Harry (13 page)

The year 2002 was not one Harry can look back on with much joy. Apart from his personal troubles it also ended in tragedy when his dearest friend, Henry van Straubenzee, whom Harry called Henners, was killed in a car crash just before Christmas. Like Harry, Henry longed for a career in the army and he was bound for Newcastle to read business studies under the sponsorship of the MoD, before going on to Sandhurst to begin his army training. Having gone to Harrow from Ludgrove, he had returned to teach for a term at his old prep school and had arranged a Christmas party for the boarders. When the sound system packed up some time after midnight he and a friend went out to borrow a CD player. It was a foggy night and as they travelled back up the long, narrow drive, their car crashed into a tree – the only tree on the drive. Henry died instantly and his friend, who had been at the wheel, was badly injured.

Harry was distraught when he heard the news. The two had been the closest of friends since their Ludgrove days. Grief-stricken, he hardly spoke a word to anyone before arriving with William and Tiggy days later, on 23 December, at the small parish church where the van Straubenzees had hurriedly arranged a funeral. Memories of their holidays in
Cornwall, French cricket on the beach by day and barbecues at night flooded through his mind. He had lost both his
great-grandmother,
the Queen Mother, and his great-aunt Princess Margaret that year but their time had come and their deaths were not a shock. At the age of eighteen ‘Henners’ had his whole life ahead of him and Harry had looked forward to many more happy meetings, holidays even, with the best pal he ever had. In January he attended a service of thanksgiving held for his life at Harrow School before returning to Eton, a chastened man.

It was with little emotion that on 12 June 2003 Harry bade Eton – in an arranged photo call with his long-suffering housemaster Andrew Gailey – farewell, writing in the leaving book that his next stop would be Sandhurst. He may have had no regrets about leaving the college, but Harry was sad to be parting from many of the close friends he made there and he remains in touch with a number of them, who have all done well. Not one of them has a bad word to say about the Prince, although several noted that he left Eton with none of the ambition that fired them.

Five sometimes difficult years had come to an end and he was happy to be going home to a private celebration at Highgrove during which his father gave him the welcome news that he had authorised St James’s Palace to announce that he would be the first senior royal for more than four decades to join the British Army. Harry was elated: not only was he now an Old Etonian but he was a candidate for Sandhurst, the Royal Military College. He was to achieve his
childhood ambition by becoming one of ‘Granny’s soldiers’. Navy-devotee Prince Philip was not so thrilled although his own joyous experience of piloting helicopters undoubtedly had some effect on Harry.

Although his son had achieved the necessary A levels to be accepted at Sandhurst, and despite a public declaration that he was ‘very proud of Harry’, Charles was
understandably
disappointed when the results came through. Despite excelling in sports – particularly polo and rugby – and being made house captain of games, after five years at Eton Harry managed only a B in art and a D in geography – more than 90 per cent of Eton’s pupils achieve grades A or B. He had dropped a third subject – history of art – after he got poor results in his AS exams the year before he left (his more academically inclined brother had achieved an A grade in geography, a B in history of art and a C in biology). And this was despite the efforts of an admiring teacher who subsequently claimed that she had helped Harry cheat to get the results he did manage to muster. Sarah Forsyth said that Eton’s head of art, Ian Burke, had asked her to prepare text to go with some of Harry’s work for an expressive project in which pupils are required to explain some of their work and relate it to that of great artists. She shocked everyone
associated
with lauding the Prince by saying that she assumed she had been asked to do it because Harry was in fact a weak student and that his academic failings were well known at Eton. Adding insult to injury she claimed that a teacher who marked his entrance exams had been desperate to find points
for which he could award marks. She went on to suggest that Harry’s work, which had featured in newspapers and included two screen prints inspired by Aboriginal designs, had actually been finished off by Burke.

Ms Forsyth claimed that, unbeknown to Harry, who trusted her, she had on 16 May 2003 secretly recorded him admitting that he had written ‘about a sentence’ of the disputed text. She was sacked for going public with the information but later won a claim for unfair dismissal although the tribunal hearing her case decided to reject her claim that she had done some of his written work for him, allowing a Clarence House spokesman to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by announcing: ‘We are delighted that Harry has been totally cleared of cheating.’

There had been one bright spot on the horizon as Harry cleared out his study at Eton: he had excelled in the school’s Combined Cadet Force and been promoted to the
highest
rank of cadet officer. Although, unlike his brother, he failed to win the Sword of Honour awarded to the school’s leading cadet, he led a detachment of forty-eight cadets as parade commander in the Eton Tattoo in front of a crowd of hundreds which included his clearly proud father and an assortment of the army’s top brass. If he had entertained doubts before about his ambitions to join the army – and for a while he thought about joining his friend Guy Pelly at the Cirencester Agricultural College – then that experience set his life-long dream in concrete: he was going to be a soldier.

His army life would have to be put on hold, however, and
not just for the traditional gap year. Despite having passed with flying colours the army’s pre-Regular Commissions Board assessment to test his aptitude for a military career, his father had decided that after the shocking surprises and disappointments of his Eton years, Harry must go away for two years – far away, to work hard ‘in his own best interests’.

Just as all this was happening, James Hewitt – who had encouraged if not inspired Harry’s military ambitions – released a statement that really set tongues wagging. The former cavalry officer emphatically announced that he was not Harry’s father:

There were some who failed to accept Hewitt’s declaration. One intellectual, who sees Charles regularly, says:

Hewitt’s declaration certainly disappointed those who had sought to profit by proving the contrary was true. One European tabloid newspaper had engaged an attractive blonde – Harry’s type! – to ensnare him in a honey trap, probably in Spain where his reputation as a lover of the night life was growing. Her job was to get close enough to him to run her fingers through his hair and snatch a strand or two. The ‘evidence’ would be examined for its DNA which would then be compared to Hewitt’s. Scotland Yard’s Specialist Operations department was alerted and the plot was thwarted, although not before Britain’s most senior police officers had been briefed and a worried Charles had consulted his lawyer, Fiona Shackleton.

And as for Hewitt’s announcement, as far as Harry was concerned it meant nothing. Prince Charles, his real father, had beaten Hewitt to the punch. Aware of how cruel gossip can be at such an upmarket establishment as Eton – where parents all claim to be privy to what goes on in the very top circles – Charles had summoned his younger son for a heart-to-heart meeting prior to his start at the college and warned him that he would hear such rumours and to assure him they were not true.

Harry listened to his father’s difficult speech without
interrupting
. He had always looked up to Hewitt, a war hero, a real-life tank commander in the First Gulf War and a likeable man. At one stage in his life he had been something of a mentor to the boy, who longed to follow in his soldiering footsteps – and Charles knew it. It was, by the account relayed
to me, one of the hardest moments in the heir’s life, for in his candid explanation it was impossible to conceal that Diana really had been in love with the dashing Household Cavalry officer. Despite the pain it caused the Prince to deliver the message, he handled it with great courage.

Harry thanked him for that but he hung on to his
admiration
for his mother’s soldier lover until Hewitt subsequently sold his story of the affair, an error of judgement that allowed a slavering tabloid-reading public to lap up the sordid details.

H
arry had hoped that after five arduous years at Eton, interspersed with his wild breaks at Highgrove, he would spend much of his gap year playing polo in Australia – he was already a member of the Beaufort and Cirencester clubs and given a season or two’s further experience was expected to join Britain’s elite group of 100 professional players. His father, however, had other ideas. Certainly he would be going to Australia but as a £100-a-week jackaroo (and his father would allow him not a penny more), a farm labourer, not as a fledgling polo star. Disappointed by the poor academic grades Harry had attained and concerned that he was still not over his wild days, Charles (who regarded himself as an academic despite having achieved no better than average results as an undergraduate) told him he was sending him off to far-flung corners of the world for not one gap year but two. In year one he would be rounding up cattle, shearing sheep and fixing broken fences on a farm Down Under, and in year two he would be doing even harder manual
work ‘somewhere in Africa’, putting off his much anticipated entry into the army until 2005, even though he had already passed the pre-Regular Commissions Board assessment with flying colours, virtually assuring him of a place at Sandhurst Military Academy.

They got the wrong idea in Australia, too. Newspaper reports and television shows were deluged with complaints about the anticipated £240,000 cost to them of helping his own protection officers guard the Prince. Public opinion was that his stint as a farmhand would be no more than a
glorified
holiday, as it might have been had Harry had his way.

Alas, the stint did not start well. No sooner had he got to know his five fellow jackaroos on the 40,000-acre Tooloombilla station in north-eastern Australia than he
realised
they were not the only company he would be having in the outback. Reporters and cameramen arrived in droves, all hoping to get the scoop of the ‘spoiled Prince’ getting
humiliated
down on the ranch. At one point he threatened to end his Queensland country experience and seats were booked for him and his bodyguards on an early morning flight out of Roma airport. ‘I can’t do what I came here to do so I might as well go home,’ he told one of his new farmhouse friends. The negative PR backlash of such a move, however, was clear to see: the Australian press had licence to label him a whinging Pom and Prince Philip sent word that at home his quitting would be likened to Prince Edward’s walking out on the Royal Marines because of the discipline he simply could not take.

It took a call from Buckingham Palace to oblige Queensland’s Premier, Peter Beattie, to make an official statement: Harry was still on the property – but a prisoner in the ranch house, restricted to watching videos instead of getting on with the work he had been sent to do, so leave him alone. Nevertheless a trip to the nearby Mitchell rodeo had to be called off when it was realised that, despite the Prime Minister’s plea, the army of newsmen threatening to descend on them was simply too large for the local security forces to handle.

Even his influential employer/hosts, Annie and Noel Hill – Annie had been an Earls Court flatmate of Diana’s and her husband was the son of the wealthy polo star Sinclair Hill, who was Charles’s polo coach – could do nothing to stem the media ambush. Press secretary Colleen Davis’s pleas for the journalists and photographers to leave him to get on with his work also fell on deaf ears. She was later replaced by the lofty but softly spoken Paddy Haverson, an army colonel’s son who had managed to end the feud between Alex Ferguson and David Beckham when he was press officer at Manchester United (although that was by prior arrangement).

It took a heartfelt appeal from Charles’s former equerry Mark Dyer, who was a sort of male Tiggy during Harry’s stay, to bring the charade to an end. ‘I’ve got a young man here in pieces,’ he told the hunting pack. After agreeing that there would be later photo opportunities the newsmen backed off, freeing Harry to get on with his chores, rising at seven each morning and working through till early evening with a
two-hour break for lunch when the Australian heat is at its fiercest – 40 degrees in the shade.

And that, as it turns out, was the moment Dyer – himself a hard-living ex-Welsh Guards officer – became Harry’s hero for life. The Prince could see that Dyer was not only a great diplomat, but also that no one would mess with him. Within days the Prince was able to slip into a bull-riding
competition
in the tiny nearby town of Injune (population 362). He wandered up to the ticket booth and paid his $10 entrance fee to gain admission to the Queensland Rodeo Association state finals. Then, sitting on a grass hill, he videoed the event and – aware that his father was scrutinising reports of his activities – sipped a soft drink rather than the beer most around him were enjoying.

He declined an invitation to ride a steer but good naturedly accepted some friendly ribbing; Jamie Johnson, president of the Injune Rodeo Association, called him ‘a useless pommy jackaroo like all of them that come out here’.

Harry had been warned by his father in advance that when speaking to people he should do his best to avoid any trace of upper-crust English accent. When he was in Australia many years earlier Charles was being driven through the outback when he spotted a gang of labourers working on the road in the blistering heat and seemingly hundreds of miles from anywhere. He ordered his driver to stop so he might step out of the limousine and speak to them. It was, to say the least, a stilted conversation: once they had told him they had been away from their homes for weeks he asked them, ‘And what
about your wives?’ Unfortunately the Windsor pronunciation of ‘wives’ left them nonplussed and after he had repeated the question three times to the puzzled group, one of the gang turned to his fellows and said, ‘I think he wants us to wave,’ and a red-faced Charles, watched by his policeman, the aptly named Paul Officer, stood on the roadside facing a handful of men waving at him just as the crowds had done in Sydney.

Two months after the media fracas, Harry honoured the deal Dyer had made for him. The media were allowed to film and photograph the nineteen-year-old as, dressed in
open-neck
blue shirt, jeans, donning a brown Akubra hat, he rode a chestnut horse called Guardsman and guided a herd of thirty Shorthorn and Shorthorn Charolais cattle around part of the property. It was a very different Harry from the young man who had arrived in the country just nine weeks earlier and sulked his way through a media baptism by fire. He had also been able to indulge his twin passions of polo and rugby, travelling to Sydney to lead his Young England team to a 4–6 victory over Young Australia Polo. Next he was in the stadium to witness the successful World Cup campaign of the England rugby team, joining his cousin Zara Phillips and her future husband Mike Tindall for an appropriate
celebration
in some of the city’s wilder bars.

There was no longer any danger of ‘whinging Pom’
accusations
. At home, after Mark Dyer had called him with an extremely favourable report of the second son’s
transformation
, Prince Charles celebrated the success of his plan with champagne, declaring, ‘It’s working.’ His boy, it seemed, was
becoming a man. Alas, if he thought the troubles were fixed then he would have another think coming in the months to follow: his high-spirited son’s hard-drinking, partying days were far from over.

For the time being, however, all seemed well and Charles was much relieved for he had problems of his own to deal with. Still bereft at the loss in March 2002 of his beloved grandmother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, he had consoled himself with the thought that he could
perpetuate
her memory by moving from St James’s Palace into her London residence, Clarence House, just as she had wished. Then one of his closest friends, Emilie van Cutsem, had asked him: ‘What about Camilla?’ The Camilla Question remained unresolved despite the fact that she had been divorced from her husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, for years and had even discussed the subject of marriage to Charles with the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey. It would be improper, his closest friends counselled, for him to be living in sin in his grandmother’s old house. Van Cutsem told him: ‘You must decide whether to marry her or let her go.’ After the house had been renovated at great public expense, however, Charles and Camilla moved in together and shared a bedroom but he did nothing about their marital status.

The most insurmountable obstacle standing in the way of their marriage was not the attitude of the Queen or Prince Philip, his brothers and sister, the Anglican Synod or its members, but the implacable opposition of the Catholic
Church, of which she was very much a member. Catholic hostility to divorcee Camilla led to an embarrassing incident when the ecumenically minded Prince was invited to attend a service at Westminster Cathedral in early 2004. Camilla wanted to accompany him and a phone call was made on her behalf from St James’s Palace to the cathedral. The monsignor who took the call said he would have to refer the request to the Archbishop. The reply to the Palace was that the Archbishop could not agree to such a suggestion. Charles had to make the visit to the cathedral on his own.

The truth was that Charles needed his mistress more than ever, as a couple of moments of Goonish farce at the royal European premiere of film
Cold Mountain,
starring Nicole Kidman, in a wintry London in 2003 had demonstrated. When Charles was being introduced to members of the cast in the traditional pre-screening line-up, it became apparent that he had no idea of the identity of the shortish, shaven-headed chap in a suit who introduced him with such easy familiarity to Kidman, Jude Law and Ray Winstone. Charles chatted to each of the stars in turn, starting with Winstone. When he reached Kidman, Charles asked whether she had been in the movie
Enigma.
Realising he had mixed her up with Kate Winslet, Nicole smiled: ‘No.’

Charles added: ‘You’ve done a bit since then …
Moulin Rouge.
’

‘Yes,’ replied Nicole, growing increasingly uncomfortable, ‘a few things.’

As the man who had been making the introductions
hovered at his side, the Prince whispered to an aide: ‘Who is this chap?’

‘He,’ the Prince was informed, ‘is Anthony Minghella, the director of the film.’

‘Oh God,’ said Charles, ‘the ice-cream man from the Isle of Wight!’

This was a reference to the trade formerly practised by Minghella’s hard-working parents. ‘Charles had not done his homework,’ the aide admits. ‘That’s the sort of thing Harry could have helped him with. He was always up to date with such things and would have made sure his father knew exactly who he was meeting had he been there.’ With Harry absent, Charles needed Camilla by his side.

On 13 February 2004 Harry was despatched to the Kingdom of Lesotho, a 12,000-square mile landlocked enclave totally surrounded by South Africa, which it supplies with water from the huge quantities garnered by its lush mountain region. Although Lesotho (which translates as ‘the land of the people who speak Sesotho’) is also rich in diamonds, 40 per cent of its people live below the poverty line and it has the third-highest rate of AIDS in the world. Charles chose it as a country badly in need of the kind of charitable work Diana had
undertaken
in the latter years of her life. Harry would learn that AIDS was responsible for the colossal number of orphans he would encounter during his stay in the country and, more importantly, that he could bring smiles to their sad faces.

Upon his arrival, Harry was met in the capital Maseru by Lesotho’s Prince Seeiso, the brother of King Letsie III. The
country’s government is a modified form of a constitutional monarchy, the Prime Minister is the head of government and the monarch serves in a ceremonial capacity only. But this was no royal tour even though Seeiso stayed with him for much of his time there and introduced him to many of the people. Hard work lay ahead. Just outside the town of Mokhotlong, Harry was handed a set of tools and told to get stuck in with those labouring to create the foundations for a new health clinic. He hardly had time to draw breath before he found himself
working
as part of a gang on a road bridge over the Sanqebethu River.

He helped dig trenches to divert water away from the crop fields at Ha Moeketsane and spent time sowing vegetable seeds for the garden at an orphanage. It brought back to him another saying he had heard from a counsellor at the Featherstone Lodge rehab when an addict was bemoaning the fact that he was low on self-worth: ‘If you want to regain self-worth go out and do something worthy.’

Accompanying a doctor on his rounds in the village of Matsieng, he saw the horrifying extent of the AIDS pandemic that gripped much of the country. The young Prince could not do enough for the victims. When his working day was over he taught the children to play touch rugby and painted their barren rooms for them. He discovered that, in addition to those suffering as a result of AIDS, there were children known locally as ‘herd boys’, boys as young as five who had been sent by their families to look after livestock in remote locations on their own. These children have to fend for themselves and many do not survive.

To draw attention to the efforts of the British Red Cross in Lesotho he made a television documentary,
The Forgotten Kingdom,
which also raised more than £500,000 for the cause. Then, in partnership with Prince Seeiso, he founded a new charity: ‘Sentebale [Forget me not – a veiled reference to his mother and her charity work], the Princes’ fund for Lesotho’. The charity had four programmes: one to provide management advice and funding to care for children who are orphaned or disabled; another to arrange regular camps for children aware of their HIV status; a third to make education
available
to children who live in remote mountainous areas and finally what Harry calls the Letsema network – a collaborative online network encouraging people to congregate and ‘discuss topical matters concerning children in their care’. One of his main problems has been to raise international awareness of Lesotho’s plight and, as a remedy, he came up with a number of promotional ideas including the Sentebale Polo Cup which moves to a different location around the globe each year.