by Penny Junor
Jamie agrees, and sees Harry’s tours of Afghanistan as the “two weigh points” in his development. “Going on operations is like having a fizzer under you in terms of growing up, and particularly for these guys in the last ten years who have been at war. His commanding officer, who was out there with him, said to me in the middle, ‘I think you’ll be quite surprised, I think you’ll meet a quite different man.’ And I think that’s true. Not that he’s lost his sense of fun or ability to kick the traces over, but he has a depth now because of this. It’s the old Keith Miller story about the captain of Australian cricket, who went away, fought in the Battle of Britain, came back and, in the first Test after the war, England had them up against the ropes and a journalist asked how he handled pressure on the cricket pitch. ‘Pressure,’ he said, ‘is a Messerschmitt up your arse!’ That’s Harry… Some of the little things that would have mattered before don’t matter anymore. He’s come through it. There’s an acceptance that he’s going to have to ride with the punches of some of the more intrusive things from the media. Before, that would have been one of the defining things of his life but there’s a perspective there now, he’s able to compartmentalize these things. He still gets steamed up, who wouldn’t? But he’s able to put it in a box and say, ‘Let’s get on with it.’ ”
THE END OF THE BEGINNING
Taking leave after an operational tour is not voluntary and it’s not a luxury. Every member of the Armed Forces who has been in combat is expected to go away for four or five weeks for the sake of their sanity. “They take themselves out of that high-octane mind-set and reintegrate into the family or social environment, as it does take some time for the brain to just settle down,” says Tom de la Rue. “Mental illness comes in all forms—it just depends on the particular individual and their chemical make-up. Nobody’s immune.”
Harry went to Verbier with his bohemian new girlfriend, Cressida Bonas, to celebrate her twenty-fifth birthday. They had met in May 2012, introduced by his cousin and good friend Princess Eugenie, who had known Cressida for years. She is the daughter of the 1960s socialite and model Lady Mary Gaye Curzon, whose late father was the 6th Earl Howe and heir to the Curzon banking dynasty. Cressida has a complicated assortment of half-siblings, as well as step-relatives who have come and gone from her life. Her childhood was turbulent, like Harry’s.
Despite a colorful, high-profile life (and poor taste in men), MG—as Lady Mary Gaye is known—is good fun, kind and well liked; and in that respect her daughter takes after her. Cressida’s father, Jeffrey Bonas, a businessman and entrepreneur who lives in Norfolk, is a less popular, more controversial figure. But, despite the privileges of an aristocratic background, a good education, good looks, brains and talent, life cannot have been easy for Cressida. Her mother was married three times before she married Jeffrey Bonas; Cressida was her fifth child—which is why, when she’s not known as Cressy, she’s called Smalls or Smally.
Mary Gaye’s first husband was the late Esmond Cooper-Key, whom she married at Penn House, her family seat in Buckinghamshire (which, on her father’s death, to her great sadness, went to her uncle’s branch of the family, because her father had no male heirs). The wedding photographer was Cecil Beaton. She and Esmond had a daughter, Pandora, but the marriage broke down when Pandora was three. Her second marriage was to John Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe. They were together for nine years and had three children—Georgiana, Isabella, and Jacobi, who is a good friend of William’s. When she fell in love with Jeffrey Bonas, he was married and his divorce was said to have cost him £1.2 million. But their marriage didn’t last and she left him when Cressida was very young.
Her fourth husband was financier Christopher Shaw, who had been married twice before and had three children. Said to be reminiscent of the fictional Jay Gatsby in his extravagant lifestyle and lavish entertaining, Shaw wanted the Curzon connection. Mary Gaye finally gave in to his repeated proposals of marriage, but it was never happy, and they divorced when Cressida was eleven. In January 2014 he died suddenly of a suspected overdose and Cressida went to his funeral. The Daily Telegraph obituary described the house parties he had thrown at Hinton Ampner, the grand house near Winchester that he leased from the National Trust. “Children,” according to the piece, “were invariably accommodated in the stable block, and it is unlikely that he knew their names (newspaper reports that Cressida… was mourning a surrogate father, were wide of the mark).”
Today, Cressida’s mother seems to be happy at last. She is with David McDonough, who runs a public relations business. They live in Chelsea.
In many ways, Cressida and Harry are kindred spirits—they have the same confident, relaxed attitude to life; they’re sparky; they know how to let their hair down but equally know how to work; and the shared experience of loss and domestic trauma during their childhoods was possibly some of the attraction. They also have interests and friends in common, not only via Eugenie and Beatrice. Cressida’s half-sister, Isabella Calthorpe, married Harry’s friend Sam Branson (Sir Richard Branson’s son) in 2013, and they had all been at Sam’s birthday party on Necker Island the week before Harry’s fateful trip to Las Vegas. She is a free agent; she dresses in her own style, happy in torn and faded dungarees and hippyish skirts with her hair in a scrunchie or loose and disheveled. She dances tirelessly at parties and festivals, and also shares Harry’s love of tennis and skiing. After school—she went to Stowe, like Chelsy—she studied dance at Leeds University and worked as a ski instructor in Verbier and a model for Burberry. But modern dance was her passion, and after Leeds she did a year at the prestigious Trinity Laban Conservatoire in Greenwich. She was said to be planning to make a career of it, but meanwhile took a job in theater marketing. In 2008 Tatler’s Little Black Book described her as “really pretty, really nice and absolutely obsessed with [jazz singer] Eva Cassidy.”
It was on the slopes in Verbier that the world first saw evidence that Harry and Cressida were an item. A photograph appeared on most front pages of the two of them on skis, wearing sunglasses, hats and well wrapped up against the cold; Harry was giving her an affectionate bear hug. “HARRY’S GAL” was one headline. “Prince shows off new love… as insiders say she’s The One”; “Has Prince Harry finally found love?” were others. The photo was one of a series that had clearly been taken by a paparazzo, but they were embracing in full view of other skiers, so were obviously happy to be seen—and they were consistently seen with one another thereafter. When those first shots were taken, they were staying in Verbier with Beatrice and Eugenie, her parents and a party of friends. The Duke and Duchess of York, although divorced, take a chalet every year for Andrew’s birthday, which was the day after Cressida’s. That year the Duke turned fifty-three. Harry has always been close to the York family. While they are very different characters, he and Prince Andrew are both second sons, were both “spares,” and were both helicopter pilots who served on the front line—Andrew in the Falklands War in the 1980s. There was also a connection through Sarah, who had once been good friends with Diana. On the night of Andrew’s birthday, twenty of them celebrated with dinner in a local restaurant where, according to reports, late in the evening Cressida had sat on Harry’s knee and they had “kissed like love-struck teenagers in the back of a cinema.”
After four months in the heat and dust of Afghanistan, the Swiss Alps with friends, family, good food and good wine, and nothing more dangerous than a paparazzo, must have been bliss, but with three distinct lives to lead, and so many charities all wanting a piece of him, Harry was never going to be able to holiday for long. And Sentebale not only had ambitious plans, the charity also had a new Chief Executive.
Cathy Ferrier is short, northern, dynamic, fun, feisty and impressive. In the spring of 2012, she had quite an unusual day ahead. She met two Princes. “It was quite frightening, quite scary. I’d never met a prince before—then two in a day.” After seven years at Oxfam, and twenty-five years before that as commercial director of the bookseller, Borders, sh
e had been earmarked for the job by the new Chairman, Philip Green. She met Prince Harry at St. James’s Palace, then Prince Seeiso at the Lesotho High Commission, where he then worked as High Commissioner.
The first meeting was in Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton’s office. “Harry asked me lots of questions about what I’d done before and then told me what his ambitions were for the charity and why he’d set up Sentebale and why he was passionate about it; asked me a lot about what I thought I could do for it and what difference I could make, etc. But in the middle of the interview… we were on the first floor with a net curtain on the window, and just outside on the street was a tour bus going by with some chap talking to a group of tourists and they were just below the window. We could hear them talking and I think Philip [Green] said, ‘If you pulled the curtain back and just smiled, can you imagine how shocked all those tourists would be to realize just how close they were to you?’ Harry said, ‘Yes, I think it might create a diversion. Probably best not.’ ”
Cathy got the job. And in the time she has been running Sentebale she has struck up a good, friendly, easy relationship with Harry and has taken the charity forward in leaps and bounds. “He’s great and he’s always been incredibly easy to work with,” she says; “very friendly and very informal. I do regular one-to-ones and give him an update on the charity and send him documents and he’ll text back and say, ‘I like this. I would like a bit more of that, and have you thought about x?’ The moment I realized we had gone through any kind of formal barrier was when he came in late for a meeting. I was at St. James’s Palace waiting for him and he’d been down to the Olympics—I think the rowers had just won a gold and he was late. He came hurtling in, and I was in the kitchen making a cup of tea. ‘Cathy, I’m so late,’ and gave me two big kisses on the cheek and then carried on and I made him a cup of tea. And you think, Okay, this is not a formal relationship any more, he’s completely relaxed. He’s good on texts and he emails quite a bit too. He’s an absolute joy to work with and there’s always a spark of humor in there, a bit of teasing because he’s like that, so his personality comes through. He’s great fun. Has a real twinkle in his eye all the time, particularly when he’s with children. It comes up so clearly when he’s with children; there’s a little tease below those communications which is really nice to see.”
HIV/AIDS is fiercely stigmatized in Lesotho—as is disability—and Sentebale had been running a program, named after Seeiso’s mother, to support and teach children about it. Their ambition was to raise £2 million to build a permanent Mamohato Centre, to provide psychosocial care and friendship for children living with the disease and children with disabilities. King Letsie had donated a piece of land not far from Maseru, the capital, with stunning views towards the Thaba Bosiu mountain. And in February, after a few days visiting existing programs in Lesotho with Cathy, Seeiso and a posse of photographers and journalists, Harry spoke at a prestigious fundraising dinner in Johannesburg, their first in South Africa, where they hoped to tap into the huge wealth of that country.
“Our aim and hope is that we can influence a decline in the transmission of HIV and increase life expectancy, in a unique way for Lesotho: by addressing the psychological and social needs of the next generation, which is so important. Ultimately, this will strengthen family structures, instill hope in future generations of Basotho people, and enable them to realize their potential and achieve their ambitions. The impact of this program has the potential to change society.”
It was only right, he said, that the center should be named after Queen Mamohato. “She was so loved as the Mother of the Nation. I hope she would be proud of what we are trying to achieve in her name. I hope that my mother will be proud, too. Maybe, just maybe, they are together somewhere up there, with blueprints and sketches already mapped out! I can only hope we put the swings in the right place.”
Sitting at Harry’s table that evening was Nacho Figueras, the professional Argentinian polo player and the face of Ralph Lauren. He had played in all the Sentebale matches with Harry; he is a friend and was set to become an ambassador for the charity. The auction wasn’t going well and fabulous lots were being sold for peanuts, so when a pair of diamond earrings in the shape of forget-me-nots, specially designed and donated by Garrard’s, came up and seemed in danger of going for less than they were worth, Nacho put his hand up. “Then the joke with Harry started,” he says. “Hey, if I raise my hand will you promise that you will raise yours?” They were egging each other on, and everyone was laughing, until Nacho found himself the last one with his hand in the air. “That night when I went back to my room I thought, what have I done? I just spent $30,000 on something that I did not need. That was the way my brain was processing the information.” The next day he and a small group (of which I was one) flew to Lesotho and spent three days visiting Sentebale projects and meeting the children, including herd boys up in the hills, who, before the charity took an interest in them, had been all but feral. “Right now,” he said on the last day of our trip, “as we are coming down the road, I am looking at it from a whole different place. I have invested $30,000 in a thing that really makes me feel proud, and happy. I would do it again, even if I had to make an effort to [financially]. That’s what happened to me.”
Long before he ever met the children, it was Harry’s sincerity that hooked Nacho. “I really felt that Harry meant what he was doing. You can see it in his eyes when you talk to him about this that he really means it and really wants it and really cares about it. Originally it was, ‘Would you play this game, it’s to raise money for this charity, Sentebale?’ And you say, ‘Of course, you’re going to play polo, why not?’ And then when you learn about it and see how much he cares about it, you say, ‘Okay I want to do this,’ I want to help him because it’s important. He can do a lot, but if we help him, he can do more. It’s not what he says, it’s what you know comes from the inside, you can feel from his heart, he is telling you what he saw and what he feels about it. He’s not just being a tape recorder and repeating something that he is supposed to say. He means it.”
Despite Nacho’s efforts, the total raised by the dinner was an underwhelming £275,000, but they were soon playing the Sentebale Polo Cup again, in Connecticut, which raised over $1 million in May 2013, as did another big fundraising dinner in Dubai in October of the same year, attended by Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saeed Al Maktoum. So, by the end of 2013, with a further injection of money from the Elton John Foundation, the Mamohato Centre was well on its way.
They were, as Harry had said, at “the end of the beginning. Unless we think big, unless we are ambitious, nothing will change.” Sentebale’s longer-term plan is to raise £20 million over the next five years, with the intention of replicating the programs into other southern African countries that are similarly affected by HIV/AIDS—possibly Mozambique, Botswana and Malawi. “There is the potential to create a very significant global charity here with a very high brand awareness,” says Philip Green: “a major charity. But for the short-to medium-term we will focus on Commonwealth countries and psychosocial support.”
The brand awareness had a major leg-up at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2013. “The one thing Harry is very good at is taking someone else’s idea,” says Philip, who had thought a garden around the forget-me-not flower might work. “He’s not precious about the origin of an idea.” In fact, he became so enthused about this one, that when Philip and Cathy told him, in passing, that their sponsor had dropped out at the eleventh hour, he was so upset that they had to find a new one. “He just said, ‘That’s such a pity, it’s such a good idea, you can’t let that go, it’s too good to miss, we would get massive publicity for the charity and we could raise lots of funds, forget me-nots… it’s such a good idea.’
“I went straight from St. James’s Palace and called Ian Cheshire, who runs B&Q,” says Philip. “I said ‘I’ve got a great opportunity for you. You’re the leading garden retailer in the UK—how about doing something around forget-me-nots at the Fl
ower Show?’ He said, ‘Give me twenty-four hours,’ and he came back and said, ‘We’ll do it.’ It was a lot of money [£350,000 before you can even apply to Chelsea], but the publicity we got from it and the awareness of the brand lifted us to another level in terms of awareness. We would have had to pay between £5 and £10 million to get that level of exposure. Media and press coverage is really important when you’re a young charity because you can’t afford to advertise. Hits on the website have gone up thousands of percents and that has translated into donations—but, to be honest, we were doing it for profile and awareness which is part of building a business for the long term.”
Harry was fiercely proud of the garden. The designer, Jinny Blom, had cleverly created a real sense of the country and its culture, and Harry had been involved from the beginning, discussing it, looking at early sketches—some of which she emailed to him in Afghanistan—and he was always wanting more. And he was delighted when so many members of his family came to see it. “There was a really nice moment,” says Cathy, “when Prince Charles and Camilla were on the garden. There was a beautiful inlaid stone with hearts and crowns and around the stone were ‘babies’ tears,’ a tiny little plant that looks quite mossy, then interspersed with them were forget-me-nots. They were stood on it with Harry,” says Cathy, “and were in mid-conversation with Jinny when Prince Philip approached and stood slightly back and didn’t interrupt and then as they were coming off the garden, Harry was talking to Charles and he said, ‘You do know your father’s here? You two have met, haven’t you?’ And did a faux introduction between the two.”
“Harry stumbled across the orphans in Lesotho quite by chance,” says one of his team; “and because he is who he is, he turned it into a charity that is now absolutely staggering. It went through a difficult patch and it’s come out of that patch much stronger, really clear, and that’s because Prince Harry didn’t give up on it. He could have gone, ‘That was a good experiment for when I was young, let’s fold it up and put it into another charity or do something clever with it’—they were all options available to him—but he was determined not to. He wanted it to go from strength to strength and—he wouldn’t put it in these terms but—he sees it as an absolutely core part of what he can bring to the world.”
