Harry (24 page)

Although she was working as a model for Burberry when she met Harry, Cressida once aspired to become an actress,
an ambition that was almost certainly put in the shade by the possibility of becoming a princess.

A true blueblood (at least on her mother's side), she mixes in the very best circles. When she was studying at Leeds her boyfriend was Harry Wentworth-Stanley, whose stepfather George Milford Haven is a cousin of the Queen. She is also a close friend of the York set – Fergie as well as the Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie. In her teens she spent three years at the Royal Ballet School on Princess Alexandra's doorstep in Richmond Park, but according to a family friend,

Harry had been seeing Cressida for several weeks before deciding to unveil her in public at a midsummer night party to celebrate the London premiere of the latest Batman film,
The Dark Knight Rises
. Although they carried out the usual manoeuvre of arriving separately at the party – her on the arm of Harry's friend ‘Skippy' Inskip – once inside they made no secret of the fact that they were together. And when they
moved on to a second venue, Le Salon, there were plenty of witnesses to testify that they spent much of their time kissing and cuddling (although the Prince was highly amused to read the following morning that the girl in his arms was the model Cara Delevingne).

‘I think Harry wanted Chelsy [Davy] to be sure she got the message that he had moved on,' says his talkative chum.

Height and long blonde hair are not the only things 23-
year-old
Ms Bonas has in common with his on/off sweetheart. Like Ms Davy she went to Stowe (as did Florence
Brudenell-Bruce
) before also moving on to Leeds University. While keen to see the Prince settle down, some royal
matchmakers
had their doubts about whether the Bonas family was a suitable one for the Windsors to merge with: Cressida's father, Old Harrovian Jeffrey Bonas was once accused of being ‘unreliable' by a judge in a court case over the £1.2 million he paid his first wife in the divorce brought on by his adulterous affair with Cressida's mother. The judge accused Bonas of hiding his wealth in offshore Isle of Man accounts.

So keen was Harry to watch Usain Bolt run for gold in the 2012 Olympics that he persuaded the organisers of a charity polo match he and William were committed to playing in to bring the match forward by half an hour so he could drive the 100 miles from Cirencester to reach the stadium in time for the 100 metres final. No helicopters for him; he was only too well aware of the negative publicity his uncle Andrew had brought on the family when he insisted on charter planes for foreign trips and helicopters to travel to golf matches – usually at public expense.

Ecstatic at Bolt's gold-medal victory – he ran the 100 metres in 9.63 seconds (the second-fastest time ever) – Harry decided a celebration dinner with his brother and sister-in-law was called for. Not for them a caviar and lobster feast at an
award-winning
restaurant in Mayfair but a home-prepared supper, albeit ‘home' being Harry's place at Kensington Palace – a one-bedroom former staff apartment that he calls home until he takes over Nottingham Cottage when the Cambridges move into the late Princess Margaret's refurbished
apartment
in October 2013. He shopped for the food at the nearby branch of Marks & Spencer, scooping vacuum-packed steaks, a ready-cooked chicken, rocket salad and Cheddar cheese into his basket to the astonishment of fellow shoppers who were not used to standing in line behind a prince.

It was a shopping venture William would never have dared to carry out but it presented no problem for Harry, who has
long hankered after a normal life. He told an old friend later that he and the Cambridges had ‘shared a lot of laughs' as they watched ongoing coverage of the Olympics on
television
. William reminded Harry of how, straight-faced, he had told TV interviewer Sue Barker at an earlier athletics event how he and Kate would be running in the London
marathon
. When Barker – seemingly believing she had just got herself an amazing exclusive – asked if that was really going to happen, Harry burst her bubble when he responded, ‘Well, they'll have to now, won't they?'

Harry is not the only one of Charles's sons with a sense of humour, though William's is usually expressed in private since he is well aware that anything said in fun by a future king is more likely to be taken the wrong way. He did nothing to detract from those who question Harry's paternity however, when during a visit to Bacon's College in east London the next day, he and Harry were asked, ‘Are you two brothers?' William jokingly replied, ‘We're not sure.'

Although he applauded all the athletes, it was Harry himself who proved to be the star of the show when he took centre stage on the closing night of the Olympic Games. Appointed by the Queen to be the royal figurehead for the
spectacular
farewell to the Games, it was his most important royal engagement to date. William had returned to north Wales to continue his day job as an RAF search-and-rescue pilot and the Queen and her husband had left for their summer sojourn at Balmoral, having agreed to step back and allow Harry to give the occasion the modern majesty it deserved. As the
national anthem was played when he stepped on to the stage, 80,000 people rose to their feet. He did not disappoint them. Looking every inch king material, he made a stirring speech congratulating all the competitors and referring to the spirit of the Olympics as ‘a magnificent force for positive change'. Once again his father, watching the ceremony on television at Birkhall, his own Scottish summer holiday retreat, had reason to be proud: here was a son who could shoulder a hefty chunk of the royal burden he himself had never been comfortable with.

So it was with Charles's approval that within hours of his final royal duty of the summer, Harry went off on holiday. With Cressida and a bunch of pals in tow including Inskip and Arthur Landon, who inherited more than £200 million from his father, a brigadier who was advisor to the Sultan of Oman, he set off for Necker, Sir Richard Branson's Caribbean island on which he had spent memorable holidays with his mother and brother. Enjoying absolute privacy, he was able to let his hair down as they celebrated the twenty-seventh birthday of Branson's son Sam. Pictures subsequently posted on Facebook showed members of the group wearing wigs and fancy dress and covered in body paint, lying passed out in the sand after nights of heavy drinking.

It was his next move that was to cause the problem. From out of the blue Harry received a call: how would he like to extend his break with a few days in Las Vegas? Harry and Inskip were up for it but others – including Ms Bonas – had commitments in the UK to return to. Having hurriedly
packed the small amount of clothing he would require, Harry set off for the Nevada gambling city and duly arrived on the afternoon of Friday 24 August – just twelve days after he had brought that massive crowd to their feet with his stirring speech at the end of the Olympics.

A Rolls-Royce had been sent to McCarran airport to collect and whisk him to the Wynn resort hotel, where he was taken up to a two-floor apartment in the Encore Tower normally priced at $5,000 a night but provided without cost for ‘the British Prince' as the owner Steve Wynn referred to him. The 6,000-square-foot apartment consisted of eight rooms including three bedrooms, a billiard room and a bar which could accommodate up to seventy guests as former occupants the singer Beyoncé and her rapper husband Jay-Z could testify. While other hotels offer little more than a box of tissues on the dressing table, Harry discovered that the Wynn had provided him with a complimentary ‘intimacy kit', a packet of condoms labelled with the message ‘Have fun, play safe'.

That night Harry went out on the town. He and his now small group were followed from the XS club to a Frank Sinatra-themed restaurant by a group of single – and
available
– young women, each resembling beauty queens. When they got back to the hotel one of them asked where he was going next; the third in line to the throne replied: ‘Up to the suite. Why, do you want to come?'

Of course she did and so did her friends. Once there, a session of heavy drinking ensued until one of them – and
a Vegas investigator who inquired into the incident ‘on behalf of certain parties in London' was unable to determine whether it was one of the girls or a member of Harry's group – suggested they spice up the proceedings with a game of strip pool, to which Harry said, ‘Let's fucking do it!' The rules were simple: if you missed a shot you had to take off an item of clothing. By this time Harry was wearing only his shorts and a necklace which had been given to him by a Botswana shaman to protect him from evil spirits; it came as no surprise when he missed his first shot.

He either didn't notice or, more likely, didn't care when the camera phones came out and his nakedness was recorded for posterity. In the event several girls – including at least one who wasn't even there – offered to sell their stories … and their pictures.

The following morning the party continued for Harry. He was rejoined by Arthur Landon, who had flown from Los Angeles where he was working on a film. In a scene
reminiscent
of
The Hangover
, Harry, still drinking heavily, went to the Wet Republic pool party at the MGM Grand Hotel and the following night to the XS club where he encountered a group of Essex boys, one of whom tweeted, ‘He kissed me on the lips. Haha! I can't describe how that night was with Harry!!' Having failed to locate one of his favourite singers, Jennifer Lopez, at a pool party the following day, the Prince, much the worse for wear, sought out the Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte whom he challenged to a race in the pool, before diving in still wearing his jeans.

Clearly he is attractive to the opposite sex and never more so than when he is partying. ‘I was in Vegas at the Encore before the pool incident and it was amazing to see the number of beauties who followed him around,' says American music executive Herb Goldfarb. ‘If he didn't have another job this young man could have made it big in Hollywood. Take it from me; Prince Harry is Britain's answer to Brad Pitt. And he has an advantage – he's available!'

Alas, the Prince had no idea of the storm that was to break and, according to an aide, was ‘deeply shocked' when told that not only had he been photographed in the nude with at least one disrobed woman but the grainy pictures were being posted on TMZ, one of America's most popular entertainment news sites which had paid $200,000 for just two of them.

Harry's unusual, to say the least, party was the kind of thing that goes on every night in Las Vegas, but was the Prince set up? His pal Arthur Landon denied that it was a friend who took the pictures and said that whoever had taken and sold them was abusing Harry's hospitality and that the
mischievous
act had ‘put a real dampener on their trip'. But was he missing the point?

Although Harry has never revealed just who it was who invited him to a weekend at Sin City's Wynn resort in the first place, he blames no one but himself for what occurred there. He delivered the well-tuned line (‘and he came up with it himself too', says the friendly Palace aide): ‘It was a
classic
example of me probably being too much army and not enough Prince.' He added:

However, there is good reason to believe that there is an
anti-British
-monarchy group constantly at work and always on the lookout for opportunities to besmirch the royals' reputations. There was the deliberate leak about the Duchess of York's extramarital affair with the Texan oil billionaire's son Steve Wyatt, and did the broadcast of Charles and Camilla's
intimate
conversation – Camillagate – really just happen to be heard by someone in Liverpool who was testing an
electronic-honing
device? And how about that revealing ‘Squidgy' chat between Diana and James Gilbey? Was the acquisition of that and its subsequent broadcast merely a quirk of fate? Diana thought not and told Harry so when he asked on one
occasion
why the carpets in their Kensington Palace apartment had been taken up. She told him that anti-bugging experts were searching beneath the floors for the listening devices she was convinced had been planted.