Harry (15 page)

Outside he climbed into the car that had been waiting to transport him the short distance home when his eyes focused on Chris Uncle, a photographer working for the Big Pictures agency. ‘Suddenly he burst out of the car,’ says Uncle,

Another photographer, Charlie Pycraft, told BBC News that Harry had indeed attacked Uncle: ‘He was half-way getting into the back of the car when he suddenly reacted and lunged at him, grabbed his camera and pushed him against the wall.’

While the Prince used his best soldier-speak expletives during the altercation, his protection officer, helped by the two club doormen, pulled him off and pushed him into the back of the car which then sped away. Giving Harry’s version of events the following day a Clarence House spokesman said that even though it was Uncle who sported the evidence of a cut lip from the altercation, it was the Prince who had been hit in the face. Harry was fortunate that Uncle did not press
charges for assault. No one is on record as saying whether he was inebriated on that occasion, but then again, who sits in a nightclub until three in the morning without consuming a fair amount of alcohol? Certainly not Harry Wales.

Once more, it was time to move on and the Queen made her feelings known to Charles, suggesting he make it clear to Harry that he was a royal not a selfish, arrogant movie star. He was into his second gap year and there were more good works to be done … and, yes, more nightclubs, at safe distances from London, deserving of a royal visit. So off he went, this time to Argentina, but Harry’s insatiable appetite for the wild life – something most twenty-year-olds would appreciate –was to get him into trouble yet again during his stay there. He had arranged to stay on the El Remanso (the Backwater) estate with friends Mark and Luke Tomlinson (sons of Prince Charles’s friends Simon and Claire Tomlinson). The estate was owned by Major Christopher Hanbury, polo patron, racehorse owner and for two decades an aide to once the world’s wealthiest man, the Sultan of Brunei. El Remanso’s own polo grounds were still under construction so Harry planned to practise each day at the nearby La Alegria estate but residence at Hanbury’s spread ensured him close
proximity
to the world’s best polo player, Adolfo Cambiaso, from whom he expected to learn much.

Alas, his plans were thwarted by a knee injury which prevented him from riding let along playing polo. Instead he made frequent visits to the nearby town of Lobos where he drank beer and played pool with men who lived and
breathed horses specially bred for polo, before moving on to the clubs favoured by local girls. He became extremely
popular
with the townspeople, who marvelled at his lack of airs and graces but the popularity did not extend to those charged with protecting him. According to one newspaper report the adventure-seeking playboy Prince ‘escaped on a motorbike with four Scotland Yard bodyguards having to chase him. For the police Harry became a real headache.’

Frustrated by being unable to ride, he tried on more than one occasion to slip away with his friends on fishing trips but, to his annoyance, the over-enthusiastic local police insisted on following him. The final straw came when a newspaper reported that a murder suspect had told a journalist that underworld characters were planning to kidnap Harry when he next visited the Bar Nievas in the one-street town of Salvador Maria, a rough bar frequented by hoodlums and bandits. The bar could not have been more different than the London night spots Harry had become used to where champagne can cost £1,000 a bottle. With its bare walls and crude wooden tables, Omar Nievas’s establishment
discourages
women customers, preferring to serve their card-playing menfolk the local Quilmes beer at thirty pence a bottle.

The Nievas security scare was enough and Argentine authorities told Harry’s detectives they could no longer
guarantee
his safety in their country. What was always thought to have been planned as a six-week ‘working trip’ was to be cut short, with the media throughout South America reporting that the Prince was being sent home in disgrace. After
the Buenos Aires daily
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claimed that Harry had returned to his hosts’ estate from one night of partying in town in ‘quite bad condition given his uncontrolled
consumption
of alcohol’, it was agreed that this was time to call it a night. Despite obvious heightened security at Ezeiza airport at the start of his journey home, Buckingham Palace insisted he was returning on exactly the date that had been scheduled. Whichever way, that particular party was over. And anyway, Christmas was coming.

It was a quiet Christmas with his father and brother under the Queen’s roof at Sandringham – the traditional break Diana dreaded each year. The princes stayed for the traditional New Year shoots but sped off to Highgrove as soon as good manners would allow. Harry was presented with an
opportunity
to redeem himself. The earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean that exploded into being on Boxing Day morning just off the coast of Indonesia was the longest-lasting faulting ever known. It caused a series of tsunamis in the area that killed more than 230,000 people; Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand were the hardest-hit countries but the devastation spread across large swathes of the eastern hemisphere.

After watching a documentary about the pitiful plight of the tens of thousands of children orphaned, the
brothers
asked what they could do to help. They were told there was a warehouse at nearby Warmley where volunteers were preparing and packing hygiene packs for the Red Cross to despatch to the Maldives where more than 15,000 people had been made homeless. The princes wasted no time in joining
the volunteer force. Harry said later: ‘It’s been by far the worst thing I’ve ever seen. We’re not exempt from what everybody else does. We just wanted to be hands on. We didn’t want to sit back.’

Alas, his halo slipped a bit just twenty-four hours later. Harry had been invited to join 250 guests at a party at the Chippenham home of the Olympic triple gold medallist Richard Meade to celebrate the twenty-second birthday of the showjumper’s son, also called Harry. It was a fancy dress party with a colonial theme and Prince William delighted others by dressing as a lion. It was Prince Harry’s choice of costume that caused a furore: he went as a Nazi to try and outdo his devil-may-care friend Guy Pelly who said he was going as the Queen.

Harry had on a jacket with the German flag on one arm and when he removed it, it revealed that he was wearing the desert uniform of General Rommel’s Afrika Korps with a badge of the Wehrmacht on the collar. Most of those present – many of them, like Prince Charles, members of the Beaufort Hunt – would have kept quiet but one of the guests took a photograph and sold it to
The Sun,
which published it a few days later under the front-page headline
HARRY THE NAZI.
The picture showed the third in line holding a drink and smoking a cigarette while bedecked in a shirt altered to look like a German uniform by the addition of the collar flashes and an eagle insignia on the chest. The part of the
amateurish
ensemble which caused most offence, however, was a red, white and black swastika armband. He’d hired the outfit from
Maud’s Cotswold Costumes in nearby Nailsworth where no questions were asked although, apparently, eyebrows were raised. No one has been able to explain how he managed to leave Highgrove without anyone spotting him so attired – Prince Charles was still in Scotland where he had seen the New Year in. But it is a sign of Harry’s determination not to be overruled by his brother that William was unable to persuade him that the outfit was, at least, unsuitable for a British prince – and a potential British Army cadet at that – to wear, even to a fancy dress party.

The incident caused international outrage in the Jewish community which was preparing to mark the sixtieth
anniversary
of the liberation of Auschwitz, and there was even a call from a former armed forces minister for Harry to be stripped of his place at Sandhurst, saying that the picture showed he was unsuitable for the prestigious military academy. Fortunately that didn’t happen but Harry was obliged by his father to make a humiliating formal apology, albeit via a press spokesman, who said the Prince was very sorry if his poor choice of costume had caused any offence or embarrassment to anyone. The Conservative leader Michael Howard said he should have made the apology in person rather than through a spokesman. A leading Jewish figure said his father – who had already made him atone for the offence by swilling out the pigs on his farm – should compel him to attend a forthcoming ceremony at the death camp Auschwitz later that month.

Never mind death camp, for Harry it was clearly time for boot camp.

T
he obvious answer to Harry’s problems was to get him into the army at the earliest opportunity. That was his wish in any case. Whereas his brother’s choice of toys in the days of the Highgrove nursery were usually games, puzzles and Dinky cars, Harry’s most treasured possessions were a complete set of lead toy soldiers and, ironically, the model of a Panzer tank, developed in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. He would play noisily with those for what seemed like hours while William pitted his early affinity for business against his mother over a game of Monopoly, neither boy paying
attention
to the wooden rocking horse (a present from Nancy Reagan) which stood in the corner alongside a miniature antique piano that had been a christening gift for Harry from Barry Manilow.

His favourite choice of garb as a small boy was the little soldier’s uniform James Hewitt had run up for him by his regimental tailor prior to one of the highlights of his early years – a visit to Combermere Barracks, the Windsor home
of the Household Cavalry. It was there, clad in the
miniature
flak jacket, army trousers and beret, which Hewitt had shown him exactly how to position, that he decided on his career plan: clambering on a real tank (and a British one!) he declared, ‘I’m going to be a soldier when I grow up.’

Fascinated by the vast array of weapons displayed in a gun cabinet in the Cavalry Museum, he pleaded to be allowed to hold one but Diana forbade him, saying there would be plenty of opportunity to do so in the future.

She was not wrong, although she underestimated Harry’s determination to enter his desired Service: when Hewitt said it would be nice for Harry to one day join his regiment, she replied: ‘Yes, I’d like that too. But sadly this family goes into the navy, which they regard as the Senior Service.’

Although in essence she was correct, Harry’s father is Colonel-in-Chief of twelve army regiments and the boy was fully aware of the ‘secret’ wardrobe in which Charles’s uniforms hang and had frequently inspected his array of
ceremonial
medals. However, his grandmother’s position as head of all Britain’s armed forces – the only person in the country who can officially declare war and peace – offered some room for flexibility on that point.

The miniature army uniform Hewitt had had made for him was worn practically threadbare and his request every Christmas for a replacement ignored, but Harry finally acquired a second one when he accompanied his mother on an official visit to the Light Dragoons Regiment at
Bergen-Hohne
Barracks near Hanover on 29 July 1993 – a day which
should have been a joyous one for Diana since it was the twelfth anniversary of her wedding to Charles. Concerned, so she said, that her sons might fall out over who could ride the tank, she had left William at home and taken the son she said was ‘into soldiers at the moment’.

Because the visit was an official one, Harry was
immaculately
dressed in his best school uniform for the benefit of the waiting photographers – but not for long. Not to be outdone by the outfit he’d heard Hewitt had had made, the Light Dragoons’ quartermaster had sent to Kensington Palace for Harry’s measurements and had camouflage fatigues made which the Prince duly turned out in, with a beret to match those worn by the soldiers his mother had just inspected and with camouflage paint applied to his face to perfect the look. He was in his element and duly clambered aboard the Scimitar tank for the ride he’d been promised. This made his visit to the Combermere Barracks look like tame stuff, for the Dragoons had arranged a mock battle with machine guns firing blank rounds at the Scimitar. When he could see through the multi-coloured smoke they had also arranged, Harry directed operations from the tank’s turret. According to an observant reporter present at the time, Harry blotted his copybook on that occasion by waving to his mother from the tank instead of saluting her. But at least he was now in absolutely no doubt about what he wanted to be when he grew up.

Harry had his chance to use a real gun long before Diana would have wished. Charles introduced him at an early age to
grouse shooting. He was just nine when he badly bruised his shoulder during a royal shoot. He had not held the weapon correctly – a mistake he was never likely to repeat. Two years later Prince Philip bought him a shotgun for Christmas, earning himself still more negative points from Diana.

Unlike their mother, neither boy had any qualms about hunting to kill. On one occasion Harry earned himself
negative
front-page headlines when, out on a shoot with his father at Sandringham, he misfired and almost felled one of the beaters, the men who were there to drive out the pheasants for the royal party to shoot.

Harry’s agonising wait to join the army finally ended early in May 2005, four months after the public humiliation over his choice of costume for the fancy dress party, but first he had a wedding to go to. Prince Charles was to marry Camilla in a civil ceremony at the Guildhall, Windsor on 8 April. Well, that was the plan; in the event the wedding was switched to the following day so that Charles could represent the Queen at the funeral of Pope John Paul II on what was originally intended to be his and Camilla’s big day. It was Harry in best mischievous form who chided his father that the worldwide television interest and the crowds thronging the streets on the Saturday were really there to celebrate the union of local lady Grace Beesley to one Fraser Moores half an hour before the heir to the throne wed the woman he had loved for more than thirty years.

And, however the Queen felt on the day about her eldest son marrying his mistress, it was Harry who made her laugh
by imitating the kind of facial expression she famously adopts when confronted with something she disapproves of.

Covering the wedding for Fox News from the roof of a building that housed a branch of the Threshers booze stores on the ground floor, I mentioned to my co-host, one John Scott, how intolerant Charles was of anyone who drank too much. That had, unfortunately, brought him into conflict on more than one occasion with Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd. She subsequently lost her driving licence through a drink-driving offence she blamed in court on me for
writing
her a letter which caused her ‘considerable distress’. At the time I was writing, with Dominic Midgley, a book called
Diana On The Edge
that examined the Princess’s
psychological
problems; one expert had suggested that anyone who suffered from both bulimia and self-harming had almost certainly been abused as a child. I wrote to her mother to ask if this had been the case. Alas, it caused her to have one too many, after which she unwisely went for a spin in her car and was arrested for driving under the influence. She never forgave me and it is unlikely she ever forgave her royal son-in-law for his occasional expressions of negative
opinion
. When she died in June 2004 Harry and William flew to the Scottish Isle of Seil for her funeral, but Charles stayed at home.

When he finally stepped through the doors of the Royal Military Academy in the Berkshire village of Sandhurst on 8 May 2005, as the most senior member of the Royal Family in living memory to enter training there, Harry was under
no illusions about the discipline and fortitude he would have to display, particularly in view of the ‘spoiled toff’
reputation
concomitant with being a prince. The first five weeks were going to be difficult for a man who enjoyed the kind of freedom and benders he had become accustomed to. A senior royal aide says he was instructed by Charles to tell the Sandhurst commandant, Major General Andrew Ritchie, not to spare the rod:

Sandhurst is where all officers in the British Army are taught the qualities of leadership. It’s the equivalent of the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, which Harry’s father, grandfather and uncle Andrew attended, and the Royal Air Force College at Cranwell. More than 80 per cent of officer cadets are university graduates and no one can pay to get in although some sons of wealthy foreign potentates have been known to try.

Charles drove his son there just as he had driven him to Eton on his first day. The playful punch he gave him on the arm as he dropped him off at the Old College training centre in Camberley seemed to signal: ‘Get your act together, you’re a man now.’ But Harry knew he had to do more than most
if he was to make a success of this longed-for career since he would be closely watched twenty-four hours a day.

Nevertheless, once the heir to the throne had left, Harry became just one of the 270 recruits joining that day for the 44-week course and that’s exactly the way he wanted it: although the college was special, he was a normal recruit. Of the three companies, he was told he would be attached to Alamein and become a member of a thirty-strong platoon. After enrolling he picked up the keys to his room and a red name badge with just the word ‘Wales’ printed in white capital letters. Just as there were no ‘HRH’s at Mrs Mynors’ school when he first entered aged three, Harry noticed the same went for Sandhurst. From this point on he was Officer Cadet Wales. The room he was to call home for the
foreseeable
future was even more modest than the one he had been allocated at Eton and this time there was no maid to keep it clean and tidy: he was required to provide his own ironing board and to place such items as his toothbrush and paste with exact spaces in between, much as servants had done for him in the past. Even his bed had to be made perfectly with the corners turned back and the blankets folded into a neat block. Everything had to be in perfect order for inspection at 5.30 each morning: ‘I was never up this early unless I was going to bed this late,’ he told a fellow cadet, whom he also told that for the first time in his life he had learned to use a lavatory brush – something a royal maid had once revealed his grandmother was a dab hand at. Just a photograph of his mother – the same one he had kept in his room at Eton
– propped on the simple bedside table would define him to visitors – not that there were likely to be many of those. Though thirty-two female cadets joined the same day there was no mixing of the sexes – the women trained in a separate platoon and their rooms were out of bounds. And anyway, there was always Chelsy – with whom he had just enjoyed a romantic break – waiting in the wings. But what, he asked himself, would she make of his almost shaven head? She hadn’t seen him with his Michael Owen cut at Eton.

Harry had more to contend with than the lack of female company. A fellow cadet was obviously determined to fill the boast back home that he had given the third in line to the throne a beating; he chose his off-duty moment after a group – including Harry – had enjoyed a few beers. ‘He picked on the wrong man, unfortunately,’ says one who witnessed the fight. Harry let him have it where it hurts most and he was never picked on again. ‘Harry always fought to win and he didn’t mind fighting dirty, either,’ explains Ken Wharfe, who took many a punch in his private parts when he had charge of the Prince as a child.

No mention was made of the incident when he gave an interview on his twenty-first birthday that September to Sky News, BBC Radio and the Press Association. His
interviewers
had to agree that he was a different man from the one they had encountered in the past; a serious, dedicated soldier. Despite his assertion that ‘I am who I am. I’m not going to change,’ he clearly had. This did not appear to be the party Prince of old, but a fast-maturing, well-disciplined adult
whose days of drinking and brawling were over … or so it seemed that day. He said that in certain circumstances he had been treated even more harshly than other recruits – ‘But it did me good’. He was determined to serve on the front line when the time came and gave the frequently repeated quote: ‘There’s no way I’m going to put myself through Sandhurst and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country.’ And speaking for the first time about the Nazi uniform incident, he did what many had expected at the time and delivered a personal apology: ‘It was a very stupid thing to do and I learned my lesson… That was then and this is now. It’s something I will never do again. It was a stupid thing to do. I think it’s part of growing up.’

It was during his first term at Sandhurst that Harry was appointed a Counsellor of State on his twenty-first birthday that September, ousting Prince Edward. He would serve in that capacity by standing in for the Queen when she visited Malta two months later to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting and by all accounts he loved being up there, as he put it, ‘with the top guys’. There were more honours to come: a few months later he was appointed as one of nine new Commodores-in-Chief of the Royal Navy: Commodore-in-Chief, Small Ships and Diving. The growing responsibilities seemed to mature him.

The proudest day of Harry’s life was probably 12 April 2006. The Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles, his stepmother the Duchess of Cornwall, his brother and his proud and loving former nanny Tiggy (now Mrs Pettifer) all turned up for his
passing-out parade at which he and the other 219 graduates were inspected by his grandmother. The Queen smiled at him and Prince William saluted him. Only one important person in his life was missing: Chelsy had arrived in London but stayed away from the ceremony in order to avoid being a distraction at the extremely formal event. She would see him later at the Sandhurst ball and she would be with him when, at precisely midnight as tradition demanded, he removed the velvet cover from the new officers’ pips on the jacket shoulder of his perfectly tailored £2,000 mess suit. Via another
tradition
he became a second lieutenant as he climbed the steps to Old College. As a Blues and Royals officer he would receive a salary of almost £22,000 a year. He deserved the honour heaped on him: he had behaved perfectly for forty-four weeks and responded to the strictest discipline without a murmur of dissent. At the ball even he was dazzled by Chelsy’s stunning appearance in a backless turquoise satin dress and with her hair pinned up to emphasise her long neck and tanned back. There was a round of applause as the couple kissed
passionately
on the dance floor. It was a sign of the change in him that, although each cadet had been allowed to invite nine guests, none of the friends from his wayward days were there – just Chelsy and William. Outside they watched a fireworks display, ate hamburgers smothered with onions and washed them down with champagne. He posed for photographs with anyone who asked, returning a bottom pinch one girl had audaciously carried out.