Harry

by Chris Hutchins

  Harry had spent the previous fortnight at the one-horse town of Gila Bend with only one bar in the Best Western Hotel; he was ready for some bright lights and action. Accompanied by four of his new military friends, he found exactly what he wanted on his first trip to Sin City at the Encore Hotel. In the hotel’s LasXS nightclub he sipped vodka cocktails and danced with a blonde dressed in a revealing cream blouse and knee-high black skirt. ‘He danced seductively with her with his hands around her waist and zero daylight visible between their bodies,’ according to People magazine which, to his annoyance, followed his every move around the town, noting, among other things, that he lost $300 on the gambling tables, was delighted to discover that the drinks in the casinos were free and never went to bed before 4 a.m. The magazine might also have noted that he jumped onto the lap of his security team at one point and got on his knees to dance with a brunette at another.

  As if he needed reminding, Harry discovered, as his mother had time and time again, that anyone can make a fast buck out of what should be private moments when on another weekend off he headed for San Diego. There he was taken to a club called The Ivy where his favourite vodka cocktails were sold at a far higher price than he was used to paying. Detailed allegations that the waitress who served him spent the night at the Marriot Hotel where he was staying were sold to a local newspaper and subsequently circulated by a news agency. Harry was disgusted when the story made headlines across America but ignored advice to lodge a complaint, telling a fellow airman back at the camp, ‘When you’re me, it goes with the territory, I’m afraid.’

  Many such stories are made up, as I learned during my research for this book, like, for example, the report about Chelsy warning the pop singer Cheryl Cole – who won publicity for her flirtatious remarks about Harry, despite never having met him – to stay away from her Prince. Ms Davy was alleged to have sworn that she was not threatened by Ms Cole and added that Harry ‘doesn’t like girls with tattoos’. In reality there was never any contact between the two women.

  On his return from the American training exercise, Harry made a beeline for Chelsy, who had been offered ‘a phenomenal sum of money’ to write a kiss-and-tell book about their relationship. She was not remotely interested: for a start she had no need of the money and secondly she did not believe that the spark had gone out of their relationship even if Harry had hinted at it when he made the public declaration of being ‘100 per cent single’. Newspaper reports at the time described her as his ex-girlfriend; but was she an ex? The trusted source close to him was, on this subject, reluctant to be drawn but a friend of Chelsy’s was less reticent:

  I think they love each other and eventually they will get back together. In fact – and she’ll hate me for saying this – I believe they will marry – once she is convinced that his wandering eye days are over! One of Chelsy’s arguments against settling down with him was that she hated the English weather and another was that his army career left him with little time for her anyway. But sooner or later he’s going to leave the army and I know he loves Africa and would be quite happy to spend at least the winters there. It would also allow him to devote time to working on Sentebale, which he is very passionate about.

  Meanwhile, Harry had other things on his mind. He did much to illustrate that he was more than a London playboy when he delivered a stirring speech based on his experience of warfare that did much to silence his critics:

  It is often said of our armed forces that they are ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Well I don’t buy that. Ordinary people don’t run out under withering enemy rocket and heavy machine-gun fire to rescue a wounded comrade. Ordinary people aren’t described by their platoon as being ‘the rock’ who held them together. Ordinary people don’t brave monsoon conditions dangling on a winch line to rescue thirteen people, each in turn. For that matter, ordinary people don’t put their lives on the line for distant folk, such as the Afghans, who need our help and are now turning their country round because of it.

  Stirring stuff indeed and it earned him a standing ovation from those watching the transmission in Afghanistan, those who saw him not as a red-carpet royal but as a loyal comrade-in-arms who was proud of what they had all achieved together.

  Loyalty, even when it means defying royal protocol, is a trait many of them referred to when asked what they most admire about Harry. Thomas van Straubenzee is particularly gracious in his praise for the Prince’s loyalty – and with good reason: he was talking to Harry on his mobile phone when he was mugged in Battersea and had his BlackBerry stolen. Having heard the scuffle over his phone, Harry drove to the area in search of his friend. When he couldn’t find him he went to the local police station where he found van Straubenzee at the desk reporting the crime. He gave a statement and offered to give evidence if the case ever came to court, which it did, but the mugger was sentenced to two years in prison without any requirement for Harry to fulfil his promise. ‘That says a lot about Harry,’ says his friend, ‘any other member of the family would have thought twice about being caught up in a criminal case, but not Harry.’ He has a special fondness for the van Straubenzees and only days before the mugging he had attended a carol concert in aid of a charity he helped set up to keep alive the memory of Thomas’s brother Henry, the young friend Harry called ‘Henners’ who had died in such tragic circumstances.

  Despite his appetite for young and pretty blondes, Harry has never yet been known to steal one from a friend, especially one as close as Thomas van Straubenzee. When on leaving The Brompton Club in west London, he discovered Vanners’s girlfriend, Lady Melissa Percy, looking somewhat distressed, sitting on the club’s rear entrance steps, he consoled her and phoned Thomas to alert him to the predicament. This is not how some of the tabloids interpreted it when they published paparazzi pictures of the Prince chatting to the shoeless girl. He was, as he always is in such situations, merely being the gallant knight, although he is rarely credited with the quality.

  13

  THE PEOPLE’S PRINCE

  Lest anyone thought his American experience had tamed his appetite for partying, Harry proved them wrong by celebrating the end of 2011 with his friend David Beckham in London, before moving on to Switzerland where he began 2012 by falling out of two nightclubs in his favourite ski resort, Verbier. After dining at his hotel with his friend Tom ‘Skippy’ Inskip he had gone to see in the New Year at the Farinet Hotel’s Casbah Club where two blondes joined his table. He moved off a little after 1 a.m. for Guy Pelly’s new bar, Public, where he was joined by soldier-turned-singer James Blunt, and his cousins Beatrice and Eugenie. Despite living up to his hard-partying image, he was able to steer clear when two fights broke out in the club.

  On his return to the UK, however, it was back to the serious business of soldiering. On 8 February 2012, he was awarded the prize for being the best Co-Pilot Gunner during a dinner to mark the end of the Apache Training course. A return to Afghanistan was now beyond doubt.

  As her Jubilee year dawned, it became increasingly apparent that the Queen needed the support of her husband more than she had ever done. Harry noticed the signs as Prince Philip’s health showed signs of faltering – the Duke had been admitted to hospital after a heart scare over Christmas. More concerned than most, Harry said he did not believe that his 85-year-old grandmother could continue with her public duties without her husband at her side: ‘Regardless of whether my grandfather seems to be doing his own thing, sort of wandering off like a fish down the river, the fact that he’s there – personally I don’t think she could do it without him.’ His remarks, broadcast in a television interview, annoyed courtiers who warned him in a frosty meeting that he was forecasting an abdication in the event that Philip should die. Politely Harry reminded them that he was his own man and not their mouthpiece.

  He made it clear that he often seeks Her Majesty’s advice ‘because she’s always right’. But as the all-important year of 2012 was to prove, in many respects their roles were to be reversed.
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  Bitterly disappointed that he was not after all going to be able to join his Walking With The Wounded chums on their bid to climb Mount Everest, he called Mollie Hughes, the 21-year-old who was coordinating her own climb with the wounded soldiers, and asked her to break the news to them. He had badly wanted to go but the army had said ‘no’. Like any employer growing tired of too-frequent absences even of such a favoured employee, the military top brass reminded him of his commitment to the service. No other soldier, they reminded him, could take off on excursions on a whim, even if they were in a good cause and, besides, he had already requested and been granted time off for the forthcoming celebrations to mark his grandmother’s Diamond Jubilee, the Olympics and his first solo royal tour, which would take him to the Caribbean and South America. It was not enough to declare that he was hugely proud to be a British soldier, he was told: he had to do the work of one.

  He did, however, get the time off afforded to all soldiers, and chose to spend one weekend with a bunch of chums in Transylvania looking for the Dracula he had been so fond of reading about in childhood-favourite horror stories. Aware that not all of those he was travelling with could afford the full fare, he was happy to fly with the budget airline Wizz Air and was grateful to Count Tibor Kálnoky for putting the whole bunch up with no charge at his home in Miclosoara. Alas, when they got there the vampire Count was nowhere to be seen.

  The disappointment he suffered at being told he could not go on the Everest expedition was more than made up for when he arrived in the Caribbean as the Queen’s Jubilee Year representative. He was fêted wherever he went in much the same way as his mother had been and, like her, it became apparent that he was destined to follow in her footsteps as the most popular royal of all.

  Those who ‘manage’ the Royal Family had shaken their heads and tut-tutted when the Queen first made it known that she wanted Harry to go to Jamaica, Belize and South America as her representative. After all, it was a vitally important year for the family; the almost-unique celebrations (only Queen Victoria had managed to reign longer than Elizabeth II) offered a fine opportunity to win back the popularity it had lost during almost two decades of royal scandal and only partially restored by Prince William’s wedding.

  Her Majesty’s grandson was a good party man but an official royal tour of such importance, the men in suits asked?

  Was he up to it? Most important of all, would he want to do it? After all, they argued, he had made it known that he had no wish to spend his life cutting ribbons and unveiling plaques as his brother was fated to spend much of his doing.

  How wrong the courtiers were proved to be on all counts. Although utterly devoted to the army in which he served at the cost of a settled love life – Harry wanted desperately to do the bidding of his beloved grandmother who he had promised publicly to help out ‘whenever she needs me’.

  The concern of those whose job it is to insist that members of the most revered family in the world cannot behave as other men and women do, is understandable: could a repeat of past misbehaviour be expected when he carried Her Majesty’s message to the hot spots of the Caribbean? Although his service career was thus far extremely successful, having overcome the learning weakness he had displayed at Eton, could he win over even those with strong republican leanings?

  He could and he did.

  Having discussed her advisors’ doubt with the Queen in a half-hour meeting before setting off on the trip, he knew he was going with her blessing. ‘She said to me, “I hope you enjoy it, now go and do me proud.”’ He was determined to do both.

  From the moment he arrived in Belize, then went on to the Bahamas, Jamaica and Brazil, he charmed them just as Diana had done wherever she travelled. Even the Queen was amazed when Harry won over the 66-year-old Jamaican Prime Minister, Portia Simpson-Miller, who, only hours before meeting him, had said she wanted Queen Elizabeth replaced as her country’s head of state and called for Britain to apologise and pay compensation for the ‘brutal’ years of slavery in the days of the Empire.

  She changed her tune, however, after a hug and a kiss from Harry (‘Well actually she hugged me,’ he said later), who throughout the tour proved to be every bit as tactile as his late mother. ‘He is a lovely man, really warm and great fun,’ she wrote privately to one of her London-based officials.

  What made the crowds truly fall for him was his sense of humour – fun was the nub of his forward planning and few can do fun better than Harry. As young choirgirls prepared for a solemn service at Christ Church Cathedral in Nassau, Harry – smartly dressed in his regiment’s No. 1 tropical uniform – made them laugh by grinning at them and pulling faces. At a formal state banquet in Kingston, Jamaica, he said the Queen was sorry she couldn’t be there ‘so you’re stuck with me’ and, mimicking Bob Marley, added, ‘but don’t worry, ’cos every liddle ting’s gonna be all right’.

  He had the crowd cheering when he cheated in a race with his sporting hero, Usain Bolt, by taking off before the judges called ‘Go’, beating the fastest man on earth to the finishing line twenty yards away, although it has to be reported here that a usually reliable source says the pair had agreed the ‘stunt’ in advance. Whether it was a fix or not, film and television footage was seen by billions around the world with the two men performing Bolt’s trademark ‘lightning’ gesture. The main beneficiary of that priceless piece of publicity was Puma, the sportswear makers’ logo prominently displayed on the royal’s tracksuit.

  ‘The request to wear the Jamaican athlete’s T-shirt was made by Harry himself but with the backing of the royal household and the Jamaican government,’ says the Prince’s press secretary. ‘It was his way of signalling respect for the Jamaican team. The fact that the T-shirt contained branding was a coincidence and not a factor in the decision.’

  Just as well, since had a deal been struck the Prince could have out-earned the huge sum Bolt receives from his multi-million-dollar advertising deals with Virgin Media … and Puma.

  Not that Harry had money on his mind when he was with his hero: so taken was he with Bolt that in a quiet and unpublicised moment, the Prince asked the fastest man on the planet to sign a napkin for him (probably the only occasion a royal has asked for an autograph since Princess Eugenie made a similar request of a TV star she fancied on a night out at the Goat In Boots pub on ‘the beach’ on Fulham Road, only to discover he had added a telephone number to his signature. According to the star’s agent, she never got round to calling him.) Bolt laughed off the request.

  The joy Harry’s visit brought to those who turned out in their thousands to greet him was matched by the pleasure the tour gave him – for one thing he was fast becoming a fashion icon and the bright blue suede shoes he wore through much of the tour became so popular that the manufacturers were sold out within days of their first appearance on his feet.

  From Jamaica he wrote to a soldier he had served alongside in Afghanistan to say ‘this is one of the happiest times of my life – it’s even better than meeting the Spice Girls, though that’s a distant memory now. I hope all is well with you too. We must meet when I get home.’ And he called one of his oldest friends in London to say he thought he’d ‘really cracked it’, that he’d ‘got a real handle on the royal thing’. ‘It must have been around three in the morning where he was but Harry was on the dog and bone [phone] whooping with joy, flying high,’ says one of the few who, having known him for more than a decade, has Harry Wales’s trust to speak frankly and without royal restraint of his friend. His reference to having ‘cracked it’ was taken as evidence that his plan to be a ‘joyful royal’ on the tour had worked. The friend wasn’t the only person he called back home, however. A Palace source says, ‘He was constantly on the phone to his brother who was always there to talk things through with him and give him advice when he needed it. It was very much William who gave him the confidence to go out and do a job he had not done before.’

  With or without opinions and advice received from home, Harry had set o
ut with the firm intention of enjoying as well as behaving himself. But even more importantly, he was going to hone his already considerable skills of communication with people at all levels – something his father had tried hard to do but never quite succeeded in. To Diana’s son it came naturally.

  It also came naturally to him to reverse some of the negative things Diana had said or done. Just a year after William’s wedding, Harry turned up unannounced at Cothill House, a boarding school in Oxfordshire to watch a musical put on by the pupils. One of the stars of Oh What A Knight (a show written by the school’s music teacher) was Fred Pettifer, the ten-year-old son of the princes’ one-time nanny, Tiggy – now Mrs Charles Pettifer – who was also his godson. Both boys had relied heavily on Tiggy in the weeks and months following Diana’s death even though they were painfully aware that the Princess, at the height of her suffering, had wrongly accused the nanny of being her husband’s mistress.

  Tiggy, who now runs the farmhouse bed and breakfast Ty’r in the Brecon Beacons and is one of the few women fly-fishing instructors in the country, was an enormous influence on Harry in his early years and the two remain on close terms – remember she had attended his passing-out parade at Sandhurst – but his appearance at Cothill House for Fred’s stage debut surprised everyone including the other parents with whom he mingled freely afterwards.

  But it went deeper than that. Harry and Tiggy knew what each had been through as the result of mayhem in the Palace and at Highgrove, which had once been homes to both of them. He talked to her at length about the sheer joy of his first solo royal tour and the privilege it had afforded him, but he went on to reveal that there was still much domestic strife behind the Palace walls. Because of his new-found and expanding influence within the family, its younger members chose him to go to with their problems – problems too great to trouble the octogenarian Queen with, and problems that Charles, more absorbed in matters of state, would pay no heed to.