by Penny Junor
“I came back with about forty-odd members of the British press and foreign press and we set up a big photo call. He was fantastic; very good with the media, he played pick-up rugby with the kids or football, there was a lot of laughter. One little four-year-old wouldn’t let him go, followed him everywhere wearing wellies. They were great friends and that became the big story of that visit; and he then went back and met him again. He was very enthusiastic and passionate. And early on clearly wanted to try and do something for Lesotho. He was genuinely moved and shocked by the absolutely terrible situation the country faced and still does through AIDS.”
The coverage prompted Carol Sarler, writing in the Daily Express, to launch a vicious attack on Harry, calling him a “thoroughly horrible young man” and a “national disgrace,” who “rarely lifted a finger unless it’s to feel up a cheap tart in a nightclub.” His gap year she said, was “a space between no work whatsoever at school and utter privilege at Sandhurst.” In Australia, he had spent his time “slumped in front of the television waiting to behave badly at the next available rugby match,” while in Lesotho, he was spending “eight lavish weeks… [during which] he has reluctantly agreed to spend a bit of the trip staring at poor people. His exploits have been making headlines for years: the drinking, the drugging, the yobbing, the waste of the costliest education in the land, the explicit disdain for the lower orders, the increasingly sexual public romps—we’ve seen it all, we’ve heard it all.”
Paddy too had seen it and heard it and had had enough. He wrote a furious letter of complaint to the Express that he insisted be printed in full. He took her points one by one. “These comments make it entirely clear that Ms. Sarler has little or no understanding of Harry as a person and how he has spent his current gap year.” It was a “very unfair and unfounded attack” full of “ill-informed and insensitive criticism.” The next week her column was an out-and-out attack on Paddy Harverson.
UPS AND DOWNS
One of the journalists at that photo call was Tom Bradby, ITN’s former royal correspondent. He had filmed both the Princes over the years and had come to know Mark Dyer very well. Mark and Colleen Harris had identified him to William and Harry as the acceptable face of journalism—someone they could trust. Tom was knocked out by what he saw in Lesotho. “The stuff that Harry was doing with African kids was so interesting and he was so amazingly natural with them. There were some fantastically moving stories about that little boy Mutsu who used to follow Harry around everywhere. It was clear that Harry had some kind of natural aptitude with kids, particularly kids who’d had a very rough time. I didn’t know whether that was something he innately got from his mother—so in the genes—or from the fact that he’d had a very rough time, maybe both. But he was in some ways quite an immature young man and yet here he was, behaving with amazing maturity with these kids and they really took to him. Everywhere he went you could see; there was no invention about that, there were kids hanging off him and they obviously really loved him and he had a really natural talent with them.”
Harry agreed to be interviewed. It was the first interview he had ever given and, to Tom’s surprise, he spoke very openly about his mother—and, it seemed, somewhat cathartically. Neither boy had ever spoken about Diana; but in Africa, with AIDS orphans, mirroring his mother’s work in Africa all those years before, there was no way to avoid asking the question. Tom had talked at length to Mark beforehand, and there was a degree of nervousness about what Harry would say and whether it would upset his father. “I don’t think he is now, but in those days Harry was a prisoner of everyone else’s worries and nerves, particularly officials at the top of the pile who were nervous of what the Prince of Wales would think. It would have been bizarre and absurd if I hadn’t asked about it, so I did, but what was surprising about it was the way it just came spilling out. He obviously wanted to talk about her, he was quite moving talking about her, I definitely had the feeling he wanted to get something off his chest and in fact somebody in the car, Damian or Mark later told me that he was slightly elated as he got in the car. So I got the impression, it bizarrely turned into a bit of therapy. He lived in a world where the Palace was always nervous about the memory of his mother. I think he felt she was in danger of being forgotten and wanted to put his own personal stamp on it, and I think he was pleased to have done so and in a way that’s Harry all over. He’s very ‘shoot from the hip.’ Everyone who works for him will tell you the same thing.”
For all these reasons, Tom suggested making a documentary about Lesotho. It took months to persuade the Palace to agree but finally The Forgotten Kingdom: Prince Harry in Lesotho was shown on ITV in Britain in 2004 and sold to America. It incorporated the interview Harry had done with Tom the previous year. “I want to try to carry it [her work] on to make her proud,” he said, and in reference to various tape recordings of his mother talking about her marriage that were, coincidentally, being broadcast for the first time, he remarked, “It’s been a long time now [since she died], not for me but for most people. The stuff that’s come out has been bad… these tapes and everything. Luckily, I’ve been out here so I haven’t really heard about it but I feel bad because my father and brother have been taking the stick instead. It’s a shame, it’s a shame that, after all the good she’d done, even this far on, people can’t bring out the good in her; they can’t remember the good. All they want to bring out is the bad stuff. I mean, bad news sells. I’m not here to change that. All I’m out here doing is what I want to do, doing what she’d want me to do and it’s not a question of reminding everyone of what good she did, because everyone knows that, hopefully.”
Talking about the times his mother used to take him and his brother on late-night visits incognito to meet AIDS sufferers and sick children or to hostels to meet the homeless, he said, “I’ve always wanted to do this. It’s what she was doing when I started off going to Great Ormond Street [Children’s Hospital]. I believe I’ve a lot of my mother in me, basically, and I just think she’d want us to do this—me and my brother. Obviously it’s not as easy for William as it is for me. I think I’ve got more time on my hands to be able to help.”
When asked about the criticism of the likes of Carol Sarler he said, “I’d love to let it wash over me but I can’t. I don’t think anyone can. It’s hard but I’m not out here for the sympathy vote. William and I try to be normal. It’s very difficult but, you know, we are who we are. I feel that I’m now getting to the age where I can make the most of that. I always wanted to go to an AIDS country to carry on my mother’s legacy as much as I can. I don’t want to take over from her because I never will. I don’t think anyone can, but I want to try and carry on to make her proud.”
An appeal was launched on the back of the film and all the money raised went towards supporting the orphans in Lesotho, and ultimately towards founding Sentebale, the charity that he and Seeiso now run between them. There was no way Harry was going to jet home to his privileged, comfortable life in Britain and turn his back on all those children.
In June 2004, shortly before the official announcement that he was planning a career in the Army, he had sad news. His grandmother, Frances Shand Kydd, had died on the Isle of Seil off the west coast of Scotland. She was just sixty-eight, a rather tragic figure, who had last been seen in public at the Burrell trial as a witness for the prosecution, when under oath she had been forced to admit that she and Diana had been estranged for four months before her daughter’s death. They had had no contact. Life had been very hard on her: she had endured an unhappy marriage and lost custody of her children when they needed her. Her second husband, Peter Shand Kydd, had left her in 1986; her brother had committed suicide two years before, and she had buried two children—her newborn son in 1960 and Diana in 1997. It was not surprising that she should have turned to two of life’s great comforters, religion and the bottle. When she returned to Scotland after Diana’s funeral, she was trapped indoors for eleven days by reporters; and, after the Burrell trial, she
found she had been burgled in her high-profile absence, and her jewelry stolen. She had been living as a recluse for many years in a two-roomed bungalow, doing relentless charity work, supported by the local community in Oban and the Roman Catholic Church. She once said, “It takes very little to make you happy if you’ve had real sadness. It makes you take less for granted, and it’s a very enriching experience, really.”
Her funeral at St. Columba’s Cathedral, a big old church on the seafront at Oban a week after her death, was a large gathering of the Spencer clan. The Prince of Wales, her former son-in-law, was not there—not, apparently, invited. William and Harry both looked immensely sad. They hadn’t seen much of this grandmother in recent years, but they had happy memories of times with her and holidays spent on Seil when they were younger. She and Diana had been alike in so many ways and just knowing she was there must have been a reassuring link to their mother’s memory. Sadly, she would never know that her red-haired “rascal” of a grandson had achieved his ambition to become a soldier.
Harry had passed his Pre-Regular Commissions Board assessment in September 2003 before he went to Australia. In July 2004 he was due to sit his entrance exams, the Regular Commissions Board that—if he was successful—would enter him into Sandhurst. It was not a given that he would get in: many candidates, most of whom are graduates, fail. Lord Dannatt, formerly General Sir Richard Dannatt, says of the process that: “It’s four days, and tough, and there is an absolute quality line; you will only go to Sandhurst if you hit the absolute quality line.” He was Chief of General Staff, the highest rank in the Army, but his own son, whom he believes would have made a good Army officer, didn’t make it through the process. Neither did the son of the Major General who was the Commandant at Sandhurst. “So if Harry had not measured up to the standard, I don’t think he would have got through. We’re pretty fair and pretty robust in our processes.”
In advance of the Board, which is a combination of grueling physical, mental and emotional aptitude tests held over four days, Harry had a bit of coaching from a former instructor. They used to meet at Broadfield, the Duchy Home Farm, near Highgrove, and the instructor helped bring Harry up to speed about what he could expect. “They are not looking to see whether you are a fully rounded leader at that moment,” says Dannatt. “They are looking to see whether you’ve got the potential given a year’s training at Sandhurst and continuing training, to become an effective leader and an effective Army officer, of which leadership is the core activity.”
Harry was delighted to have passed and intended to start at Sandhurst in January 2005. In the meantime, his plan for the final part of his gap year, starting in November, was to stay on a polo ranch in Argentina, to immerse himself in the sport among the best horses, players and teachers in the world. Unfortunately, a couple of months before he went, he damaged his left knee on a training exercise with the Army, and then compounded the injury on the rugby pitch, coaching children on a Rugby Football Union community program. So when he arrived at the El Remanso polo farm, he disappointingly wasn’t able to ride. Instead he saw a bit of the country, did some sightseeing and, among other things, went big game hunting at a private lodge owned by Count Claudio Zichy-Thyssen, who had more than 170,000 acres stocked with wildlife. Little did Harry know that a photograph of him, gun in hand, triumphantly squatting beside a dead water buffalo would come back to haunt him ten years later, the very day he, his brother and father jointly launched an impassioned appeal in London to stop the illegal slaughter and trade in endangered wildlife.
At the time, that wasn’t the issue. What was occupying the British press were cock-and-bull stories about Harry’s supposedly drunken exploits and excesses in the local town. The party boy—whose reputation for staggering out of nightclubs was gathering pace—was behaving so badly, they said, that the local police had complained to the Prince’s protection team. He had been sneaking out of the ranch at night to go clubbing; the tabloids quoted a local girl who claimed to have danced with him. What’s more, a gangland kidnap plot had been discovered that forced him to leave the country early.
Harry, in fact, had never set foot inside the nightclub in question, and the kidnap plot was pure fantasy. Unbeknownst to the media, Mark Dyer had sneaked Harry’s new girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, out to the ranch as a surprise, and Harry had no need to go in pursuit of girls. What he and his mates had done for a laugh was let a friend, who was also a redhead, pretend to be Harry—it was the friend who had been out partying and enjoying the attentions of the local talent, who triumphantly thought they’d pulled a prince.
Harry had fallen in love with Chelsy Davy when he had been in Africa earlier in the year. He had first met her a couple of years before that, introduced by mutual friends when she was in her final year at Stowe School, but this time they clicked. Although often portrayed in the press as nothing more than a good-time girl whose love of vodka and late nights was second only to Harry’s, she is actually very bright, very ambitious, and, like most girls from southern Africa, fun, sporty and practical. They made each other laugh and had a lot in common and seemed to make a perfect couple. Everyone liked Chelsy; she very quickly became friends with his friends and family, as well as with William’s girlfriend, Kate Middleton, and Kate’s sister, Pippa.
She was born and brought up in Zimbabwe, but educated in England. Her father ran a game farm in Zimbabwe called Lemco Safari Area, which covered an area of 1,300 square miles—twice the size of Surrey. Charles Davy was one of the largest private landowners in the country, but lost several farms to President Mugabe’s aggressive reclamation policy. Chelsy’s mother, Beverley, had been Miss Rhodesia, and was once the face of Coca-Cola locally; her family were also farmers. Like so many white Zimbabweans, they had had their land seized and their home razed to the ground. The Davy family now lives in Durban in South Africa with a holiday apartment at Camps Bay near Cape Town and, over the years, Harry has been a frequent visitor to both.
A longstanding family friend once quoted by a newspaper said, “She’s probably never made a cup of tea or a bed in her life. But she could ride bareback, skipper a speedboat across Kenya’s Lake Naivasha and all the time match the boys drink for drink. African girls like Chelsey have a lot in common with the upper classes. The bottom line is that these girls are athletic, strong-boned and gorgeous. They have that extra something that comes from being raised in the bush. They have a big appetite for life. These are the kind of girls who’ll sleep under the stars without bringing a change of underwear, who aren’t afraid of spiders and could strangle a snake. That wins them a lot of respect. They also share the same education, impeccable manners and privileged outlook on life as the British aristocracy.” Was it any wonder someone like Harry would find her so irresistible? And her surprise arrival at El Remanso must have been all his dreams come true.
In Argentina, Harry’s two PPOs, who had been telling the local police, as is customary, where Harry was going each day, discovered that the police were in dispute with the local municipality over their wages, and to supplement their meagre earnings were getting backhanders for tipping off the local press about where Harry would be. “So the protection officers stopped telling the Argentinean police where they were going,” says Paddy, “which really annoyed them. They then leaked a story to the local newspaper that there was a kidnap threat against Prince Harry. A newspaper in Buenos Aires constructed this extraordinary vision of Harry on the rampage, based on the nightclub story and the police stuff, which was picked up by the Daily Mirror and run word for word—without any checking—on the front page. He had lived probably the most blameless two weeks of his life; sometimes it’s quite comical.”
The story appeared the morning Harry flew to Heathrow, under the headline, “OUT OF CONTROL? Harry’s home early from Argentine in booze row. Prince picked up girls and was ‘ungovernable’—but the Palace say he’s just a boy with a bad leg.”
The bad leg was on the mend. Harry saw a specialist sports physician and had an MR
I scan, but it was a bone bruise inside the kneecap and there was no need for anything more radical than physiotherapy and strengthening exercises. It did, however, mean that his entry to Sandhurst had to be delayed by four months, until May 2005, to make sure he was completely fit.
The delay was unfortunate. During those months, the average tabloid reader might have concluded that the spare did nothing but spend his time in expensive nightclubs, taking a swipe at the waiting paparazzi as he staggered into the street in the early hours of the morning. As one of his team says, “He came back from Argentina and had more time on his hands, which was not a good thing because, like any young man, he kicked around, hung out with his mates and probably spent more time than he might have done out and about when he should have been in Sandhurst.”
The tabloids had decided upon a narrative. William was the clean-living Prince and Harry was the wild child, and week after week they produced the photographs that proved Harry was off the rails. He didn’t help himself; the photographs didn’t lie—he did drink too much, like most of his friends and contemporaries—but, after Christmas that year, the press found a new stick to beat him with. He and William went to a fancy dress party in Wiltshire, given by Richard Meade, the former Olympic show-jumper, for his son Harry’s twenty-second birthday. The theme was “colonial and native” and while William went as a lion, Harry dressed in a German desert costume with a swastika on the armband that he had found in a local fancy dress shop. With the typical mindlessness of the average twenty year old, he didn’t think, and neither did most of the people at the party—both young and old. But someone took a photograph.