by Penny Junor
The News of the World claimed that Harry had been smoking the cannabis in the shed at the back of the Rattlebone and on one occasion, at the end of a lock-in, a very drunk Harry, when asked to leave, had called the French under-manager, ‘a f***ing frog’. Steve Hoare, from Nobodys Business, was there that night and was so disgusted by ‘the lies’ he read in the papers over the whole incident that he has never bought a newspaper since. No one ever used the shed out at the back, the lock-ins happened in the back bar, there were never any drugs in the pub when William or Harry were around and if anyone had produced any, Skip and Casper, instructors from the polo club or their PPOs, who were always there, would have been on it like a flash. As for the incident with the Frenchman, François Ortet, known as ‘French Frank’, it was playful banter; they were friends, and the Frenchman was giving as good as he got.
According to locals, the News of the World had sent a couple of young reporters to live in the village for a month and infiltrate the Rattlebone. They had been introduced by a regular as relatives and they got to know the locals. It’s rumoured that it was not motivated by altruism. The figure of £35,000 has been mentioned.
What none of the media who flocked to the sleepy village of Sherston looking for locals to spill the beans on Harry knew was that Mark’s release of the story to the News of the World was a skilful piece of damage limitation. During the summer, the News of the World had published a photograph of a very spaced-out Harry in a nightclub in Spain. They had kept a watch on him ever since, spoken to associates and compiled damning evidence of far more serious behaviour than that described in their story in January 2002. Some of it had been going on in the basement of Highgrove, which the Prince had done up for the boys as a den. They called it Club H and had wild parties there with their friends, playing loud techno music until the early hours.
Rebekah Wade had rung her friend Bolland to alert him to what they had, and he brokered a deal which saved the young Prince’s bacon and left his father smelling of roses.
‘Worried Charles chose to “terrify” Harry away from drugs by sending him to therapy sessions with hard-core heroin addicts,’ announced the News of the World, but a ‘family friend’ declared reassuringly that, ‘he has never done drugs since. William is such a steadying influence. The two of them have had detailed discussions and Harry has changed his ways. He now understands the very real perils of drug-taking and excessive drinking. He has a lot to be thankful for. If his brother and father did not care so much about him there might well have been a different end to this story.’
Little did the friend know that the wild child was merely limbering up.
What incensed Harry – and William too, in defence of his brother – was that the two incidents were not connected. Harry had been to visit the rehab centre in June or July of 2001, with Mark Dyer, where he did speak to recovering addicts, but it had nothing to do with his own behaviour. The News of the World did not have the cannabis story until August or September of that year.
‘Harry really resented the way he was made to look bad so that his father could look good,’ says a friend. ‘He understood why it happened, and I don’t think he blamed his father, but the idea that Harry had gone to a rehab centre a year before because Prince Charles had seen the way things were going is a blatant load of b*****ks. Prince Charles didn’t have any idea what his son was up to. It was PR panic and spin and he really resents that he was made to take the rap for that.’
This same friend says, ‘The idea of Harry being the wild one and William the good one is nonsense. They were both wild. Harry was just the one that got caught.’ He doubts, however, that William ever took drugs. ‘He’s quite canny, quite square in that way, I’d bet a lot of money he never has. He would never have been bullied into doing it because everyone else was. He’s quite an intelligent man; he would know absolutely if he was caught taking drugs it would be a catastrophe. He lets his hair down and puts down some serious drink on occasions, certainly he did as a student, and when he’s away he definitely lets his hair down, he likes a good night out with his friends, but he’s always quite careful to protect his image and not do anything that would really damage him. You get pissed, so what? Nobody cares; you take drugs, it tarnishes you for ever and if you’re going to be King? No. But the idea of good Prince, bad Prince was always a load of rubbish.’
What was almost more upsetting about the News of the World story, however, was that the boy who unjustly took the blame for the whole scenario was Guy Pelly, a polo-playing friend of both brothers but principally William, and a student at Cirencester Agricultural College. He was said to ‘have encouraged Harry to experiment with the drug at a private party in Tetbury’, and taken it into Highgrove so Harry could smoke it at parties there. A family friend said, ‘Prince Harry fell in with a bad lot. Guy Pelly, who has a drink-drive conviction and is a student at Cirencester, was the worst influence. It was Pelly who introduced Harry to cannabis in June last year.’
William has always been worried for his friends that their association with him could force them into the limelight or cause them embarrassment in any way – he is almost obsessive about it – and this was as bad as it could get. Pelly was and is a good friend whose name and reputation were trashed by the media, and he was forced to give up his farm management course because of the row. He only ever spoke once about it. ‘I have never dealt in drugs at Highgrove, at the Rattlebone Inn or anywhere else,’ he said. ‘I have never taken drugs with Prince Harry or supplied any drugs to him. I have never used drugs at Highgrove or the Rattlebone Inn. I would like this categoric statement to put an end to the matter.’ That was wishful thinking – his reputation has never fully recovered from the incident – but it is a measure of the depth of loyalty and affection he, like all their close friends, feels towards both Princes that he was prepared to put up with the indignity and never attempt to clear his name further.
And it is a measure of just how loyal both Princes are to their friends that just five weeks later, despite the newspapers telling us that Charles had forbidden Harry to see Guy Pelly again, they very publicly stood shoulder to shoulder with him on the terraces at Twickenham for a high-profile international rugby match.
Eighteen months later, after Mark Bolland had gone from his job, he admitted that the sequence of events in the story was distorted to portray Charles in a positive light and attempt to draw a line under the scandal. ‘Presenting the [rehab] centre as the great solution to the problem was something that I was embarrassed about,’ he said in an interview with the Guardian. ‘It was misleading.’
LOSS AND LEARNING
Colleen has sympathy for both Princes and understands why they were so upset by the shenanigans, but she says that nothing at that time was ever as clear-cut as it looked. ‘You have no idea what else was being covered up. Yes, it was terrible but it could have been a lot worse. What William and Harry are forgetting is there were many times when we managed to keep them out of the media when they were up to mischievous things.’ The Rattlebone (not far from where I live in Wiltshire) was undoubtedly the scene of some high-octane partying by both William and Harry, as were several other pubs within a ten-mile radius, and it is a measure of the affection engendered by both boys that locals keep their memories to themselves.
But sometimes the family was in the news quite simply because of who they were. Just a month into his second semester, when the story of Harry’s drug-taking was beginning to subside, Princess Margaret, the Queen’s troubled sister, died. It was not entirely unexpected; she had suffered a series of strokes and been unwell for some years but, in such a close family, it was a major upset. She had been a neighbour at Kensington Palace and a presence at every family get-together. The entire family gathered for a private funeral at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, including the Queen Mother. Despite her own failing health and a fall just a few days before when she had damaged her arm, she was determined to be there to lay her youngest daughter to rest. She was flown from Sandringha
m to Windsor by helicopter and carefully helped into a car for the last part of the journey. She was very frail and hidden behind a black veil, but as Margaret’s coffin was taken away, she struggled to her feet. It was the last time William saw his great-grandmother.
Six weeks later, the BBC interrupted a programme in the early evening of 30 March 2002 to announce that she had died peacefully in her sleep at Royal Lodge, Windsor, with her daughter, the Queen, at her side. The family, and this time the nation too, were again in mourning. The Queen Mother was an iconic figure in her flowing pastel silks and feathery hats; the very epitome of royal decorum and style, and a woman whose guts and courage while bombs were falling over London during the Blitz had inspired the nation. William used to relish being seated next to her at lunch and was fascinated by her stories about the past. There was no hysteria as there had been over Diana’s death, but in a gross error of judgement, the BBC instructed the newscaster not to wear a black tie. No one foresaw the public’s reaction to her death. Diana’s death had been unnatural and untimely; the Queen Mother’s was a peaceful conclusion to a long, full and largely very happy life. She was a hundred and one, had two new hips, a full set of marbles and a wonderful sense of humour. Yet there was no shortage of mourners. Thousands of bouquets were left on the lawns at St George’s Chapel and the queue for the lying-in-state in Westminster Hall stretched for three miles.
William was skiing in Klosters with his father and Harry, and, as usual, a gang of friends, when they heard the news. His father was said to have been ‘completely devastated’ and it was William’s turn to be the comforter. On their return home Charles gave a very personal and moving tribute on television to ‘the original life enhancer – at once indomitable, somehow timeless, able to span the generations. Wise, loving, with an utterly irresistible mischievousness of spirit.’ She was ‘quite simply the most magical grandmother you could possibly have, and I was utterly devoted to her.’
Plans for her funeral – Operation Tay Bridge – had been drawn up years before and were very straightforward. It was a full-blown State funeral with ceremonial regalia in Westminster Abbey, the most solemn State occasion since her husband King George VI’s funeral fifty years before. Her grandsons, the Prince of Wales, Prince Andrew, the Earl of Wessex and Viscount Linley, together with Prince Philip, Princes William and Harry and Peter Phillips – and breaking tradition, the Princess Royal – all walked behind the coffin, carried (as Diana’s had been) on a gun carriage, drawn by the King’s Troop, the Royal Horse Artillery. The Prince of Wales was visibly distressed. William and Harry, for whom so much of the day must have brought back memories of their mother’s funeral, looked sad but composed.
William was a master at keeping his feelings hidden. He had been doing it since he was a child and the only person in the world who knew the turmoil that bubbled beneath the surface was Harry; and vice versa. He and Harry, so different in so many ways, and like most siblings not especially close as small children, now clung to one another, their relationship cemented by mutual need. Only they had experienced the full nightmare of life within the Wales Household; only they had known what it was like to be at an all-boys school when the newspapers were full of their parents’ infidelities; only they had known what it was like to grieve for their mother while millions of strangers took ownership of her death, and to try to move on from that while the media did its best to keep her in the news.
They’d seen less of each other since William had left Eton – and after Harry left school in June 2003 and went off on his gap year, their meetings were even more infrequent – but the bond between them never wavered.
‘How did he cope with all the awful things that were going on in the media?’ says David Corner. ‘He had a collection of support networks. He liked and talked to Colleen a lot. There were others in St James’s Palace at that time that he trusted and talked to. That was not part of his life with me, or any of us. I think he built that fence not because of non-trust but because there was an absolute split in his mind in terms of his social activities, his problems that were coming from London and being a student. It was maybe something he learnt at St Andrews. He almost wanted to walk out of the front door and be as normal a student as he could be.’
There were not many ways in which William was treated differently at St Andrews, but how his marks were kept was slightly special. Instead of going into the registry along with everyone else’s, Colin Vincent and David Corner guarded them so there would be no chance of a leak. ‘On hearing this, William’s immediate question was, “How are they marked?” “Exactly the same as everybody else’s.” Everything was extraordinarily normal and when it was finished we thanked God that it had been so normal, right through from admission to graduation, it had worked extraordinarily well and the other students agreed, they didn’t feel they had been impeded in any way.’
‘We had lots of funny conversations,’ David says. ‘We used to meet in the street and chat. I remember one day standing talking to him in front of the tourist bus. There were a whole load of tourists on it and the guide was pointing out to them that if they looked over there on the left and bent their heads, they could see where Prince William lives. If they’d only looked down!’
Professor Peter Humfrey remembers welcoming William to the History of Art department in his first week. ‘There would have been two hundred or so people in the lecture theatre. He sat close to the front where I suppose people couldn’t turn round and stare at him and he had a baseball cap pulled right down over his eyes.’
‘It was just so obvious,’ says Dr John Walden, his Geography tutor, ‘he was uncomfortable about being watched.’
The academic staff were afraid the other students might come into lectures with their cameras but none of them saw any evidence of it and no one seemed to leak stories – or if they did the newspapers didn’t use them. The students had been told, ‘We are not going to talk about you and you aren’t going to talk about him, are you?’ And it appeared to work. Professor Brendan Cassidy, his first tutor for History of Art, was astonished by how casual people were. When he announced to the class that William would be joining them, there wasn’t a flicker of interest. ‘Then when he did turn up, they turned round and, I was so surprised, I was expecting some kind of buzz, but there was nothing. In the class there were seven women and two men; that’s perfectly normal in History of Art. William seemed very uncomfortable with the girls, and in the second or third week, the other man didn’t turn up for the tutorial, so William was there with his seven women. His body language said it all, he tried to wrap himself up, but within a couple of months he was so much more relaxed.’
Kate was not among the women in William’s tutor group, although who knows if he would have felt any more comfortable if she had been. He was definitely more relaxed with familiar faces, and hers was growing familiar. They were becoming friends within a group that lived at Sally’s, and while they attended the same History of Art lectures, they had different tutors.
In that first semester, Brendan Cassidy gave the group a very simple exercise, to compare two pictures that hang in the National Gallery, one by Giovanni Bellini and the other by Andrea Mantegna, both Venetian Renaissance artists. ‘I never twigged, of course, that William couldn’t just walk into the National Gallery and see Giovanni Bellini. I asked if he’d seen the pictures, assuming he had, and he said, no, he’d never been in the National Gallery.
‘I had heard previously from [Lady] Jane Roberts [curator of the Print Room] at the Royal Collection at Windsor that she had given him little tutorials there but, of course, that’s completely different. If I’d been smart I should have given him an essay on something at Windsor and he could have borrowed something from Granny’s collection. The essay was good.
‘There’s no question about whether he should have been here. There was grumbling among some folk that he only got in because of who he was but that’s not true, he was perfectly capable of doing his subject from my experience. In the old mas
ters he was very competent, he wasn’t a star but he was certainly competent, and he could certainly hold his own and deserved to be there; he wrote well enough. I got the feeling if he had been allowed to roam around a bit more, get to the National Gallery, his work could have been better than it was.’
‘I never really understood why he did History of Art in the first place,’ confesses Peter Humfrey. ‘I imagine there had been some charismatic school master who put him on to it, but I could see that he wasn’t deeply engaged with it and, of course, he didn’t carry on with it after his second year.’
FINDING HIS FEET
Much has been made of William arriving at St Andrews to read History of Art and switching to Geography. It’s not as dramatic as it sounds, and according to Colin Vincent a significant number of people do the same thing. William gave History of Art as his degree choice on the UCAS entry form but he was always going to study Geography alongside it for the first two years; he also did Social Anthropology and Moral Philosophy and briefly a bit of Arabic Culture. All that happened is he decided to take Geography through to honours level instead of the other subject. Colin was the one who helped him reach that decision. ‘We had discussions and he wrote down the pros and cons of the two subjects. It was all to do with what he was finding stimulating and interesting. I think he had surprised himself with his ability to cope with the quantitative, mathematical side of Geography. He had a view he couldn’t do it. His father had been concerned that, like him, he didn’t have a quantitative brain.’