Authors: Chris Hutchins
In initially blaming the media for causing the crash, Spencer was presumably unaware of how his sister had acknowledged her debt to the British press after they honoured the
agreement
she and Charles had reached with them at the meeting in Kensington Palace. The editors had kept their promise to
abide by their wishes. Spencer seemed to blame the entire media for the crazy paparazzi chase by continental
photographers
and the actions of Fayed’s intoxicated driver. It did not endear him to the British media.
It was more than two weeks after the funeral that Harry and his brother were given details of the Paris tunnel accident – and then nothing was held back. The drunken chauffeur, the defective limousine, the bodyguard who had not protested against the route that would inevitably lead to a paparazzi chase as well as his failure to insist that his charge put on the seat belt that might have saved her as Ken Wharfe says he would have done. But, above all, it was the part played by Dodi Fayed – as anxious to impress his father with a royal match as he was to win over the Princess – that earned Harry’s wrath: ‘It must have been Sister’s fault!’ he repeated over and over. Harry grew even more furious when Al Fayed inflamed the situation by suggesting that they had both been murdered and, at one point, suggested that Prince Philip was involved in the plot. ‘Who would want to kill Mummy?’ the young Prince asked his father at one point. The Royal Family, having had enough, removed the ‘By Appointment’ logo Harrods had been able to display for many years. It was an unsavoury battle which lasted years before Al Fayed finally accepted that the deaths had been the result of an accident for which his son was partly to blame.
Harry was the member of the family who suffered most from Diana’s death. William’s looks, easy charm and academic
superiority
were always going to make life smoother for him. Harry
made up for it by going at everything at the double. He was his fragile mother’s son with all of her charged emotions, many of her fears and much of her paranoia. Charles began to allow them greater freedom and encouraged others to befriend them to an extent he would never have experienced at their ages. Tiggy, once Diana’s bitter enemy, became Harry’s substitute mother. At Charles’s invitation, the former nanny was invited to stay with them at Highgrove while they were given time off school to grieve. She spent every waking hour with them going through many of the thousands of letters of condolence they had received to show how much their mother had been loved. William wanted to reply to them all – an impossible task – but Harry just wanted the comfort the second most important woman in the world to him had to offer.
He also received close comfort and attention from his late mother’s sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale who turned up at Ludgrove on the morning of his thirteenth birthday with a PlayStation, the gift Diana had planned to give him. Sarah and Diana’s other sister, Jane, phoned him every day in a compassionate bid to help him recover from his great loss.
In an effort to relieve Harry of his grief, Charles arranged for Tiggy to take him and school friend Charlie Henderson on safari in Botswana on his half-term break from Ludgrove – time he would normally have spent with Diana. Charles chose Africa so they could meet up on his breaks from various engagements there – plus he had a special surprise for him when they joined up in Johannesburg: Harry’s favourite group, the Spice Girls, were in town for a concert and Charles had arranged for Harry,
who played their records incessantly, to meet them. Once in the city, Harry rarely left his father’s side. The two spent an hour talking in a suite at the new Hilton Hotel and when Charles went outside to shake hands after declaring the building open, he was surprised to hear the crowd shouting, ‘Harry, Harry’. He looked up to the balcony of their suite and saw his younger son snapping pictures of him. ‘He’s right there,’ Charles cheerfully told those who hadn’t spotted the Prince. Later Harry emerged into the world’s spotlight for the first time since his mother’s funeral. Smartly dressed in a dark-blue two-piece suit – Charles had told him he could go in jeans but the young Prince, rapidly becoming PR conscious, said he considered it would open his father up to criticism of being a ‘Diana imitator’ – the two of them went to the concert where he met his heroines backstage. Needless to say they – ‘Baby Spice’ Emma Bunton in particular – made a great fuss of him (although he seemed more
interested
in the sexily costumed Geri Halliwell) and for the first time in weeks he was seen to smile.
To Harry’s delight that was not the end of the trip: Charles took him to the remote settlement of Dukuduku where father and son both sampled the local beer – something Charles, now a single parent, would never have allowed in the days when he played the role of stern father. They also called on Nelson Mandela, who gave Harry several gifts which he added to the Zulu souvenirs he had already acquired on the trip. With one exception – a Zulu bracelet which he gave to Tiggy – he still keeps his ‘Africa collection’ in his room at Highgrove alongside his Arsenal scarves.
The trip proved to be a strong re-bonding experience for father and son and Charles was determined to repeat it when he took Harry and William on an official visit to Canada. Although he had fears that the boys would be overwhelmed by the attention they were obviously going to get, they were delighted by their reception from a screaming crowd of what can best be described as ‘royal fans’. It is interesting to note that Harry enjoyed the adulation and collected a large batch of newspapers adorned with front-page photographs of himself, his brother and his father. William was somewhat more
reticent
, aware that this was what he would have to experience for the rest of his life and acutely conscious of how much his mother had secretly resented public adulation. From the window of their suite at the Waterfront Hotel in Vancouver, Harry pointed out to his brother a group of screaming girls holding aloft a banner that read ‘William, I’m the one for you’. At that time William was easily the more attractive of the two and, rather like Paul McCartney when he stood alongside John Lennon, was the one the fans were screaming for – but this did not deter Harry. He was perfectly happy to settle for his brother’s cast-offs if necessary, but it proved not to be so; when they arrived in the town of Burnaby he
discovered
that pupils at the high school they visited had formed a Harry fan club. Charles was pleased with the Princemania he witnessed. During years of walking with his ex-wife through crowds like this he had come to accept, somewhat reluctantly, that the person they had come to see was Diana. But this was different: after everything he and the boys had come through
he was happy to take a back seat and watch their
popularity
grow. Acceptance had become his byword and when the young princes’ photographs dominated the front pages, he knew that the editors were giving the public what they most wanted to see and read. His superstar sons were a breath of fresh air on what otherwise might have seemed a rather stuffy and formal visit. When Harry turned his baseball cap back and called ‘Yo dude!’ to him, Charles’s response – ‘Really, do you have to do that?’ – was more of a gentle admonishment than the strict reprimand he might have given in earlier times. Indeed, it was William who seemed more concerned at Harry’s response to the adulation than their father,
according
to a veteran British journalist covering the tour. ‘I could see that William was wise enough to see what lay ahead. Everything these boys did would be subject to close public scrutiny, and that meant things bad as well as good.’ How right Harry’s subsequent activities were to prove him.
Some months after their Johannesburg meeting, the Spice Girls turned up (by helicopter, of course) for tea at Highgrove which Harry – in William’s absence – hosted, serving the girls coffee and cakes and offering them wine from his father’s cellar, all the time regaling them with praise for their hit records, several of which he knew by heart. The young Prince did his best to entertain the girls by reprising some of his own stage performances, in particular loudly repeating the battleground speech from Shakespeare’s
Henry V,
‘Cry God for Harry, England and St George!’ Although it went largely unnoticed by most, a disloyal servant claims that the Prince
paid little attention to ‘Posh Spice’, Victoria Beckham, who had initially refused to leave the helicopter because of the high wind blowing outside. Nevertheless, it was a big day for the publicity-hungry group too as they reflected on leaving the royal home with goodie bags containing, among other things, free samples of the organic food and drinks sold by Charles for his charity under the Duchy Originals label.
Once the Spice Girls had departed, Harry told his father that the day had been the second best in his life. When Charles asked him what had actually been the best day, the young fan replied: ‘The first time I met them.’
Such acts proved that Charles had mellowed – even the feud between the Windsors and the Spencers seemed to have run its course and, in a bid to show that he would not let such a war between the families harm his relationship with his nephews, Charles Spencer declared that he had reached ‘an understanding with the Prince of Wales’. For his part, Charles, who always hated confrontation, said in moderate response, ‘Both boys are coping extremely well – perhaps better than anyone expected.’ That said a lot about royal blood: they had learned from an early age that they had to present a certain veneer regardless of what they were feeling inside.
Despite what Spencer thought of him, Charles had firmly established himself as the man in his sons’ lives and, as Harry has noted in more recent times, he began to ‘chill out’, taking them on the sort of outings that Diana would have taken them. There was a visit to one theatre to see the children’s classic
Doctor Dolittle
and another to watch Barry
Humphries’s performance as the outrageous Dame Edna Everage. Whereas in the past the Prince might have frozen at the Australian comic’s remarks about the young princes dressing up in women’s clothing, he laughed hysterically and the boys joined in. Back at St James’s Palace, where Charles was now living, Harry charmed the staff with samples of the comic’s performance, telling one servant that Humphries had picked out a large woman seated on the front row of the
audience
and said to her, ‘What a lovely dress, beautiful material – you were lucky they had so much of it.’
Although Diana would always be at the front of their minds, with their father’s help they were clearly learning to overcome their grief. Unable to deliver it personally because it occurred in term time, Harry was the one who sent a bunch of flowers to be placed on Diana’s grave on the first Mother’s Day following her death. Soon after Charles gave in to his younger son’s wish to visit the grave on an island at Althorp, the Spencer estate which the heir was never overly keen to visit. It was all part of the healing process and Charles made further efforts to satisfy one or both of his sons’ desires whenever his own duties
permitted
. He even cancelled one long-standing engagement to take Harry to France to watch England play against Colombia in the World Cup. That day David Beckham became his newest hero after the player scored his first ever goal for England with an impressive free kick. Charles was pleased he had taken the day off from royal duties for he was able to witness a further stage in his son’s recovery from the tragedy of losing his mother so publicly and at such a young age.
Charles was happy because his sons – particularly Harry – were happy. They were bonding in a way that would never have been possible while the Prince and Princess were at each other’s throats.
Just one feud remained (and still is) unresolved: that concerning the book written by Paul Burrell, which he called
A Royal Duty
and which was serialised in the
Daily Mirror,
then edited by Piers Morgan. The servant made a fortune by revealing the secrets Diana had trustingly shared with him, even reproducing private letters she had written to him at times of great stress, irrationally suggesting in one that Charles was planning for her to die in a road crash, and in another that her husband had put her ‘through hell’.
It was more than her sons could stand. Despite their tender years Harry and William sat down together and compiled a statement:
We cannot believe that Paul, who was entrusted with so much, could abuse his position in such a cold and overt betrayal. It is not only deeply painful for the two of us but also for everyone else affected and it would mortify our mother if she were alive today and, if we might say so, we feel we are more able to speak for our mother than Paul. We ask Paul please to bring these revelations to an end.
They were no longer boys to be toyed with and their message to Burrell was also a signal to the media world at large.
O
ne troubled year and two days after Diana’s death, Harry joined his brother at Eton. Because he was born in September – on the cusp of the academic year division – he had been able to spend an extra year at Ludgrove in a bid to improve his disappointing academic performance. The exceptionally high standard of learning at Eton was always going to be a challenge for him for, like his mother, he was no academic. Diana had considered two other options – Radley College in Oxfordshire and Milton Abbey in Dorset. Harry, however, wanted to be at Eton because William was there and had been for two years. And anyway, it was close to Windsor Castle where the Queen always spends weekends and even though he was a boarder at the college it was comforting to know his grandmother was nearby and that at weekends he could easily walk and have tea with her, as William often did – resisting the taunts of local yobs who were always on the warpath for the Eton ‘toffs’.
Prince Charles had his own doubts about Eton: he had wanted his sons to go to Gordonstoun in Scotland where he, his father, two uncles and two cousins were all educated. But the Spencers had always favoured the Berkshire college that Diana’s father and brother both attended.
If Charles was still miffed about the choice he did not show it when he and Harry arrived in a Vauxhall estate car and posed briefly for photographers in heavy rain. On arrival Harry was wearing a favourite light-green sports jacket but that was soon to be swapped for the unique Eton uniform (black tailcoat, waistcoat, white tie and the stiff collar he used to complain made his neck sore) which dates back to the nineteenth century.
Father and son stepped into Manor House to be greeted by housemaster Dr Andrew Gailey, a kindly Irishman, and his wife Shauna who entertained them along with the other new boys and their parents. There they were joined by the no-nonsense house ‘Dame’ or matron, Elizabeth Heathcote, who made her authority known by instructing the Prince to sign the entrance book. Next, Harry was taken to his room which, he was happily assured, would be cleaned and tidied by a maid, a girl who would also make his bed and attend to his laundry. Looking out of the room’s ivy-covered window he noticed that some of the press photographers were still lingering below and Harry, being Harry, obliged them with a bonus picture by waving to them.
His royal protection officer was duly installed in the next room with instructions to report to his superiors if Harry
continued to show the worrying signs of distress he had suffered since the Paris car crash. Watching over his younger brother was also a task allotted to William who was lodged close by in the same house. After a year that had tested his parenting skills to the limit, Charles was all too aware that his younger son was particularly vulnerable and the special tasks entrusted to the policeman and the sibling were never going to be easy ones for them to accomplish.
Founded in the mid-fifteenth century by King Henry VI, Eton has a formidable reputation for producing great men. No less than eighteen British prime ministers, including the Duke of Wellington, Horace Walpole and Harold Macmillan, and writers George Orwell, Henry Fielding, Aldous Huxley, Percy Shelley and Ian Fleming did their learning there. Most leavers go on to university, one-third of them to Oxford or Cambridge. All this was well above Harry’s intellectual level.
The college has a language all of its own. William taught him that the cricketers are known as ‘dry bobs’, rowers as ‘wet bobs’ and those who go in for neither are ‘slack bobs’. Lessons are ‘divs’ and teachers are ‘beaks’. Boys who merit positions of special responsibility are marked by different colour
waistcoats
, trousers or buttons. Fees for the 1,300 or so pupils are now in excess of £30,000 per year. Harry was spared the process of acting as a servant to any of the older boys by the relatively recent abolition of the fagging system, and by the time he arrived the thrashing of offenders with a birch rod while they were stretched over a wooden block had also been done away with. Nevertheless, he managed to annoy several of
his fellow pupils by going out of his way to demonstrate that he was just one of them, when he was clearly not. This proved to be quite a problem in the ensuing months and he had difficulty in making friends. He won several over, however, when he demonstrated in more than one playground fight that he had fists as good as the best of them, a fact that was noted in an early report to his father along with a mention of his ‘aggressive’ play when he was on the football field. This one was not to be messed with, was the message, although his bravery when taking on boys bigger than himself was a good indication of what was to come in later years. It was, however, to cause him a nasty injury when, during a soccer match, he collided with another player while jumping to head a ball and landed flat on his back. He suffered such pain in his arm that it was thought he had fractured it. His arm was put in a sling but even that did not prevent him thumping a pupil who dared to laugh at his predicament.
His enthusiasm for Eton’s fearsome Wall Game (where two teams of ten players wrestle and push a ball in a scrum along a 110-metre wall for the chance to have a shot at a garden wall or tree), which had caused fatalities in the past, was a sure sign that he feared nothing or no man. To the Palace’s dismay he was photographed on crutches after kicking in a window following a particularly strident row with another pupil over a girl they both fancied. He soon became a familiar figure in the matron’s office. After persuading a local barber to give him the same haircut that Michael Owen, his football hero of the day, was currently sporting – a ‘skinhead’ – the Palace had
to plead with Fleet Street editors not to publish photographs of him taken in the streets of Eton and Windsor looking just like any other delinquent on the hunt for female fodder.
His behaviour was a concern for all, but there was light at the end of the tunnel, as one (now retired) housemaster relays:
We used to say that Harry was like a firecracker and when other pupils saw him coming they used to pass a by-now familiar warning: ‘Don’t light the blue touch paper’, in other words don’t give him the slightest excuse to vent his spleen. He needed some outlet for his anger and he found it when he discovered the Combined Cadet Force. Eton has a
long-standing
military tradition and he became an enthusiastic recruit of the well-disciplined Force. That, for a while, curbed his frustration and diverted much of the aggression he had been displaying outside the classroom. We knew then that he was destined for a career in the military, where he could
channel
that aggression usefully.
Never a truer word…
Nevertheless, it was hard to reconcile the image of a
grief-stricken
Harry standing behind his mother’s coffin with Harry the Hellraiser who emerged during his time at Eton. One balmy summer evening he was being driven along King’s Road, Chelsea, in a 4x4 with his bodyguard and some friends on their way to a party. Music blared from the vehicle’s sound system as it pulled up at traffic lights next to an open-topped sports car. Harry lowered his window and began lobbing chips
into the other car to the obvious annoyance of its driver. When a newspaper columnist upbraided Harry in print for being a lazy, disdainful and privileged yob, Paddy Harverson, Prince Charles’s then spin doctor, wrote an angry letter to the paper:
Like any other nineteen-year-old fortunate enough to be able to spend time travelling and working abroad, Harry should be allowed to benefit from his experiences without being subject to this kind of ill-informed and insensitive criticism.
Despite Harverson’s protest, Harry would be the first to admit that from an early age he was a seasoned imbiber of vodka and it was not for nothing that he earned the
nickname
Pothead Harry. Unfortunately he was often ‘out of it’ in public: on one occasion it was left to his younger cousin Beatrice to restrain him when, dressed in jeans and wearing a reversed baseball hat, he lost it during a wild scene at a party in the Chinawhite marquee after a Guards Polo Club event, lobbing water and cans of Red Bull at his friends. The contrast between his overwrought excitement and Beatrice’s ladylike dignity could not have been more pronounced.
Chinawhite owner Rory Keegan says:
The princes were young men growing up. They were not doing anything wrong. They had a right to have fun. Couldn’t we let them have their youth without invading it at every turn? Harry doesn’t have a bad bone in his body and it’s important to us to protect him.
Harry’s first serious experience with alcohol had come about during the Mediterranean holiday with his mother and brother as Mohamed Al Fayed’s guests in July 1997. Each time the yacht pulled into a port, Harry would go ashore with whoever he could round up from the small cruise party and, as Diana herself was later to put it, ‘got into mischief’. One of those who went along told his own father that they all felt ‘happily squiffy’ after sampling a local brandy.
Things were to take a turn for the worse, much worse. Harry and his brother had helped arrange a Highgrove party ahead of their father’s fiftieth birthday. The outside of the house had been decorated with wildflowers and Greek statues had been erected in the Prince’s favourite spot – his beloved walled garden. The boys had gone to great lengths to persuade Camilla to join the gathering to show they bore her no ill feeling. Guests included the actors Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson, whom he and William had persuaded to stage some comedy sketches poking fun at their father along the lines of Atkinson’s Blackadder –
charging
the audience £30 a head for the pleasure. The young hosts had also chosen the musical entertainment – including remixes of DJ EZ and Norris Da Boss Windross, neither of whom most of the guests had ever heard of. The finale of their ‘sounds’ programme was the ’70s hit ‘Y.M.C.A.’ by the Village People, which the guest of honour was obliged to dance to. Although he had no idea of the gay connotations Charles was instructed by his sons to try and imitate their movements. It was not long into the night, however, before a drunken
fourteen-year-old Harry stripped completely naked and ran around the surprised – to put it mildly – distinguished guests. One present says:
Charles was visibly shocked, in fact he turned crimson but he told a group of us later that it was just teenage high spirits and he himself had done much the same. It was the only time in my life that I didn’t believe him.
More than one so-called royal watcher suggested that a likely reason Harry had become so inebriated was Camilla’s
presence
. They could not have been more wrong for by this time both boys had accepted Mrs Parker Bowles’s part in their father’s life and they were happy that she made him happy, especially since he constantly reminded them that he had truly loved their mother. No, Harry’s drunken behaviour was a sign of things to come and there never had to be a reason – he drank when he was happy, he drank when he was sad. He just liked the effect.
On another cruise in August 1999 – this time with his father – he drank heavily aboard John Latsis’s yacht, the
Alexander.
He was often found weeping for his mother in the arms of Tiggy but such emotional demonstrations owed much to the alcohol he had put away.
During a shooting party on the Duke of Westminster’s estate he was sick across the bar at the Duke’s home, Eaton Hall in Cheshire, and a disgusted member of the catering staff was ordered to clean up after him while the ‘legless and
speechless’ Harry was put to bed. The same year he threw cider bottles and drunkenly abused teenage girls while
holidaying
at the Cornish resort of Rock. One of the girls he targeted said, ‘He was vomiting behind the wall. He’s one of the most revolting people I’ve ever come across.’
Invited to Spain the following year to play in the annual Sotogrande Copa de Plata polo tournament, he spent his nights in Marbella clubs, often staying at his table until the cleaners arrived around dawn.
The big trouble started once he joined William at Eton. Fellow students swear he did not drink during term time but made up for it when he invited a number of them to Highgrove during the school holidays. He founded Club H with a well-stocked bar in the cellars (converted in Charles’s time to a bomb-proof shelter) and it became the venue for wild parties with various mind-altering substances reportedly being handed around. All the new friends he had made at Eton were welcome with one exception: a particular boy, who was gay, had become infatuated with Harry, would follow him everywhere and wrote him ‘affectionate’ notes, becoming the bane of the Prince’s life as a result. According to another student:
Harry has nothing against chaps who bat for the other side as long as they don’t try and involve him. This particular fellow persisted, he would not leave him alone. I think Harry was too nice to tell him he simply wasn’t interested, that he liked girls too much to be interested, but on the second occasion that he turned up at Club H bringing a bunch of flowers – most
people brought a bottle – he was asked to leave. In fact he left Eton soon after. Harry was sad about that, too. He hated the thought of being responsible for someone else’s academic downfall, but if it hadn’t been him it would probably have been someone else and they were more likely to have given the chap a good hiding.
Girls as well as drugs were allegedly brought to Club H by Harry’s long-standing drinking buddy (still to this day) Guy Pelly, then a nineteen-year-old student at nearby Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester. Harry’s chat-up line for the girls he met in surrounding pubs and clubs was, ‘How would you like to come back to my palace for a drink?’ – a close runner-up to the
Playboy
boss’s immortal ‘Hi, I’m Hugh Hefner’. He had fewer problems than most men of his age in getting the girls to accept his invitation to party. Although she never went to Highgrove one 24-year-old, occasional model Suzannah Harvey, accepted the seventeen-year-old Prince’s invitation to ‘step outside’, during a hunt ball at Badminton House and was later to tell her story to a Sunday newspaper showing how wild he was when it came to necking and fondling members of the opposite sex.