Harry (21 page)

Harry’s much proclaimed longing to be a ‘normal’ human being is greatly frustrated by his failure to have a normal love life but he is the first to admit that he is often helpless when it comes to the female temptation pushed his way. One circle of girls ensconced in apartments in Kensington, Chelsea and Belgravia, and known as the Harry Hunters, developed their own signal system, circulating text messages which would read something like ‘H@M no C’ – gibberish to most but to the recipients it meant ‘Prince Harry is at the club Mahiki without Chelsy’. When one Mahiki regular, seemingly fuelled by cocaine, told him about the coded messages, he simply responded (according to her), ‘Wow, bring it on.’

Harry’s choice of friends is believed by his father to have much to do with his often wild behaviour. They are almost, without exception, fellow clubbers. It was his best friend, Guy Pelly – then promotions manager of the club – who
introduced
him to Mahiki, a venue close to the Ritz Hotel which sells Treasure Chest cocktails at £300 a shot. One of the first to become a Mahiki regular, Harry’s presence attracted huge attendance and queues were known to grow round the corner once it became known that the club had royal patronage. Even the so-called
Tatler
set girls – those with double-barrelled names who often employee PR men to keep their names in the society columns – are content to stand in line when there’s a chance of bumping into the party Prince.

Another of his favourite late-night haunts is Raffles
on the King’s Road. It is conveniently located close to a friend’s Chelsea home where the party often goes on until breakfast time and bouncers have been known to turn away ‘unattractive’ women. Chelsy’s favourite, though, was always Chinawhite, just off Oxford Street and a regular haunt of the young, rich, famous and, of course, glamorous.

In many of the places he favours, the Prince is rarely presented with a bill. An exception is Boujis, where he once ran up a tab of more than £10,000 after treating complete strangers to £200 bottles of champagne. According to a reliable Buckingham Palace source he got a lecture from the Queen for flaunting his wealth after news of his huge bill leaked out – something his brother has never had to face. It didn’t stop Harry: similarly large amounts of royal cash were spent at his other favourite venues: The Brompton Club (subsequently bought by another of his close friends, Piers Adam), The Box and Whisky Mist, where his attendance is always welcomed.

Whichever nightspot he was at, Harry was never short of company, especially of the female kind. But Chelsy, the very antithesis of all things Middleton, was the only one who truly tugged his heart strings: ‘He doesn’t know what to do because she’s the only one he’s ever wanted to settle down with and she’s just not interested in being a professional
princess
,’ says one close to the Prince.

Without naming Chelsy, Harry came close to detailing the problem to an American TV host when he said: ‘As any girl would tell you, it’s sort of “Oh my God, he’s a prince. No thank you.”’ And on his chances of marriage he sadly explained the problem: ‘I’m not so much looking for someone to fulfil the role, but obviously, you know, finding someone who would be willing to take it on.’ Clearly Ms Davy was not such a
candidate
. Nevertheless, he sent her indirect messages, announcing that he was ‘100 per cent single’, but Chelsy was not fooled by his bid to challenge her to call him for yet another
reconciliation
. She had a life of her own to live and his responsibilities were too great to support a tender romance.

The tug-of-love was not over yet, however.

Had he given in to his various affairs, Harry could have been married several times by now, but he is cautious in that regard; his father had reminded him that a previous royal Henry – King Henry VIII – had one of his wives beheaded simply because he wanted to marry another woman. The
killing
apart, though, Harry may have more in common with his amorous red-headed ancestor than he realises.

N
o one was more surprised than his father when Harry passed his Apache flying test. For someone who had limped through his academic career at school and college, it was an extraordinary achievement. Harry had said himself a few years earlier that although his dream – after repeatedly viewing the Tom Cruise movie – was to become a
Top Gun
pilot, he did not feel he was bright enough for the role.

The new-found application to learning – something he had abysmally failed to demonstrate at Eton – was astonishing. Apache helicopters cost £46 million each and are among the most advanced and complicated war machines ever conceived. Learning to fly them and use their highly complex weaponry requires the kind of brainpower few believed Harry possessed, yet he had amazed his instructors with both his dedication to study and his natural and instinctive flying ability.

He had spent several weeks of his training flying the gunship though the precarious French Alps. Nicknamed the ‘flying tank’, the aircraft is so sophisticated it can detect,
classify and prioritise 256 potential targets in seconds, but that’s of no use unless the man at the controls can absorb and act on the information it delivers. The Apache is no robot; it requires a man at the controls capable of using the 30mm cannon firing 625 rounds a minute, the CRV-7 point-and-fire rockets and four air-to-air missiles on receipt and
interpretation
of signals received in front of his right eye on the helmet display unit.

Harry was trained to act as the aircraft’s co-pilot gunner, operating the Apache’s arsenal of weapons from the front seat while behind him sat the pilot. He was now qualified to embark on missions that would involve targeting the Taliban in support of ground troops under attack from
insurgents
. With its payload of laser-guided Hellfire missiles the Apache can target buildings being used by the Taliban for cover, reducing them to rubble. For enemy out in the open, Harry could operate the Apache’s 30mm chain gun using his helmet-mounted display as the aircraft flew at 205mph in all weathers from arctic cold to desert heat and by night as well as day.

Harry was not just good at it, he was declared one of the two best young airmen to have fulfilled the course; he was a true Top Gun.

Charles was justifiably proud of the son whose lack of application had so exasperated him during his schooldays and, in the way that such fathers do, before he went to bed on the night the results came through, he wrote his son a letter of fulsome praise.

Harry celebrated in his own way: he had a date with four soldiers and a great deal of snow and ice. When he heard that four servicemen who had all been seriously injured in Afghanistan were planning to walk to the North Pole, he asked if he might join them.

Although they had pledged to make the trek with as little able-bodied help as possible, he pointed out, he had after all agreed to be patron of their Walking With The Wounded charity, founded to raise funds for the re-education of wounded servicemen and women, so he surely deserved a place in the team. His wish was granted but his father did not approve. He explained that he had had no training for such a dangerous venture; the trek would take the men through an area populated by polar bears and where night-time
temperatures
dropped to -45°C. But Charles knew better than to try and talk his younger son out of anything he had set his mind to. So, with less than four weeks to go to his brother’s wedding, Harry set off with Private Jaco van Gass, whose arm was amputated after he was hit by a grenade; Captain Martin Hewitt, whose right arm is paralysed after a bullet went through his shoulder; Captain Guy Disney, who lost a leg to a rocket propelled grenade; and Sergeant Steve Young whose back was so severely damaged by an IED blast that he was told he might never walk again – all determined to reach the most northerly point of the world to highlight the plight of the 1,700-plus service personnel injured in Afghanistan since the conflict began.

With preparation in Norway, it would be a four-week
mission, covering 200 miles of the frozen Arctic Ocean by foot, pulling their equipment in sledges weighing more than 100kg. Needing to get back to the army as his leave had finished, Harry was able to spend just four days skiing across the ice with them, sleeping at night in a tent he called his ‘pleasure dome’ and where he kept them amused with jokes, some of which would have made royal courtiers cringe. ‘He’s so down to earth,’ recalls Jaco van Gass. ‘I was very surprised at that; he helps out with absolutely everything.’

Such was the effect of his spirited encouragement that despite a start delayed by gales in Norway, they were ahead of schedule after hauling themselves and their sledges twelve miles on Harry’s final days with them.

He was as reluctant to leave them as the Arctic was to let him go – cracks in an ice runway at Borneo Ice Airfield delayed his homeward flight by forty-eight hours. On his return he admitted: ‘I took part in only a small section of the trek, but I know full well how physically demanding what they are doing is. The spirit and determination of these lads is second to none. They are true role models.’

And when the team reached the North Pole just thirteen days into their trek across the polar ice cap and three days ahead of schedule, Harry was the first to congratulate them via satellite phone, telling them they were ‘showing off’ by getting there early and urging them to enjoy the champagne he had provided them with for ‘the magic moment when you make it’. An aide confides: ‘They may not have been together long but they became his buddies. One of the first things
he did when he got back was to add them to his personal Christmas card list.’ He had clearly had the ‘Diana effect’ on the expedition since his participation helped raise the
anticipated
financial target by several times, so when the charity announced that the brave four planned to tackle Mount Everest next, he promised to go with them as far as the base camp, 17,000 feet up.

In a rare ‘I was wrong’ admission, Charles congratulated his son on his ‘pluckiness’ and before he went to bed on the night of 14 April – the day his son received his Apache Flying Badge – wrote him the letter of praise which Harry treasures to this day. Just two days later Charles had further reason to congratulate him again when Harry was promoted to the rank of captain.

Within days of returning from the Arctic, Harry got to work on the best man’s speech he would deliver at his brother’s wedding breakfast. He was required to submit the final version of it to Palace courtiers, but first – in a telephone call that went on until the early hours – he read it to Chelsy who had flown from her South African home specially to attend the wedding with him. Although she says she found many of his anecdotes hilarious, Chelsy advised him to take out a number of the racier ones – including a reference to Kate’s ‘killer legs’–reminding him that his grandmother would be there and that she would not take kindly to the sort of humour traditionally delivered by the best man on such an occasion.

It came as no surprise to Charles that his plea to his younger son to ‘behave’ on the night before the big day went
unheeded. After dining with his brother and stepmother at Clarence House he moved on to the nearby Goring Hotel, which the Middletons had taken over in the days prior to the wedding, and he was, as expected, the life and soul of the party. He not only joined those celebrating in the bar but remained there until 3 a.m. when he made a spectacular exit leaping from one of the hotel’s balconies and – worryingly considering what lay ahead – landed awkwardly on one ankle. ‘He was showing off,’ says a friend.

So no wonder he looked a little jaded, with squiffy hair, as he stood at his brother’s side in Westminster Abbey just a few hours later. Thankfully there was no chance of him having forgotten the ring: aware of the possibility (because his military trousers have no pockets) an aide had had the tailors, Kashket & Partners, sew a special pocket for it into a gold-embroidered cuff attached to the jacket of his Blues and Royals uniform.

At precisely 9.30 that evening, following a three-course meal for 300 washed down with vintage champagne, Harry delivered the perfect best man’s speech and the humour was indeed tempered. The Queen had declared that morning that in future Prince William and his bride would be known as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Harry went no
further than to make frequent references to ‘The Dude and Duchess’ during what was largely a moving address in which he described William as ‘the perfect brother’ and Kate as ‘the sister I always wanted’. Even the Queen laughed when he added, ‘William didn’t have a romantic bone in his body before he met Kate so I knew it was serious when [I heard him] cooing down the phone to her.’ Then he did a
high-pitched
impression of Kate calling William ‘Billy’ and his brother calling her ‘baby’.

And that’s as far as he went, thanks to censor Chelsy.

Despite his dislike of the media, Harry used an American
television
programme to let the world know that he had warned army chiefs in no uncertain terms that he would quit the force if he was not redeployed to Afghanistan in his new – and even more dangerous – role as an Apache helicopter pilot.

Although it had trained him for the job, the army knew that such a lethal machine as an Apache with the third in line to the throne at the controls was bound to ensure that the Taliban, well equipped with surface-to-air missiles, would make it their No. 1 target, but Harry was determined that his training should not be wasted. ‘You can’t train people and then not put them into the role they need to play… These people [who said I shouldn’t go] live in a ridiculous world.’

A source close to Prince Charles says he was ‘
uncomfortable
’ with the idea that as an Apache pilot Harry would be
flying missions on which there was a certainty that he would be required to take human lives. But Harry reminded him that during his previous term in Helmand in 2007 he had not only ordered aircraft to bomb Taliban positions but had personally pumped out rounds from his .50 machine gun at Taliban soldiers advancing on JTAC Hill, so it was too late to worry about causing fatalities: this was war and however unpleasant it might seem, killing the enemy was a big part of the job. Anyway, Charles had been deeply moved when, in a speech at
The Sun
Military Awards, Harry had singled out the relatives of those left behind when members of the armed forces went to war:

Charles sent him another note saying he had been ‘moved to tears’ by Harry’s thoughts for those – now including himself – left worrying at home.

This time the Prince had a special reason for being
desperate
to return to the war zone: the Taliban had killed one of his closest friends, Corporal Liam Riley, who trained with him in Suffolk, Canada. Not one to normally show great sorrow
in public, Harry was close to tears when he described Liam Riley as

It was further proof of his great loyalty and concern for those he grew close to – men at least.

It was, however, several months before Harry was despatched to the US and he spent one of his last evenings in the UK dining with Chelsy at her Belgravia home, doing his best to rekindle their romance. For all their disagreements and his various flirtations, she was the one he loved at that time and he asked her to trust him, to wait for him.

And then, on 7 October, he was gone: off with nineteen other British airmen to the California Naval Air Facility at El Centro (population 40,000), close to the Mexican border to undertake over two months the final training exercise of his Apache Conversion to Role course. This paved the way for a second tour of duty in Afghanistan. The Americans, who named the operation Exercise Crimson Eagle, had chosen the location (it’s where Tom Cruise filmed many of the scenes for his
Top Gun
movie) because it replicated the brutal terrain of Afghanistan: vast stretches of desert that
run sharply into soaring mountains and reach temperatures in excess of 110 degrees. Ground skimming and night flying made it doubly dangerous but since his main tasks would be to seek and destroy Taliban tanks and positions and assist in secret missions to kill and capture Taliban leaders, as well as providing air cover for ground troops, he had to be ready for anything. From El Centro he would move on to Gila Bend, Arizona where Apache students undertook live fire exercises on the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range complex. The real thing … but not quite.