filtered down the stairs, at which the Queen’s face lit up and she said, “We’ve got to hear this,” and raced up on deck again. Reluctantly, the younger members of the family, frozen to the bone, abandoned their glasses and followed their grandparents back into the cold.

  The following evening was party time. The Queen Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace was transformed into a stage and the Mall and the parks to either side of it became a vast open-air concert venue that teemed with humanity. Waving Union flags, people laughed, danced and sang along to the greatest collection of superstars spanning sixty years of popular music and entertainment that had ever gathered under one sky—all brought together by Gary Barlow, the singer song
writer from Take That, who—with Andrew Lloyd Webber—wrote the highlight of the evening, the Jubilee song, “Sing,” that was performed by the Military Wives Choir and musicians from Kenya and other Commonwealth countries. It included a fourteen-year-old soloist called Lydia, whose voice sent shivers up the spine. Other artists included Robbie Williams, Jessie J, will.i.am, Kylie Minogue, Annie Lennox and a quartet of knights and a dame: Cliff Richard, Tom Jones, Elton John, Paul McCartney and Shirley Bassey. There was an orchestra, the Kenyan Slum Drummers and the African Children’s Choir, opera singer Alfie Boe, pianist Lang Lang, and comedians Lenny Henry and Jimmy Carr.

  The extravaganza culminated with the Queen, who had arrived halfway through, taking to the stage alongside all the performers. Following a heartwarming tribute from the Prince of Wales, she lit the last of more than 4,000 beacons to have been lit across the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth and overseas territories in celebration. Then there were fireworks that could be seen and heard from many miles away.

  There was one noticeable absentee that night: the Duke of Edinburgh, who was just a few days short of his ninety-first birthday. He had fallen ill during the afternoon at Windsor Castle and been taken to King Edward VII’s Hospital in Central London, suffering from a bladder infection. It was the second time his health had caused concern in recent months and his grandsons were not the only ones to be worried. At Christmas he had spent four nights in Papworth Hospital in Cambridge where he had surgery to clear a blocked coronary artery.