Authors: Chris Hutchins
Awesome stuff, but first he had a wedding to go to. As a clear signal of the growing admiration he had for his mentor Mark Dyer, before setting off for Wattisham the
morning-suited
Prince acted as an usher at the former royal equerry’s wedding to his Texan bride Amanda Kline in the Welsh town of Abergavenny. He had grown close to Dyer since the former Welsh Guards officer took him under his wing during the drugs scandal of 2002 and was greatly impressed by the way he handled the press invasion during his ‘virtual rehab’ gap-year sojourn in Australia. Clearly moved by the ceremony and, in jolly mood, he told one guest at the
reception
afterwards: ‘Gosh, this is so lovely it makes me want to get married too and have lots of kids.’
But as Chelsy, the only serious candidate to be his partner for life, might have thought of a boy with such a roving eye, the trouble was choosing a girl he could settle down with from the multitude of eager contenders waiting in the wings.
A
s Harry Wales discovered early in life, there are lots of advantages to being a royal, but there are
disadvantages
too. Many young sons of wealthy parents have all the material things their hearts desire – fabulous homes,
luxurious
holidays and servants to ensure their every need is taken care of. In Harry’s case there is an added bonus: there are few desirable women in the world who would not like to be a princess. He has had his choice of a multitude of such delectable females and quite a few of them, it has to be said, were the daughters of women who would give anything to be related by marriage to Her Majesty the Queen. But there was one big problem he had to face that would not trouble his contemporaries: how was he ever going to know if the girl he eventually chose would be the right one, marrying him for the right reason?
But Harry’s first love was not a girl chasing his fame and potential fortune. From the moment he set eyes on the
beautiful
Laura Gerard Leigh, a nice St Mary’s Calne girl, during
his troubled time at Eton (where she was said to be a regular visitor) he fell head-over-heels in love. Prince Philip, wary of the dangers of Harry falling for a misfit, was particularly delighted when he learned of the budding romance between his grandson and the granddaughter of the close friend he called ‘G’ – Colonel William Gerard Leigh, who had served in the Life Guards throughout the Second World War and was a much respected figure in the polo world.
The Gerard Leighs’ close connections with the Royal Family promised a match made in heaven. Alas, much as she liked him, Laura was not as besotted with Harry as he was with her though she enjoyed his attention, his sense of humour and his gracious hospitality. On their many summer evenings out the pair talked endlessly about their mutual love of rugby (she attended the Six Nations tournament with him) and horses – especially polo horses. But, as he admitted later, his passion for the beautiful girl at his side was never fully reciprocated. Letters he wrote professing his love for her failed to receive the desired answers. Romantic Valentine cards from Harry were answered with jocular ones from Laura.
A contemporary at Eton says:
Harry was heartbroken. I believe he turned to drinking
copious
quantities of vodka at that time because of it. I was going through a similar experience myself so I knew how he felt. We both thought more about our loves than we did our suffering studies. Laura wasn’t interested in titles and prospects – her father was a multi-millionaire stockbroker so she didn’t have
to care about money, just love, real love, and sadly, from what I witnessed, as much as she liked Harry she decided she wasn’t in love with him.
The match ended when both set off for their respective gap years. According to Harry he tried to keep the fire in his heart burning, but once they were apart there was little or no response from the girl he had fallen so deeply in love with.
And then along came Margaret – that’s her middle name, she declines to be identified any further – a totally different girl from Miss Gerard Leigh. Unlike the rich and
often-spoiled
women he met in nightclubs and parties, ‘Margaret’ was an ordinary girl he first glimpsed on a visit to her shop where he had called in to pick up groceries during his time at school.
He was very nice, very polite and at first I didn’t even
recognise
him. After we’d been chatting for a few minutes he asked me if I would join him for a drink later. I told him I had a boyfriend but he was very persuasive and I agreed to see him at a pub in a nearby town – another girl who worked with me whispered in my ear, ‘You know who that is, don’t you? It’s Prince William’s brother, it’s Prince Harry.’ I was stunned, the closest I had ever been to anyone famous was when Kenny Everett came to an event in our town and I plucked up the courage to ask him for an autograph.
I didn’t want to be seen with Harry by anyone who knew me or, more importantly, someone who would tell my boyfriend,
so we met up in this pub and I had cider and he had a beer. He was really lovely although I don’t think he really knew how to [behave] with someone from the other side of the tracks; all his friends were upper class, privileged people. Also, I felt so guilty because I knew my boyfriend would have been very upset if he knew. We talked for more than an hour – he asked me about my job, whether I had any hobbies, and when I said I had to go because I needed to catch a certain bus, he asked me for my mobile number and I gave it to him; he didn’t offer me his but he did ask me not to talk to anybody from the newspapers about him and me which offended me a bit so half-jokingly I said to him, ‘OK, on condition you don’t talk to them about me,’ which made him laugh.
Anyway, he called me the next day and said he’d enjoyed my company and would like to see me again. We met on two further occasions and on the second he held my hand and kissed me and said he thought he was falling for me. I felt awful, I liked him a lot but I knew it wouldn’t come to anything and that I risked losing the boy I’d been
courting
for nearly two years. I was also embarrassed because there was a man who was obviously his minder hovering in the background.
Harry called me several times after that but I had to tell him I couldn’t see him again. He was pleading but I knew it was wrong. I could never be part of his world. I cried buckets after that last call but he never rang me again. He’d said he understood. I wrote it all down in my diary – including the cheeky remarks he made to me – but I destroyed the diary on
the night before I married my boyfriend, a marriage which is very happy, I’m pleased to say, and we have two lovely children.
Margaret’s story says a great deal about Harry’s genuine compassion. The Prince that she encountered was not a royal playboy but a young man who would ultimately give his heart to whomever he was attracted to, regardless of their position or status in life. As Margaret herself sums up their brief romance:
I still think about Harry. He’s such a lovely man, a true
gentleman
. I never talked about it before except to a girlfriend who I know called you. Please don’t let anyone else contact me. It’s long been my secret and I guess his too. I’ve read all about his affairs – well, his girlfriends – in the papers and I hope he’s happy but none of them seem like the kind of girl I believe he needs. Glamour and nightclubs may sound very attractive but the Harry I knew, albeit briefly, needs real love and he doesn’t seem to have found it.
Prince Philip might well have approved of Margaret after his fears that Harry’s position in life might be used for all the wrong reasons were realised when a Hollywood publicist decided to link the Prince with a young starlet he was anxious to turn into an international celebrity. The girl was one Hilary Duff, an up-and-coming actress who had just appeared in
Lizzie McGuire
and also had high hopes of becoming a
singing
star. The hype merchant helping her on her way claimed
that Harry had made a series of telephone calls to her and that the pair were ‘keen to meet up soon’. Duff herself said: ‘This is just like a fairy tale and he’s my Prince Charming.’ She even sent the bemused Prince an autographed poster for her movie, a film he had never seen since the picture was aimed at fourteen-year-old girls. The ambitious PR campaign bandied it about that Harry had initiated contact with Duff: ‘He pulled a few strings and was able to get his private
telephone
number to her. He was thrilled when she called him. They’ve just started talking on a regular basis. It’s a case of puppy love for both of them.’ Duff soon forgot Harry when she married the real man of her dreams, a professional hockey player called Mike Comrie.
Although there can never be a replacement for the first love in anyone’s life, he was to find brief consolation in the arms of two others: TV presenter Natalie Pinkham, a friend of his cousin Zara Phillips, and Beaufort polo club assistant Jo Davies. If there was one girl who certainly had nothing to gain from publicity linking her with Harry it was Pinkham, a talented broadcaster who fascinated him with her love of extreme sports like bungee jumping, canyoning, sky diving, paragliding, scuba diving and rock climbing. Similar to him, she was a keen supporter of good causes and received acclaim for walking on fire for the Motor Neurone Disease Association. But Pinkham announced that she was suing a newspaper (not
The Sun
, which had first printed it) for publishing a photograph of the Prince kissing her cheek and cupping her breast which had been taken three years earlier,
alleging a current romance. Pinkham, who was introduced initially to Harry by her ex-boyfriend, former England rugby team captain Matt Dawson, claimed the picture was from her own private collection and represented ‘a flagrant breach of copyright’.
No such litigation was brought to bear by the
delightful
Ms Davies, at twenty-seven then eight years Harry’s senior, who made light of her kiss with Harry. Then assistant manager at Cirencester Park Polo Club, she joked, ‘What can I say? It’s all a bit silly really. We’re just friends.’ Her embarrassment was not diminished, however, at the
publication
in the national press of a topless photograph of her (well, she was using oranges to cover her modesty) taken for a charity calendar.
It was, however, Chelsy Davy who eventually captured his heart. On his twenty-first birthday (15 September 2005) he surprised even his father by going public and declaring that Chelsy was his girlfriend. In the spring of 2006 they spent a fortnight on a getting-to-know-you holiday and,
following
her return to the UK on a six-week break, they stayed at Highgrove at weekends and a borrowed cottage on the Lulworth Castle estate during his leave from a tank-driving course at Bovington in Dorset. To their friends it sounded bliss: this was surely the real thing. They were together constantly until, on the evening of 20 May, he decided to have a night out on his own after watching a show headlined by Ozzy Osbourne and Lionel Richie. On the other side of town the same thought had crossed the mind of Catherine
Davies, a 34-year-old married (though separated from her husband) mother of two. Their paths crossed at the Art Bar in Walton Street, Knightsbridge. One can only imagine how Chelsy felt when she subsequently read Mrs Davies’s account of what followed: ‘Hi, I’m Harry,’ said the Prince, thirteen years younger than the woman whose cleavage had transfixed him. In what seemed like no time at all he invited her to join him on a club crawl, travelling in the back of the Range Rover with his two armed protection officers in the front.
After some horseplay at the club Boujis they went to a house in Chelsea, retiring to the kitchen where he made her a bacon sandwich. To cut a long story short, they ended up enjoying some horseplay, partly in an empty bath after Mrs Davies had said she would like to see the rest of the house. Shortly after, she claims he gave her ‘a long and lovely kiss’. More than that she declined to reveal in the account of her night with the Prince, which she sold to a newspaper, except to say that at 3 a.m. one of his protection officers drove them to her home in Battersea where Harry bade her a polite farewell with a kiss on the cheek. Catherine had just one souvenir of her unusual encounter with the Prince: a
photograph
a friend of hers had taken on a mobile phone of the two of them sitting in the bath.
It was probably Harry’s roving eye that caused Chelsy to split from him the following year. Although he was clearly in love with her and teased her mercilessly as only two people so close to each other can, he found it hard to be faithful. There was even talk of her finding a goodbye text message on
his mobile phone from ‘Margaret’, who by now must have acquired his number. Harry’s decision to go to Paris for the Rugby World Cup final in October 2007 instead of turning up for Chelsy’s twenty-second birthday celebrations proved a bridge too far and she let it be known that they had split because she ‘needed space’.
Harry’s response to Chelsy’s choice was to go
party-hunting
although it has to be said that the girls who followed were never to be serious contenders for his heart. When Sir Richard Branson’s son Sam told him the heavenly Australian singer Natalie Imbruglia was planning a fancy-dress
celebration
for her thirty-fourth birthday in February 2009 at his father’s nightclub, the Kensington Roof Gardens, Harry made it known that he would very much like to be there. Recently divorced (from husband Daniel Johns), Imbruglia was more than happy to have one of the world’s most eligible
bachelors
– dressed in a surgeon’s outfit for reasons best known to himself (one of his more mischievous chums says he had gone as a gynaecologist and called himself Dr Goldfinger) – grace her gathering.
Well aware that royal presence would do her no harm, Imbruglia later boasted that she had both a prince and a princess at her party, for Harry’s cousin Beatrice also turned up with boyfriend Dave Clark who happens to work for Branson’s Virgin Galactic company. However, there was never any question of a romance: as a friend of the singer confides: ‘[Natalie] gets on very well with Harry but she tends to go for rock musicians rather than public schoolboys.’
Someone with no objection to public schoolboys is Astrid Harbord, with whom Harry was spotted leaving Chelsea haunt Raffles within weeks of his split from Chelsy, seeing him safely home to Clarence House after yet another
celebratory
night. Astrid (an old friend of Kate Middleton’s) and her sister Davina are from a noted family with aristocratic
connections
. Their father Charles Harbord was an Old Harrovian and the family home was a splendid residence in Wiltshire – until, that is, Harbord shot himself dead in May 2012 at the rented apartment in Dorset to which he and his wife Sarah-Juliet (née Blandy) had been obliged to move
eighteen
months earlier when his extravagant lifestyle caught up with him.