This remarkable reaction showed the public generally supported Harry and if given the choice would side with the young Royal ahead of any newspaper. It became clear that the public feeling, even after nearly five years since Diana’s death, remained firmly behind her children rather than the media.
In 2004 the agreement over media coverage of the princes was still in place, as the newspapers were reluctant to break it. Seven years after the events in Paris, and public feelings towards the press were still raw.
Prince Harry had left Eton College after his A levels in 2003, in which he had secured a B in art and a D in geography. Despite attending one of the world’s most prestigious schools, he had scraped through and only just achieved the minimum results required to allow him to apply to join the Army’s officer training course. No one dared criticize his results. Not even when it later emerged that his former art teacher had helped Harry with parts of his coursework did anyone poke fun at him.
By his own admission Harry is not academically minded. He suffers from mild dyslexia and was far more suited to the challenges of Eton’s CCF (Combined Cadet Force) corps, where he achieved the highest rank in his last term at school. The general consensus was that having to cope with the tragic death of his mother, coupled with the pressure of being a young Royal, more than excused his below-average exam results.
With a place at Sandhurst secured, however, Harry made a mistake that would haunt him for many years to come. Rather than head straight into the British Army, the young prince chose to take a ‘gap year’.
Had Harry gone straight to Sandhurst in 2003 after getting his exam results there is little doubt the media restrictions would have remained in place. The military academy is after all a college of learning. There, young cadets are made into officers. They take exams, learn basic infantry skills and much, much more. It would have been very difficult for any news organization to argue that Sandhurst could not be deemed ‘full-time education’, and the prince would have been left alone.
However, Harry followed in the footsteps of so many ordinary teenage school leavers and decided to embark on what would turn out to be eighteen months of travelling, partying and high jinks. Unfortunately for Harry, he was not an ‘ordinary teenage school leaver’, and this decision left him open to the kind of scrutiny that his palace advisers had fought so hard to avoid.
One palace source explained: ‘At the time Harry left Eton it was hoped he would focus on going to Sandhurst. Clearly his one great passion, and something he was very good at, was the school cadet corps. At that time Harry was very vulnerable. He was still very damaged by the death of his mother and people noticed he carried a lot of anger. Going into the military would have, with hindsight, helped this young prince face and deal with his demons.
‘But instead he was absolutely adamant that he would take a break. He wanted the freedom to travel, to let his hair down and see the world. No one around him at that time was able to persuade him not to take a gap year and his aides were told to make a press statement confirming his time out.’
Harry spent time on an Australian ranch and was spotted cheering on the England rugby team as they lifted the World Cup in November 2003. He then travelled to South Africa and made the very worthy decision to set up a charity in memory of his mother. But the rest of the time the prince spent living in his apartment at St James’s Palace in central London surrounded by the handful of people he considered friends.
In October 2004, soon after his return from South Africa, Harry set off for a night out at the Pangaea club in London’s West End. Surrounded by his chums, Harry drank and enjoyed the evening as if he didn’t have a care in the world. The exclusive club seemed to be a safe haven for the prince. Just a stone’s throw from his palace apartment, here he could enjoy a night out safe in the knowledge that the club’s security and his own detail of Met Police protection officers would keep any unwanted attention at bay.
Sadly, however, the same could not be said for the short walk he would inevitably need to take between leaving the club and jumping into one of the waiting protection officers’ vehicles. At 3 a.m. Harry emerged from the club to be confronted by the one thing he hated more than anything, a pack of paparazzi.
There is a common misconception about press photographers. Paparazzi is a word generally and erroneously used to describe just about any group of photographers with a camera. In fact, paparazzi is quite a narrow term which only applies to freelance snappers who trade in pictures of celebrities, royals and anyone else they hope to make money from.
A press photographer is generally an accredited photojournalist who has had training and is commissioned by newspapers to take pictures. If a press photographer behaves badly, hurls abuse or harasses their target, they risk the wrath of their employers. As a result they are forced to ensure their pictures are taken legitimately, as they cannot risk their reputations by taking shortcuts or stepping outside the rules of engagement agreed by the Society of Editors.
But in these days of digital photography and a heightened public obsession with the cult of celebrity, there is little or nothing to stop just about anyone from picking up a camera and chancing their luck. In London’s West End these ‘bounty hunters’ patrol the nightclub doors looking for famous targets. With the success of Twitter, their sources are unlimited. One tweet from a member of the public boasting about a celebrity face in the crowd, and the paparazzi can pounce.
On that night the photographers were aware that Harry was partying in Piccadilly and it would only be a matter of time before he would have to emerge.
It needs to be stressed here it was not at all underhand or illegal for them to patiently wait outside a club for someone famous to emerge. If celebrities choose to make a splash in a public place then they are ‘fair game’ in the eyes of the law. But a young Royal emerging from a club in the small hours will inevitably not see it in those terms, and when the little group of photographers’ flashes started to go off in the October darkness, Harry was furious.
Accounts differ about what actually happened that night. It was claimed that Harry deliberately stepped back out of his Royal protection officer’s vehicle to make a lunge at one of the photographers. In the scuffle that followed, the snapper in question was left with a cut lip. Clarence House later insisted that it was Harry who had been hit in the face with a camera, and that he instinctively reacted by pushing the camera away.
Whatever the truth of the ugly incident, it made little difference to the consequences. The following morning images emerged in London’s Evening Standard showing the prince lashing out before being physically lifted away by one of his most trusted protection officers and bundled into the waiting vehicle. In an interview accompanying the pictures, photographer Chris Uncle said: ‘Prince Harry looked like he was inside the car and we were still all taking pictures.
‘Then suddenly he burst out of the car and lunged towards me as I was still taking pictures. He lashed out and then deliberately pushed my camera into my face.’
Another photographer backed up the claim. ‘He was halfway getting into the back of the car when he suddenly reacted and lunged at him and grabbed his camera and pushed him against the wall.’
Harry’s media team at Clarence House were forced onto the back foot and released a statement defending the prince. But the incident made headlines all over the world and whether he liked it or not, questions were being asked about whether Prince Harry was in meltdown.
Since he left Eton, the public had seen very little of Harry. The only images of him showed a young man enjoying what could only be described as the mother of all gap years. Although there had been focus on his Sentebale charity set up to help the forgotten AIDS orphans of the tiny kingdom of Lesotho in Southern Africa, relatively little had emerged to show Harry in a good light. The timing of the nightclub incident was therefore all the more unfortunate for him. There was very little his advisers could point to in his defence. These unprecedented pictures of a young Royal in a fracas s
imply fuelled the feeling that the prince should have already knuckled down to his military career rather than waste time partying and travelling the world.
Several months later I discussed what actually took place with one of the people who was there with Harry as it happened. ‘It was in many ways a storm in a teacup,’ he said. ‘Harry felt he was threatened by how close the photographers came. They were right up in his face, their flashes firing off like disco strobes. He was very upset and angry when he got back into the car. As he was driven off, the red mist had clearly got the better of him. His face was bright red with rage and he was swearing and cursing. After that he was just upset and kept asking what could be done about the incident.’
At that time Harry’s anger towards the paparazzi was all-consuming. It is hard to imagine just how much the 20-year-old prince was upset by what happened. The combination of an angry young man, a few late-night drinks and a confrontation with the one thing he hated the most was all too much for Harry.
By the time the story had been reported all over the world, editors and Royal watchers were beginning to reach the conclusion that a closer eye could be laid on the young prince. While the post-Diana agreement was still in place to an extent, opinions varied as to whether a gap year constituted an end to full-time education, or whether it was, in a loose way, still part of his growing up.
The work Harry had done in Lesotho was winning him many plaudits. He was showing a mature side, a side determined to continue his mother’s legacy. He even invited a small group of newsmen along with him on one of his trips to launch the charity and throw the spotlight on the terrible plight of the orphans he had met.
Lesotho, the small kingdom land locked by South Africa, had one of the world’s highest AIDS and HIV rates. It was, and still is, so bad that the life expectancy for an adult is a mere thirty years. Harry visited the country and saw at first hand the horrors being suffered by the young people of Lesotho. Because of the AIDS epidemic, an entire generation of adults is missing. The majority of people are either below eighteen or grandparents. What struck Harry was the way these children seemed to have been forgotten by the outside world, and he made a profound and genuine pledge to make a difference.
During his trip with the media, an ITV documentary was made, which did indeed throw a light on what was going on. For Harry, and his advisers, this was a coup. Like his mother, the prince was using his Royal fame to focus a spotlight on people the world had forgotten. To this day Harry has kept his pledge to the children of Lesotho. Sentebale – which means ‘Forget Me Not’ – continues its essential work in Lesotho.
But in October 2004, Harry’s decision to invite the media to follow the work of his new charity in some ways fuelled the calls for the prince to be put under more scrutiny. Cynical minds started to argue that if it was OK for the media to report on the very worthy things Harry was up to, why should they not report on his other antics? It was an age-old debate that was starting to emerge within the British media. Everyone liked Harry, but how much longer could the press sit back and allow his advisers to call all the shots?
Even then, there was a public fascination with Harry. He did not seem like the other Royals. He was not like the other Royals. His natural way with people, and in particular children, came across in bucket-loads as he bounced a little orphan on his knee for the cameras. It was clear he had that natural gift when meeting people for instantly making them feel like the only people in the world that mattered.
Following the media coverage in Lesotho, pledges of support and money started to roll in. Sentebale was up and running with Harry at the helm. Harry was an emerging star. But everyone was eager to see the other side of his personality – the party-loving, laid-back lad with a glint in his eye and a lust for life. A prince who was fun to be around was a prince people wanted to know more about.
The row over him smoking cannabis, followed by the high-profile clash with photographers, opened the door to this hunger for information. The agreement to leave him alone was being put under pressure and as Harry headed towards the end of 2004, he must have sensed things were all about to change.
It wasn’t long before the press got a sniff of one very significant change that Harry had been keeping secret since April that year. Away from the cameras, away from the front-page stories, he had fallen head over heels in love.
CHAPTER 3
THE ROYAL JOB
‘What do you think about doing the Royal job?’ asked my news editor Chris Pharo in his typically abrupt, no-nonsense way. I was walking the dog when he rang and I was caught completely off guard. I’d never considered covering the Royal beat at The Sun, and the call came right out of the blue.
In the days of Diana, the Royal job was the stuff of legends. I had heard stories about what it was like following one of the most talked-about women on the planet to all corners of the globe. The Royal patch was indeed a plum job then. Because stories and pictures of Diana were such a huge seller, the budget for covering them was equally large.
It was rumoured that when Charles and Diana went on honeymoon following their wedding in 1981, a team from The Sun had chartered a private jet to scour the Mediterranean to find the yacht they were holidaying on. The bill for the plane alone was £50,000, and although that was split between several newspapers, it still amounted to a vast sum of money.
My colleague and legendary Royal reporter Charlie Rae would often share stories about flying the world in First Class, staying at some of the best hotels in some of the finest locations. As a general rule, Royals only go to nice places. So, for the reporter lucky enough to be dispatched to cover them, this meant jetting off to ski slopes, safari lodges, and exclusive resorts I could only dream of.
Since qualifying as a journalist I had moved on from the morris dancer exclusives at the Tonbridge Courier, eventually getting a full-time job at The Sun in 2001. The paper was a daunting place to work. Everything happened at 100 miles an hour and the daily pressure was immense. Walking into the Sun newsroom for the first time was a day no reporter would ever forget.
In 2001 The Sun was still put together on the seventh floor of the print works on the vast News International site dubbed Fortress Wapping. At the height of his dispute with the print unions in the mid Eighties, Rupert Murdoch famously outflanked the strikers by moving his entire UK newspaper operation to a nine-acre site in the run-down area of Wapping, on the edge of the City of London.
The site was ideal because it really was like a fortress. High stone walls and huge fences protected an oasis safe from the rioting protesters and picket lines that threatened to bring the news operation to its knees. The site was dominated by the huge print works which in 1986 had been state of the art, requiring far fewer printers to operate. In 2001 the News of the World, The Times, the Sunday Times and The Sun editions still rolled off the presses there before being loaded onto hundreds of lorries to be dispatched throughout the UK.
The Sun newsroom was a dark, imposing place housed on the top floor above the print rooms. When, each evening, the print run began, the floors shook and everyone arriving for a late shift had to run the gauntlet of lorries and forklift trucks as they rolled in and out of the building. But it was in this dirty, almost threadbare room where Britain’s biggest newspaper was put together by the army of sub-editors, journalists and support staff every day of the year except Christmas Eve.
Stepping out of the stainless steel lift and walking towards the metal-framed glass doors of the paper’s newsroom, you were instantly reminded of the place you were entering. All along the corridor leading to the newsroom were huge copies of legendary Sun front pages, encased in frames, proudly shown off like hunting trophies in a colonial palace. Above the fingerprint-smudged glass doors hung a red and white sign saying: ‘Walk Tall – You’re entering Sun country’.
In reality, being lucky enough to do casual shifts at The Sun meant keeping your head down, doing what you were told and trying to make the most out of any assignment you were hande
d. After more than a year of casual shifts I was offered a staff contract at the paper. I left my job with a press agency and grabbed the opportunity with both hands.
By November 2004, when my boss sounded me out about doing the Royal beat, I had worked on all kinds of general news stories. As a general reporter I had worked on what felt like everything. Covering the TV show Big Brother in the days when people still watched it in their millions. Working with the team who covered the Soham murders of 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. Then following the trial of their killer, Ian Huntley. When a group of Leicester City soccer players had been falsely accused of raping three girls in a Spanish hotel I had spent a month chasing the story.
I had been sworn at by Posh Spice on the ski slopes of Verbier, shaved my head into stripes in an appallingly unsuccessful bid to look like David Beckham with braids. Under instruction from the news desk I’d even pushed a Dalek onto the set of Doctor Who in protest at the producers refusing to bring back the infamous Kaled mutants everyone remembered from their childhood.
It is fair to say there was never a dull day at The Sun, and this was an environment I adored. But until that phone call I had never given any thought to the job of covering the Royals for The Sun. Royal coverage at that time consisted of writing up the stories and pictures on William and Harry with which the media were spoon-fed by the palace. Or filling in a picture caption as Prince Charles pulled a funny face while visiting an organic yoghurt factory somewhere in the West Country. While the Royal job was prestigious and meant travelling to some great places all over the world, it was not something that had ever appealed.
The reason the news editor was sounding me out was quite simple. It was November 2004. Prince Harry had been charging all over the world on what was fast becoming the longest ‘gap year’ in history – he would not arrive at Sandhurst until May 2005. Away from the cameras it had been revealed that the 20-year-old prince had been secretly dating a young Zimbabwean student. Just days before that call, the Mail on Sunday had revealed that Harry had taken Chelsy Davy for a two-week holiday in Argentina at a remote polo lodge near the capital Buenos Aires.
Prince Harry Page 3