Prince Harry

by Penny Junor

  The paparazzi shots of the two of them entwined was too much for some commentators. “The sight of a paunchy playboy groping a scantily-dressed Diana must appall and humiliate Prince William,” wrote the late Lynda Lee-Potter, doyenne of columnists, in the Daily Mail. “As the mother of two young sons she ought to have more decorum and sense.” While in the Daily Express, Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s former Press Secretary wrote, “Princess Diana’s press relations are now clearly established. Any publicity is good publicity… I’m told she and Dodi are made for each other, both having more brass than brains.”

  Meanwhile, William and Harry, who had been left at Kensington Palace with their nanny Olga while their mother shot off to Paris, were now with their father and preparing to join Britannia, the royal yacht—a far cry from Jonikal—for her last-ever cruise of the Western Isles before being decommissioned. First there was lunch at Clarence House with the Queen Mother, their great-grandmother, to celebrate her ninety-seventh birthday on 4 August, and the traditional birthday photo call. Then it was Balmoral and hundreds of acres of heather and moorland, hills and crags, rivers and lochs, and all manner of sport and fun to be had with not a paparazzo in sight.

  To ensure the paparazzi left them in peace, Sandy Henney, their father’s Press Secretary, had organized a photo call for all three Princes. It was always an ordeal for her to find suitable settings for interesting photographs, one for the daily papers, one for the Sundays; she also had to persuade William to cooperate. Harry didn’t hate the cameras any less than his brother, but he was more cooperative. William, by then a bit of a sulky teenager, had to be persuaded and cajoled, whereas Harry, outgoing and uncomplicated, and always eager to please, was Sandy’s ally. The Prince of Wales, while never finding it comfortable, was the ultimate professional and simply did what was asked of him.

  The first set-up was at a cabin by the River Dee. The idea was that the three Princes and William’s black Labrador, Widgeon, the sister of Tiggy’s dog, would walk down to the river and meander along the bank, stopping every now and again to throw the odd stone into the river for the dog. “The dog saved the day,” says Sandy. “William was throwing sticks for him and you could see Harry was egging his brother along.”

  She had decided to use a weir as the location for the Sundays but couldn’t think how to use it. “So I said to Tiggs, ‘Have you got any ideas?’ And she said, ‘God no, let’s go out in one of the jeeps with Harry.’ He was hanging off the back of the jeep like kids do and he said, ‘I’ve got a couple of ideas. How about doing this, this and this.’ I said, ‘Not sure that would work, Harry.’ Then he said, ‘I’ve got another idea,’ so off we go. The third idea was brilliant, it was all Harry’s. There was a salmon ladder in the river. ‘Okay Harry, how are you going to make this one work?’ ‘Well, William and I can run down here…’ and Tiggy’s up there with a cigarette, and Harry’s clambering down and I’m thinking, Oh my God, we’re about to lose Number Two, and he came up and he said, ‘Right that’s what we’re going to do.’ And I said, ‘Well done, Harry, that’s going to work. Now you’ve got to sell it to your father and your brother—and bless this young man’s heart—what was he, eleven? Coming up twelve? He briefed the Prince, my boss. I had the radio and we were on the other side of the weir with the press and I said, ‘Right,’ to the police, ‘get them to get out of the car and walk down and Harry will take it from there’; and you could see him directing his father—you couldn’t hear because of the noise of the weir—but Harry directed the whole thing and it worked. He was brilliant.”

  TRAGEDY IN PARIS

  Less than three weeks after a happy, carefree day on the River Spey, Diana was dead and life would never be the same again for any one of them. It was Sunday 31 August 1997, and later in the day, William and Harry had been due to join their mother in London for the last few days of the summer holidays. Tiggy Legge-Bourke “by the grace of God,” as the Queen so rightly said had just arrived in Scotland to take them south. They never made that journey and they never saw their mother again.

  In the initial call, which came at one o’clock in the morning, the British Ambassador in Paris, had only sketchy news. There had been a car crash. It was thought that Dodi Fayed was dead; Diana had been injured but no one knew how badly. Their car had hit a pillar in a tunnel under the Seine, during a high-speed chase. A group of paparazzi had been in pursuit on motorbikes.

  Sir Robin Janvrin, then the Queen’s Deputy Private Secretary, took the call in his house on the Balmoral estate and immediately woke the Queen and the Prince of Wales in their rooms at Balmoral Castle. He then phoned the Prince’s Assistant Private Secretary, Nick Archer, as well as the Queen’s Equerry and PPOs and they quickly set up an operations room. In London, the Prince’s team had individually heard the news in their homes at much the same time, ironically, from the tabloid press. They were immediately on the phone to Scotland.

  The plan was to get the Prince of Wales on to a flight to Paris as soon as possible to visit Diana in hospital, but that was superseded by another call from the embassy at 3.45. Robin Janvrin had the unenviable task of updating the Prince. “Sir, I am very sorry to have to tell you, I’ve just had the Ambassador on the phone. The Princess died a short time ago.” She had suffered serious chest and head injuries but mercifully had lost consciousness very soon after the impact and never regained it. Doctors battled to save her life, both at the scene and for a further two hours at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital four miles away, but they fought in vain.

  Transporting her body home was no simple matter and it was a source of heated debate. No longer a member of the Royal Family, she was not automatically entitled to a plane of the Queen’s Flight. The suggestion that the alternative might be a Harrods’ van clinched the matter and “Operation Overload” sprang into action, a plan never previously needed, to repatriate the body of a member of the Royal Family to London.

  Thus at 10 a.m. a BAe 146 plane from RAF Northolt was in the air with the Prince’s London team—Stephen Lamport, his Private Secretary, Mark Bolland, his Deputy Private Secretary and Sandy Henney—on its way to Aberdeen to collect the Prince of Wales. It flew via RAF Wittering in Rutland, where it collected Diana’s sisters, Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Lady Jane Fellowes. Robert Fellowes had broken the news to the Spencer family and both women had wanted to go with Prince Charles to collect the body. He had decided not to take the boys. The shock, horror and grief felt by everyone in the castle that summer’s night can only be imagined, but the Prince’s first thought was for William and Harry. Should he wake them or let them sleep and talk to them in the morning? Like every father who has to tell his children that their mother is dead, he was dreading it. He didn’t know what to do for the best but the Queen strongly recommended leaving them to sleep which he did but he sneaked into the nursery and removed the radios and televisions from their rooms lest they woke early and switched something on.

  What the Prince of Wales said to his sons when he woke them at 7.15 that fateful morning, and how they processed the news, no one but the three of them will ever know. He had spent a lifetime visiting the bereaved in times of national disaster, and being steadfast in the face of tragedy, but nothing could have prepared him for the terrible task that faced him that morning. Any father who has ever had to break such news will share his pain. Just as any child who has lived through that unique loss will identify with William and Harry. There can be no easy consolation, no easy explanation, no way of softening the blow or easing the pain and the anger. And for Harry, still just twelve, still a child, still emotionally dependent on his mother, still vulnerable, it must have been almost impossible to absorb.

  Just hours later, William said he would like to go to church “to talk to Mummy.” Harry agreed, so the Queen took them that morning, along with the rest of the family, to the little kirk at Crathie. There is something deeply comforting in the traditional ritual and language of a church service for those who have been brought up with religion in th
eir lives, as they all had—and something deeply spiritual about a building that over hundreds of years has witnessed every stage of life from birth to death, and absorbed in its very fabric every emotion known to man.

  William was newly confirmed into the Church of England—of which he will one day be the Supreme Governor. The ceremony at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle just five months earlier was the last time the entire family had been together, although his grandmother, Frances Shand Kydd, had sadly been missing. Diana had not been speaking to her mother at the time, so had not invited her; she had also forbidden Tiggy to attend. After months of religious instruction, William would have had his faith to lean on. Harry, two years younger, and not yet in that zone, might have struggled more. Though not even faith can take away the agony of loss, the hollowness, the numbness, the inevitable rewind of last conversations, last thoughts, last memories, the words left unsaid and the guilt—whether real or imagined—that most of us feel when someone so close to us is unnaturally snatched away. But for those who believe in God, there is great catharsis in prayer.

  The secular media saw none of that. They were outraged that William and Harry should have been taken to church—one newspaper described it as a public relations exercise—and they were outraged that Diana wasn’t mentioned by the minister in his prayers. It had been the Reverend Robert Sloan’s decision, but the media blamed the Queen. “My thinking,” he told reporters, “was that the children had been wakened just a few hours before and told of their mother’s death.” But what outraged the media the most was that not one member of the Royal Family shed a tear.

  The Royal Family, and the Queen in particular, became the focus for the nation’s anger as it fell into a period of deep (and, to some, entirely incomprehensible) mourning for the Princess who, with her mixture of vulnerability and beauty, had tapped into the nation’s psyche. And in a week that saw the most extraordinary outpouring of grief from people, most of whom had never met or known Diana, the Queen’s absence from Buckingham Palace became a lightning rod. At every other national disaster, she or a close member of her family had been one of the first to visit, the first to offer words of commiseration and comfort and to be present alongside ordinary people, doing what royals do best, spearheading national sentiment, representing the nation to itself. Yet, in this greatest hour of need, there was no sign of them. And there was no visible sign that they were in any way grief-stricken.

  It was not the reality. This is a family that for generations has been brought up to keep their emotions in check—not in private, but in public. It is part of the training, part of the job—and quintessentially British. But in the touchy-feely, confessional world that characterized modern Britain—and that Diana had been so much a part of—their restraint was anathema. But it is a family that has suffered its fair share of grief. The Duke of Edinburgh’s early life was punctuated by loss. By the age of seventeen his mother had been admitted to a mental asylum, his father had virtually disappeared from his life, one of his sisters and her entire family had been killed in a plane crash and his guardian and favorite uncle had died of cancer. Prince Charles, too, had suffered shocking losses, including the sudden death of his influential great-uncle, Lord Mountbatten, killed in 1979 by an IRA bomb; and that of his cousin, Prince William of Gloucester, after whom William was named, who was killed aged thirty when his light aircraft crashed.

  But if ever there was a place conducive to the healing process it was Balmoral, a spiritual haven among the hills and the heather where, for the next week, while preparations were under way in London for the funeral, William and Harry were supported by loving family and friends, including their cousin Peter Phillips, aged twenty, who immediately flew up to join them, and by the routine of life that they had enjoyed every summer. It was familiar to them and thereby safe and reassuring. They could go for long, long walks, they could be kept busy, or they could be given the space and time to talk, to reminisce, to ask questions and to begin to take in the enormity of what had happened. The boys’ welfare was the prime focus of everyone there in Scotland that week, on helping them get through each hour of each day.

  SPEAK TO US MA’AM

  That Sunday morning, Tony Blair had caught the mood of the nation perfectly. His voice cracking with emotion, he had said, “I feel like everyone else in the country. I am utterly devastated. We are a nation in a state of shock, in mourning, in grief. It is so deeply painful for us. She was a wonderful and a warm human being. Though her own life was often sadly touched by tragedy, she touched the lives of so many others in Britain and throughout the world, with joy and with comfort. She was the people’s Princess and that is how she will remain in our hearts and memories for ever.”

  In the healing calm of the Scottish Highlands, the Queen was insulated from what was going on elsewhere in the country. She and the whole family were getting news from every quarter—politicians, friends, historians and VIPs from all over the world—and they saw the newspapers screaming at her to come back to the capital, but none of them could feel the raw emotion that those in the streets could feel, especially in London where the piles of tributes, flowers and teddy bears were growing by the hour. There were said to have been a million bouquets outside Kensington Palace alone and countless other offerings. Sandy Henney was sending graphic updates to the Prince of Wales via Stephen Lamport. “You can’t read about this,” she said. “You can’t even see it on television. There is real hatred building up here, and the public is incensed by your silence.”

  But Charles knew he was not the one to take the lead, it was his mother’s call; and for once in her long reign, she put her family before the nation she served. She took the view that this was a private tragedy and that her priority was her grieving grandsons. And in the long run, and in human terms, who is to say she was wrong? The fact that William and Harry survived the trauma of their mother’s death so successfully, and are now happy and focused working royals, is in no small part due to the love and support of their grandmother and everyone else at Balmoral that August who helped them through those early days.

  “They’re up in bloody Scotland; they should be here. Those children should be here,” was the common cry in the pubs up and down the country, fueled by increasingly angry headlines. “Charles weeps bitter tears of guilt,” proclaimed the Daily Mail over a photograph of the Prince taken some months before. “Show us you care,” demanded the Express. “Your subjects are suffering, speak to us Ma’am,” railed the Mirror. “Where is our Queen: Where is her flag?” shouted the Sun.

  There was no flag. All over the country, flags were flying at half-mast, but at Buckingham Palace there was nothing—just mountains of flowers and messages piling up outside the railings. The reason was protocol. The only flag ever to fly at Buckingham Palace is the Royal Sovereign, and then only when the monarch is in residence; it never flies at half-mast, because technically the monarch is never dead. As the adage goes, “The King is dead, long live the King!” Faced with the clamoring of the tabloids, the Queen, in consultation with her advisors, clung to what she knew best: tradition.

  The flag became the embodiment of all that was out of touch and irrelevant about the monarchy in the 1990s, and stood in stark contrast to the warmth and compassion of the Princess whom the Royal Family had spurned. It caused a furious row internally, and in the heat of the moment it was suggested that Sir Robert Fellowes might “impale himself on his own flag staff.” Eventually the Queen was persuaded, and on the Thursday, in the nick of time, a Union flag was raised to half-mast.

  That day the family ventured outside the gates of Balmoral for the first time since Diana’s death. William and Harry had expressed a desire to go to church again, so the Prince took the opportunity to give them a small taster of what awaited them in London. The funeral was just two days away and, in preparation for it, the Prince had asked Sandy Henney to come up to Balmoral to speak to the boys. He often asked for her help when there was something difficult or confrontational to impart
to his sons. She explained about the extraordinary scenes that they could expect to see on the streets of London. “Mummy’s death,” she said, “has had the most amazing impact on people. They are really sad because they loved her very, very much and they miss her, and when you go down to London you will see something you will never, ever, see again and it may come as a bit of a shock. But everything you will see is because the public thought so much of your mummy, it is the sign of their grief for your loss. We want you to know about it so you will be ready for it.” William absorbed everything she was saying in silence; Harry was curious and wanted answers. Why was she telling them this? Why were people behaving in this way?

  Later, she was up in the tower at Balmoral, where letters were pouring in by the hundreds and thousands. “Harry arrived with Tiggs,” she recalls. “ ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. I explained that all of these people wanted to say how sorry they are that your mummy’s dead and that they’re thinking of you.

  “ ‘Can I open some?’ said Harry, snatching up some envelopes. ‘Of course you can. Go on, help yourself’—and just sit there, I thought, and break my heart.”

  Sandy was a warm, empathetic figure, with no children of her own, but with stepchildren—the perfect person for the sensitive task of coaxing the boys out of their shell. “I think he was slightly overawed. They are who they are, she was who she was and yet I don’t think there was that realization when they were small just what an effect their mother had on people.

  “He didn’t just lose a parent, he lost that parent and in such a spectacular way. I think they did a marvelous job at Balmoral. That blanket that went around them, just to give them some breathing space to begin to understand that she wasn’t going to be there anymore. No matter what anyone says about how the Queen should have come down to London, I don’t care; they got it right for the boys and we should be forever grateful for that because they’ve turned into two reasonable, decent human beings.”