by Penny Junor
“I think they would still choose to spend an evening together, yes,” says a friend. “It would be a different night from the one they would have spent three or four years ago, which would have been, ‘Who can remain standing longest?’ as it were. Harry loves going round and having supper with George and Kate and William. It’s that sort of night they have now, because they’re growing up. That’s not to say Harry doesn’t have an alternative night—he’s probably got four or five alternative nights which he also enjoys, and William is probably not on those nights anymore and it would be a bit odd if he was. But they are very, very close and Harry loves the whole domestic bit which his brother’s now doing—which is interesting because he’s not longing to get married or anything but I think he sees what his brother’s getting out of it, which is fantastic.”
When, or who, Harry will marry is anyone’s guess. For two years Cressida Bonas appeared to be a contender, until they broke up at the end of April 2014. Friends had said it seemed to be serious between them, but they had said much the same about Chelsy Davy. All that is certain is that, as both women know, being in love with Harry is the easy bit. Taking on everything else that it entails is a very different matter. Kate Middleton is an exceptional woman from a stable, loving family and she is rock solid. She might have been born for the job, and William was very lucky to have found her and got to know her in the privacy of St. Andrews. But she has made sacrifices for which no amount of red carpet, titles or tiaras can compensate.
Only Prince Harry and Chelsy know what brought their relationship to an end—although it must have been amicable because they are still friends. It may have been that she wasn’t prepared to live with that level of media scrutiny and she valued her freedom too much. It may be she thought the whole royal set-up looked stultifying. Or it may be that the relationship had just run its course. But friends say that Cressida hates the media attention and she too is completely unmoved by the royal connection.
“Cressida, I do know, is about as interested in the whole royal thing as Chelsy was,” says a friend, “which is to say not at all. Kate probably loved William very deeply very early, so she got it into her head this was what she was going to have to live with, and at least Kate will be Queen one day. That’s a fairly substantial thing to do with your life; and if you conduct yourself well it will have an impact on a massive institution in British public life with this enormous history. If you’re married to the spare-but-one, what kind of life is that? I think that’s Harry’s problem; to find anyone who will marry into that—because most substantial women wouldn’t.
“I’m told he was very serious about Cressida but it’s between the two of them what that really meant. Her family history isn’t full of happy marriages, and neither is his, so I think there was a nervousness on both sides that if they went that way, would they really know what they’re doing? I don’t think anyone wants to second-guess that. She’s a very, very nice woman. The impression I get is that, for her, the public-facing bit was a real issue. She really didn’t want it, and was actively keen to avoid it—which in a way is quite encouraging. He was not going to find it easy to land that particular fish.”
The truth is he is going to find it difficult to land any fish unless the media has a dramatic change of heart and gives him some privacy.
When George was born, William was still based in Anglesey, where he and Kate rented a farmhouse, but after much agonizing, and to many people’s surprise, he decided to leave the military in September to concentrate on royal duties and charity work. It was announced at the time of their marriage that they would be taking over Apartment 1A, Princess Margaret’s old house at Kensington Palace. It had been empty for years and needed complete refurbishment, so in the meantime they had the use of Nottingham Cottage, a dinky-looking two-bedroom building to the north of the Palace. When they finally moved into 1A in the autumn of 2012, Harry took over Nottingham Cottage. So both brothers are now a stone’s throw from each other’s front door and a two-minute walk from their office, which is now also at Kensington Palace.
Harry’s relationship with Kate is as good as it looks from the outside. It’s relaxed, easy and he makes her laugh, but his relationship with the Middletons is less so. And the Middletons now play a prominent part in William’s life. William adores them and they him. “They are incredibly nice,” says a friend. “Carole is Carole, she is what she is; she’s an alpha-male mother who’s very open about who she is, but they are a terribly well brought up, polite family, very charming, nice people. The only downside of Harry is he can be a bit rough around the edges; in slightly unconventional way. The sort of guy who might start flicking food across a dinner table when you really wouldn’t expect someone in polite society to do that. The Middletons would find that quite challenging. I am sure Kate has adjusted to it but there’s an element of Harry that’s quite… not laddish—unconventional. There are definitely people who have worked in Harry’s orbit who have not enjoyed it, whereas the vast majority of people absolutely love him and would lay down their lives for him. If you were being really harsh you might say he was juvenile but I don’t think that’s fair.”
There were major changes to the Household in 2013. Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton took a step back. Everyone who knows Jamie, without exception, says what a brilliant mentor he has been for William and Harry. He has steered them through some very difficult years and helped them build firm foundations for the future. “They are such cool guys, it’s very difficult to go wrong with them. Prince Harry has his moments but even with old Harry and his wild moments, the guy’s instincts are absolutely 100 percent brilliant. He just gets it; a very light finger on the tiller.” Jamie’s mission was to help them reach their personal goals. Now that’s done, he felt they needed someone new for the next phase in their lives, when they would need a Private Secretary each. He is staying on in an advisory role but he has passed the baton on, believing that even the best people run out of ideas after seven or eight years.
Miguel Head, who was their Press Secretary, became William’s Private Secretary. His place was taken by Ed Perkins, who used to look after Prince Andrew at the Buckingham Palace press office (and since all the royal press offices were amalgamated under the Prince of Wales’s new Press Secretary, Sally Osman, at the beginning of 2014, he is now back at Buckingham Palace, where they are all based). Rebecca Deacon, who was at Sentebale, became Kate’s Private Secretary. The only external appointment was Ed Lane Fox, who became Harry’s Private Secretary in June 2013. He was a former captain in the Household Cavalry, who left the Army the year Harry joined and went off to work in PR. “He’s not the opposite of Harry because he has the same sort of flair,” says one of the team. “He’s good and can spot the really good ideas and make them happen, but he’s quite adjutant-ly, quite methodical, so you know with Ed when things aren’t quite right. He’s quite authoritative so he’s rather a good match for Harry. He keeps his own counsel but what he says is pretty good. They’re getting on really great; it’s a fantastic teaming up and I think they’ll be doing stuff for a long time to come, hopefully.
“Prince Harry’s one of these people—you just dangle a carrot in front of him and he’ll get excited. He always comes at things completely laterally, at an angle you’re just not going to guess, and you’ll talk to him and think, what are you on about? And then suddenly you’ll go, ‘Christ, I see what you’re on about! Good idea.’ I think lateral thinking helps being an Apache pilot, doing ten things at once and coming at things sideways. When I’m going through my lists with him, through ten different letters that people have written on ten different subjects; if I explain to him the rationale of why I’m making a recommendation, he’ll go, ‘Yeah yeah yeah, got that; but what about this? Couldn’t we do that for them?’ And I think, yes, of course. Christ, why didn’t I think of that? He’ll just come at it from an obtuse angle. I’m not sure he can come from a particularly straight angle, so he probably needs a Private Secretary who’s dissimilar to him in that respe
ct, who goes straight up the middle—so he can do the dancing round the edges. Ed will do really well with him.”
POLES APART
Two members of the Everest team to whom Harry paid tribute in his speech in Washington, the night he collected the humanitarian award, were Martin Hewitt and Jaco van Gass, both of whom had also been to the North Pole. Ed Parker realized after that first expedition that WWTW had built up a momentum that couldn’t be lost. He wanted to put together another challenge quickly. Because 2012 was the anniversary of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s ascent of the world’s highest mountain, he had settled on Everest as the target. It was again filmed by Alexis Girardet.
The resulting documentary, Harry’s Mountain Heroes, was shown on ITV—and Prince Harry was patron of the expedition once more. He couldn’t go this time because he was busy with pre-deployment training, but he did do press launches, interviews and some training with the team to give the expedition coverage a kick-start. He also went to see them off at Heathrow Airport and sent them an encouraging message when they were on the mountain. “We always knew he wasn’t going to be a big part of it,” says Alexis. “He said very clearly, ‘If I’m going to do this I want to be part of the team that goes to the summit, not to just trek in and become the guy that does a little bit of these things. I want to do it properly with them.’”
It had been a great disappointment when the climb had to be called off. They had trained for seven months in the Alps and then they had climbed Manaslu in the Himalayas, which is the eighth highest mountain in the world—becoming the first disabled team ever to do so; but, as Ed says, “They got to Everest and the conditions were just too risky, so I pulled them down. The head guide and I talked every day and I smelt a rat. More people lost their lives on Everest that year than in the previous fifteen years. I didn’t want to risk them.”
Jaco and one other escaped two avalanches by a whisker. “Every day there were very high winds and someone was bivouacked out, having been hit by falling rock and avalanches. There wasn’t much snow and it was too warm, hence the avalanches. We came back down and, sponsored by Glenfiddich, had quite a few bottles of whiskey. Next day, with very sore heads, the expedition leader said, ‘I’m calling it, it’s too dangerous.’
“You can get selfish about it; you or the team want to achieve your goal, but for us to reach the summit takes a team of fifty Sherpas. When we are lying in our tents in the mornings in base camp, those guys go through the Khumbu Icefall, they established Base One; they carry all the equipment, all the bottles, all the tents, they set up every camp. You walk from A to B and it’s all done for you. They do ten times more than you have to. So it was too dangerous for us and for them. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but it was definitely the right call.”
By then Ed had even more ambitious plans. “It was suggested to me in the middle of 2011, very much through Clarence House, that it would be a great idea to do something with the Americans,” he says. “We fight alongside each other, we should draw on each other’s expertise and experiences afterwards.” He came up with the idea of a race to the South Pole, a British team against an American team but, at the suggestion of Clarence House, he added a Commonwealth team of Canadians and Australians as well. Alexis was again asked to make a documentary—Harry’s South Pole Heroes—and Harry again agreed to be patron of the expedition. Ed desperately hoped he would walk with them, knowing it would make all the difference to the profile, and he did. In April 2013, seven months before the start date, he committed; immediately corporate doors started opening and Ed was able to raise the £1.8 million he needed.
Their headline sponsor was Virgin Money. “They put in a really properly grown-up sum of money,” says Ed, “and the lead came through Prince Harry. The CEO is a lady called Jayne-Anne Gadhia who had been a trustee of Sentebale, and at the London Marathon [of which Harry is patron], he was standing at the finish and Jayne-Anne was there and Harry said, ‘You should be talking with WWTW.’ I then get a call from Clarence House saying, ‘Quickly follow this up,’ which I did, and to her eternal credit, she said, ‘Right, let’s have a proper look at this.’ What I haven’t told Clarence House is that we had already approached Virgin Money and they’d said ‘No’! I went through different channels in a different way and I know they are approached by a million people, as every company is all the time, but this just came through with a little bit of sparkle and that’s the difference.
“When we went to the North Pole, a rather unattractive individual asked how Harry had been paid for. I think I was nicely defensive but if anyone ever came this time, I would say, ‘Well, I think his income rather outstripped his cost because he was there to introduce us to Virgin Money.’ But he was also there to get the press interested. If he hadn’t come, WWTW would be an eighth of the size we are.” Not to mention that the Royal Foundation contributed “a nice six-figure sum” and the obvious endorsement implied by having its logo on all the publicity.
It is a happy by-product of these expeditions that the individuals come away with a sense of achievement, but the rationale behind them is not about the individuals at all—it is to inspire and demonstrate to other disabled people that injury does not have to be the end of their useful life.
“What becomes more complex,” says Ed, “is those with no physical injury. They find it very difficult because they are not definable by you and me, so the psychological impact goes far deeper. We took three people with us who are physically pretty much right as rain but have mental injuries, and we took them so they could tell their story and engage a bit more with the public about who and what mental injury is about. It’s important that employers understand that these conditions could lurk and how to deal with them if they manifest themselves. It’s a bigger problem than the physical side.”
For the first time there were women in the teams, which he says had a calming effect on the men. Each team had four wounded, plus a guide, a mentor from the charity (Ed Parker, Simon Daglish and Richard Eyre), as well as a celebrity. Harry was with the British team, Alexander Skarsgård, the Swedish star of True Blood, was with the Americans and Dominic West, Damian’s brother and star of The Wire, was with the Commonwealth team. And among the wounded was a double leg amputee (the wounded in the British team had four legs between them), a Puerto Rican who is totally blind and hates the cold, an Australian who’d been shot through the neck, three people with mental injuries, a girl with 30 percent burns who was blown up by a suicide bomber, and a Canadian bomb-disposal expert who, after defusing a bomb, had stepped on an IED. For safety’s sake, this time they took a medical team and two support vehicles.
“If things go wrong in the South Pole,” says Alexis, “no one’s coming to get you. If there’s a storm they can’t fly to you, they can’t fly a helicopter. You’re out of the range of helicopters. If your tent’s gone, you’re dead. There is nothing you can do. You’re doing all the no-nos. You’ve got big fires going inside the tent because you can’t do it outside to cook your water. You’ve got to melt snow for three hours every evening and two hours every morning, so you’ve got a stove roaring full blast inside the tent, probably two or three stoves, so it’s easy for something to go wrong. You get a burn, yes, there’s a doctor with us, and there are sat phones, but it might take five days to evacuate somebody off the continent.”
The training was intense. Harry joined the teams in Iceland for a few days, but he was still based at Wattisham so did most of the training on his own. But walking about the countryside dragging tires to simulate sledges was as nothing compared to the twenty-four hours they were locked in a cold chamber in temperatures of up to -58°C with snow blizzards and winds of up to 75 km/h to give them a flavor of what was to come.
“Everyone assumes the North Pole and South Pole are alike,” says Ed. “It could be as different as walking across grass and walking across sand. In the North Pole you’re walking on broken ice, which is constantly moving, so there is constant danger of falling through the ice. When y
ou go to Antarctica you are walking at over 9,000 feet, so there is an issue with altitude initially. It’s flat; once you get up onto the plateau where you start, it is like a pancake, so there is nothing for the eye to look at apart from the man’s back in front of you. So mentally, it’s dull. You’re on ice but on about four to six inches of soft snow, so pulling through that is bloody hard work. The chap at the front of your team is breaking a trail and the rest are just huddling behind him and following through, so if you’re leading it’s properly grown-up hard work and you do that for two hours and then rotate.”
“They say it’s 40 percent physical, 60 percent psychological,” says Alexis. “You can train as much as you want physically but if it’s not there mentally, you’re in trouble. Round the edge of the continent it’s lovely: there’s mountains, sea, penguins, all that kind of stuff, then you get inland, on to the plateau, and it’s a continent the size of Australia roughly and there is nothing. It’s just flat for thousands of miles in every direction, literally nothing to look at. When we were there the first time we saw one bird in the first week and that was it in seven weeks. You can’t talk to people because there’s usually wind blowing, you’re skiing along for ten, twelve, however many hours you go for during the day. And twenty-four-hour daylight, as there is in the North Pole as well, average temperature -35°C, it can easily get to -50°C, there’s constant wind. Antarctica is the coldest, driest, highest, windiest continent on the planet.”
Bad weather delayed their November start date, but they finally got going on 1 December 2013. On 7 December, however, Ed called off the race element. Conditions were very tricky, people were tiring rapidly (and some had to move to support vehicles for short periods on medical advice); this change in plan meant that the teams could travel together and support each other. On Friday 13 December, the three teams made it triumphantly to the geographic South Pole. It had taken them just thirteen days to cover 200 kilometers.
