Prince Harry

by Penny Junor

  Later in the summer, all four boys would exchange surfboards and barbecues for sumptuous luxury and gourmet cuisine with the Prince of Wales on the Latsis super-yacht; and swap the cold Atlantic breakers for the still warmth of the Mediterranean. And then they would all go to stay with the Princess at Kensington Palace, which was much more informal. The van Straubenzee boys loved going there. Diana was good fun and full of laughter and smutty jokes. And among other treats, she would take them all to the Royal Tournament, which, until its demise in 1999, was held every summer at Earls Court in London. It was a military tattoo on a huge scale, the largest in the world—an extraordinary spectacle involving two and a half thousand servicemen and women, rousing music, bagpipes, flags, military bands, and awesome displays of horses, tanks, guns, motorbikes, field carriages, and everything military; it was noisy and thrilling. William and Harry had been taken to see it since they were very young, and it’s perfectly possible that Harry’s childhood fascination with the Army and his ambition to be a soldier began right there.

  A SIGNIFICANT OTHER

  Being a single parent presented the Prince of Wales with the sort of dilemma that faces every working parent who must suddenly start taking turns with the child care following a separation. Diana still had Olga Powell to look after the boys; and that continuity of love and care will have helped them through the separation and all the difficulty that surrounded it. For while they were always their mother’s top priority, they must sometimes have felt that her own problems took precedence, and that maybe she was the one that needed looking after, not them. It is very easy for a child, of any age, to slip into a parenting role in such circumstances, and it would be surprising if William and Harry hadn’t.

  At ten and eight, they were too old for a traditional nanny. What Charles wanted was someone who was more of a companion and big sister; someone who could take them riding, or to meets, or to the fairground, to drive them to their friends’ houses, or to the dentist or the hairdresser. He wanted someone who would generally look after them and keep them entertained in his absence and exert some discipline over them, which Charles signally failed to do. By very good fortune, a splendidly ditzy young aristocrat called Alexandra Legge-Bourke, known as Tiggy, had been taken on in the Prince’s office as an aide to his Private Secretary, Richard Aylard. Charles had known her family for years; her mother, Shân, and aunt, Victoria, were both Ladies-in-Waiting to Princess Anne. Tiggy, who was and is the biggest bundle of fun, was twenty-eight and perfectly qualified, having previously run a nursery school of her own called Tiggywinkles.

  She was given the job of looking after the boys and it could not have been a more successful appointment. They adored her from the very start, especially Harry, who is still extremely close to her. She was an overgrown tomboy, totally on their wavelength, and loved all the outdoor things they loved. She told ridiculous jokes and laughed at theirs; she liked the same kind of music they did, watched the same videos and television programs, yet at the same time she managed to get them to do what they were told, without ever being officiously strict. If their father told them to go to bed, they would ignore him or wheedle him round. If Tiggy told them, they would call her a “Bossy Old Bat,” but go.

  She once said of them, “I give them what they need at this stage: fresh air, a rifle and a horse. She [their mother] gives them a tennis racket and a bucket of popcorn at the movies.” Diana looked upon the blossoming relationship between her sons and Tiggy Legge-Bourke with horror and jealousy.

  The years of separation were not happy ones for the Princess. She developed a passion for Oliver Hoare, an art dealer friend of the Prince of Wales, whom she had met through her husband. He was often seen arriving at Kensington Palace and there was much gossip. Hoare was married and not inclined to leave his wife. He tried to cool the relationship, at which Diana started making silent telephone calls to his wife at their family home. Eventually his wife contacted the police and the calls were traced to Kensington Palace. The story found its way into the press, much to the fury of the Princess, who immediately blamed her husband and one of his staff for leaking it, convinced that they were out to smear her name. It had actually been leaked by a boy who was at school with one of the Hoare children.

  There was no campaign to discredit Diana following the separation. In fact, quite the reverse. Charles had given specific instructions to his staff to say and do nothing to reflect badly upon the Princess. Shortly after the split, he had declared independence from Buckingham Palace and, with the Queen’s agreement, formed his own press office to which he had recruited two highly experienced press officers, both from solid civil service jobs: Allan Percival and Sandy Henney. He made it blindingly clear to them both that no matter what Diana did or said, she would always be the mother of his children and anything that hurt the Princess would hurt them.

  For all that, Diana saw conspiracies everywhere and sent anonymous, unnerving and sometimes poisonous messages to a range of people, including Patrick Jephson and Tiggy. Even Camilla had threatening telephone calls in the dead of the night. “I’ve sent someone to kill you,” she would say. “They’re outside in the garden. Look out of the window; can you see them?” For a woman on her own in a house in the country in the middle of nowhere and with no protection, it was frightening. But no one dared confront the Princess about the messages for fear of provoking a scene or, in the case of staff, being sacked and joining the long list of people—cooks, housemaids, dressers, secretaries and butlers—who had unfairly and peremptorily been shown the door.

  The Prince picked up many of Diana’s casualties, even Diana herself. She drove him to distraction in many ways. He was angered by some things she did, not least her decision to retire from public life, which she did dramatically on a public platform, despite pleas from him, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh to withdraw if she liked, but to do it quietly so that she could change her mind at a later date if ever she wanted to. She ignored them all. At a charity luncheon in December 1993, to the dismay of all those charities who relied upon her patronage for their fundraising, she said, “Over the next few months I will be seeking a more suitable way of combining a meaningful public role with, hopefully, a more private life. I hope you can find it in your hearts to understand and give me the time and space that has been lacking in recent years… Your kindness and affection have carried me through some of the most difficult periods, and always your love and care have eased the journey.”

  Charles found conversations with her difficult and upsetting. He seemed to do nothing more than provide a focus for her anger; but he did care very much that she should be looked after. He worried about her and was always there at the end of a telephone, right to the end, when things went wrong with a love affair or the children or even the press. She would ring him up in tears and he would do whatever needed to be done to sort out the problem.

  She also shared her emotions and confidences with her sons, particularly William, laying far more on his young shoulders than was good for him. He was very caring, very protective, always keeping an eye to see she was all right, always there with boxes of tissues or chocolates when he knew she was unhappy. Harry, younger and less burdened with responsibility of the firstborn, was more carefree, busy with his games and toys and his own affairs, but taking it all in nonetheless.

  There was one problem that Charles couldn’t sort out. No longer able to go to Highgrove, Diana wanted a house in the country. The boys loved getting out of London, and at times she felt they were like caged animals in Kensington. She approached her brother Charles Spencer who, after their father’s death in 1991, had inherited the earldom along with the family home. She had identified a house on the estate—which had two hundred-odd cottages and farmhouses on it—that would suit them perfectly; far enough away from the big house to leave him undisturbed, but safely within the grounds to afford her and her children privacy. He said she couldn’t have it; he didn’t want the media circus that her presence would attract. The real reason o
nly came out after Diana’s death when Paul Burrell was tried for allegedly stealing some of her possessions. Diana, whose relationship with her family was as volatile and unpredictable as with her friends and staff, had randomly cut her brother out of her life and he had been very hurt. She, in turn, was very upset to be refused the house. Sadly, the relationship was never repaired.

  Instead, Diana relied on friends with houses in the country to take the boys to when they were sick of London, or had an exeat from school. She loved the normality of her friends’ houses, and immediately got stuck into domestic chores, encouraging the boys to do the same. She’d unload the dishwasher, chop onions, peel potatoes, lay the table, do all the ordinary tasks that go on in ordinary households. One of those friends was Julia Samuel (who is now one of Prince George’s godmothers). She and her husband, Michael, have four children, two of whom were the same age as William and Harry, and at the time their country house was very close to Ludgrove. Diana often took the boys there for weekends out—or they would meet up in London, where the Samuels had a house in Hyde Park Gate, opposite Kensington Palace. They would go to the movies together or to a concert at Wembley. For many years they couldn’t have been closer, but suddenly the calls stopped coming—for some reason Julia never understood—and for a year there was very little contact. Then, as suddenly as the friendship had stopped, it started again, and she and Diana were once again close.

  Another friend was Lady Annabel Goldsmith, who lived in a beautiful Queen Anne house on the edge of Richmond Park, where Diana occasionally took the boys. It was a colorful and rather chaotic household with lots of barking dogs and, on Sundays, her large family, into which William and Harry folded comfortably. Annabel wrote in her memoirs, “She would ring and ask if I was going to be at home and if she could come and join me. She would land like a butterfly, have lunch and dart off again, sometimes bringing the boys with her, sometimes not. She would drive herself down… dash through the back door often clutching a present, greet the staff who all loved her, try to evade the mass of dogs yapping at her feet and settle down to amuse us… Her repartee became an essential part of these Sunday lunches, interrupted occasionally when she vanished to the kitchen to do the washing up.”

  The last person who might want to rock the boat at this stage was the Prince of Wales, but to mark twenty-five years since his investiture as Prince of Wales, he had authorized a biography by the respected writer and broadcaster, Jonathan Dimbleby, and an accompanying documentary for television. Dimbleby was given unrestricted access to the archives at St. James’s Palace and Windsor Castle, the freedom to read and quote from the Prince’s journals, diaries and the many thousands of letters he had written since childhood, and permission to speak to his family and friends about him, openly and at length.

  The consequences were catastrophic. This well-intentioned venture caused terrible upset within the Royal Family and led directly to Camilla’s divorce from Andrew Parker Bowles, Richard Aylard’s departure, Diana’s Panorama interview, and yet more debate about the Prince’s fitness to be King. And it was yet another embarrassment for two young boys.

  The documentary was called Charles: the Private Man, the Public Role. It aired in July 1994, and provided a useful insight into the Prince of Wales and how he spent his time. It ran for two and a half hours, but what most of the fourteen million viewers remembered about the film ran to no longer than three minutes.

  Dimbleby asked the Prince about his infidelity: “Did you try to be faithful and honorable to your wife when you took on the vows of marriage?”

  “Yes,” replied the Prince, “until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.”

  Camilla, he said, was “a great friend of mine… she has been a friend for a very long time.”

  At a press conference the following day, Richard Aylard, who had presided over the project and encouraged the question, confirmed that the adultery was with Mrs. Parker Bowles.

  His reasoning had been sound, if flawed. The Prince had to be asked the question in the light of the Squidgy and Camillagate tapes, and of Andrew Morton’s book. He could confirm it (the truth), deny it (thus lying) or say he was not prepared to comment, which would lead to further harassment by the paparazzi, who had already made their life hell. The decision was made to tell the truth. Charles wasn’t the first man to have found comfort in another woman after his marriage had irretrievably broken down, but no one heard the justification. All they heard was the confession.

  “NOT FIT TO REIGN” screamed the Daily Mirror. Other headlines were similar.

  Diana drove down to Ludgrove to talk to the children; there was only so much the Barbers could do. William was more vocal than Harry. As Diana later said in her Panorama interview, “William asked me what had been going on and could I answer his questions, which I did. He said was that the reason why our marriage had broken up? And I said, well, there were three of us in this marriage and the pressures of the media was another factor, so the two together were very difficult. But although I still loved Papa, I couldn’t live under the same roof as him, and likewise with him.”

  The book, simply called The Prince of Wales, followed in the autumn and was serialized in the Sunday Times. The book itself was a comprehensive portrait of a very complex man, but the extracts gave the impression that Charles was a whiner.

  What could have been an excellent vehicle for the Prince turned into an own goal. His parents were deeply hurt by his account of his childhood, and Andrew Parker Bowles was left with little alternative but to bring his marriage to Camilla to an end. They were divorced the following January and he subsequently married his long-term girlfriend, Rosemary Pitman.

  Sir John Riddell, who had left his role as Private Secretary to the Prince in 1990, was surprised that his advisors had let it happen.

  “They released Jonathan Dimbleby and the Prince of Wales on to the Scottish moor together at 9.30 and they came back breathless and excited at 4.30; and when you go for a very exhausting walk with anybody—if you went with Goebbels—after a time the blood circulates, the joints ease up, the breath gets short—you’d pour out your heart to anyone, even Goebbels. Jonathan Dimbleby’s charms are huge so the Prince of Wales gave him all that stuff about how unhappy he was when he was a boy—the Queen never spoke to him, the Duke of Edinburgh was beastly to him—and it very much upset them.

  “Everyone was told this book would finally show what a marvelous person he was; and people were bored out of their wits by Business in the Community and the Prince’s Trust; they wanted to know about their private life. We’re interested in who they’re going to bed with, except we got rather bored by that because we couldn’t keep up with it.”

  No sooner had the excitement over Dimbleby’s book started to fade than Anna Pasternak published Princess in Love, her saccharine account of James Hewitt’s five-year love affair with Diana.

  The Queen had called 1992 her annus horribilis, but she maybe should have held her breath. And it wasn’t over yet. There was still more to upset a small boy’s security.

  THE FINAL STRAW

  In September 1995, at the age of thirteen, William arrived for his first term at Eton College, one of the best—and certainly the most famous—public schools in the world, having successfully passed his common entrance exam. The whole family turned out to take him, Charles, Diana, and Harry, putting on a display of unity and smiles for the inevitable press and the curious public. It was a daunting prospect for William. He was not just leaving the security of Ludgrove, which he knew so well, for a school that was almost ten times the size, but he was leaving his brother, whom he relied on as much as Harry relied on him, and the reassurance of all his friends and teachers. He knew he was going to be an object of interest from locals, boys and “beaks” alike (Eton-speak for teachers); everyone would be looking at him, wondering what he was like, and, what’s more, knowing all the lurid details of his home life.

  That very day the Princess had been on the front pages agai
n with yet more revelations about her love life. After Oliver Hoare, she had fallen for the England rugby union captain, Will Carling. She had met him at the Chelsea Harbour Club, the exclusive gym where she used to go to work out in the early mornings. Harry was mad about rugby, William was more interested in football; nevertheless, Carling was a hero to both boys and suddenly he was in their lives. Diana had taken them to watch him play, he was a regular visitor to Kensington Palace and he had given them each rugby shirts that were no doubt their pride and joy. Who knows whether they had known the true nature of their mother’s friendship with him. But on that first day of the Michaelmas term, every man and woman in the country was left in little doubt. Oliver Hoare’s wife, Diane, had threatened to divorce her husband only when his affair with Diana became public knowledge. Julia Carling was less tolerant. She had no proof, but was convinced Diana and her husband were more than just good friends and ended her marriage to Will in a bitter, protracted and very high-profile way that ensured the tabloids had plenty of material to keep their readers titillated and Diana’s name in the news.

  A few days after saying goodbye to his brother, Harry went back to Ludgrove for the start of the new term, no doubt relieved to be back with his friends and the safe cocoon that the routine of school provided. What neither he nor William knew (nor anyone at Buckingham Palace or St. James’s Palace, nor even the Chairman of the BBC, which screened the program) was that their mother had plans actively under way for one final bombshell that would hit right at the heart of the institution that was her children’s future.