Harry (3 page)

His superiors' foremost concern was not that he would stop a bullet but that he might be captured. There could be no greater prize for the enemy than having not Harry Wales but His Royal Highness the Prince Henry Charles Albert David Windsor in their hands. Harry had some idea what to expect if the Afghans took him. Six years earlier, at the age of seventeen, he had volunteered to be the hostage when the Eton College Combined Cadet Force conducted an escape and evasion exercise. He had been ‘captured' by five regular soldiers of the Royal Green Jackets, dressed as Taliban fighters complete with Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles, and taken to a barn in the Thames-side hamlet of Boveney. While other schoolboy cadets attempted to find and rescue him, he was hooded and submitted to twelve hours of intense
interrogation
and mind games. His captors moved him around to disorientate him, forced him to stand for long periods leaning on his finger tips against a wall, and made him kneel before
them. While they shouted incessantly at him, ‘mentally
beating
him to the ground', Harry would tell them only his name, date and place of birth. The rescue party was unsuccessful and he was released at 5 a.m. the next day.

The exercise prepared him for the cruel reality of capture, especially at the hands of al Qaeda, giving the young royal a small taste of what could lie ahead…

2nd Lieutenant Wales and his new friend Major Bill Connor were briefly parted early in January but reunited the following month for an operation in northern Helmand. ‘The operations in northern Helmand, in between Musa Qala and the Kajaki Dam, were a different type of danger from Garmsir,' said Connor.

The sheer danger of this operation is emphasised further by Harry's American friend:

By then, however, Harry had become a victim of his celebrity. He was later to discover that an Australian women's magazine,
New Idea,
had broken an agreed embargo and leaked news of his Afghan posting on its website. Harry was not told but his SAS guardian angels were alerted to the increased danger to which the celebrity magazine had exposed him. Miraculously, the news went ignored by the rest of the world's media (even CNN, not a party to the media agreement, knew he was there but suppressed the story after a call from the Palace press office) until it was picked up by one Matt Drudge and posted on his widely read news aggregate website, the Drudge Report. Drudge, a former shop assistant and the only child of Reform Jewish Democrats (his mother worked for Ted Kennedy) had
previously undergone psychiatric treatment. He claimed to have been the man who broke the story of President Clinton's scandalous association with Monica Lewinsky, but he lacked both education and media experience, boasting that he had failed his bar mitzvah and achieved such a feeble high school graduation result that he reckoned it qualified him for ‘no more than a post at 7-Eleven'. As a result of Drudge's website post, the Prince was recalled to Britain.

In general, Harry had a reasonable relationship with the media. He remembers being in his parents' limousine and hearing his father chastise his mother for waving to ‘friendly' journalist James Whitaker as their car passed the ever-present bunch of media men. ‘Oh, it's OK,' she said, ‘James is friendly to us,' to which Charles replied sarcastically (according to royal protection officer Ken Wharfe, who was also in the car), ‘That's all right then. At least they remind people we still exist.'

When Harry found out that his recall was down to Drudge's disclosure, he was furious. ‘He was p****d off when he heard the [expletive deleted] Australian magazine had blown his cover on its pathetic website,' says one who sat next to him on the plane home.

Jon Snow touched on this when he declared on his blog:

Military bosses, however, do not like being disobeyed – even if it is an agreement with civilians rather than an order given to their soldiers. As Harry was being flown home the army's Chief of General Staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, said in a
somewhat
reserved statement:

According to subsequent remarks Prince Philip made to a royal protection officer, Dannatt was far less reserved when he telephoned the Queen to apprise her of the situation.

Once he had calmed down, Harry summed up his battle front experience saying he'd felt ‘a bit of excitement, a bit of “phew” finally [to] get the chance to actually do the soldiering that I wanted to do ever since I joined up'. In what must have been an unguarded moment, however, Harry also said he had enjoyed being away from home: ‘I don't want to sit around Windsor because I generally don't like England that much. It's nice to have been away from all the press and the papers.' Despite appearing, publicly at least, to get on with reporters and photographers, he had an innate mistrust derived from his mother's emotions and her fate, and it had an effect on his feelings about his homeland.

There was some comfort for Harry following his return, although he had to wait several weeks for it. In April he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant on completion of two years' army service. It boosted his pay by £78 a week.

The greater honour was to come, however. Less than two months after his promotion Harry was presented with an Operational Service Medal for his time in Afghanistan. His friend Bill Connor fared even better: in addition to being promoted from major to lieutenant colonel and awarded the Bronze Star for his service in Helmand and for being involved in direct fire operations against the Taliban, he received the Combat Infantryman's Badge. Later he was also awarded a valour medal from the US counter-terrorism Advisory Task
Force for actions during a substantial firefight in Kandahar. Both expressed their pleasure that the other's service had been acknowledged.

Harry's aunt, the Princess Royal, presented him with his medal at Combermere Barracks, which lies in the shadow of Windsor Castle. Princess Anne was overheard to remark to a girlfriend later: ‘Well, at least when he goes on parade he will have a genuine medal to show for his bravery unlike two of my brothers.' (Charles and Edward presumably, since Andrew had earned his in the Falklands conflict.)

But the big surprise of the day was the presence at the ceremony of his on/off girlfriend Chelsy Davy who had returned to the UK to resume her studies in ‘grim Leeds' after a sunshine break in South Africa. Seated beside Prince William amid the wives, girlfriends and children of other soldiers at the barracks and clearly aware of the media attention her presence would attract, Chelsy beamed with pride as Anne pinned the medal on Harry's lapel. The following day, to his obvious chagrin, Prince Charles noted that the presence of the 22-year-old Zimbabwean student accounted for hundreds of column inches in the morning papers, compared to his occasional line or two.

And later, following a parade through the streets of Windsor led by the band of the Blues and Royals, it was Chelsy who sat next to Harry at a service in the town's Holy Trinity church to remember colleagues who had fallen. Attractively dressed in a cream jacket and smart brown skirt, she stepped into a limo with him to return to the barracks for
a reception attended by his comrades and their other halves, before retiring to the castle – a world apart from FOB Delhi.

Clearly Chelsy had forgiven Harry for neglecting her while she was in Leeds (it was not the first time she had chosen to overlook his bad manners). Her forgiveness on this occasion meant that they were once again an item: she had joined Kate Middleton the previous day at Cowarth Park to sip
champagne
and cheer on Harry and William who were competing in the Audi Polo Challenge.

Could Miss Davy be on her way to becoming Mrs Wales after all?

N
othing upsets Harry more than sly insinuations that he was born to two people who did not even like, let alone love, each other. The fact of the matter is that he was very much a love baby. Lady ‘Kanga’ Tryon – a close friend and confidante of Diana’s – said the Princess told her that Harry was conceived at Windsor Castle at a time when she and Charles were every bit the archetypal couple in love.

These were indeed happy days for Diana, and Lady Tryon’s remarks made to the author just a few months before her death in 1997 go a long way to disproving the theory that Charles did not father his younger son. It was not until two years after Harry’s birth that she took a lover, although by then Diana had had no less than seven advice-seeking
discussions
with the Queen about her fears for the marriage. Her Majesty summoned Diana for the first of those meetings – and Prince Philip, whom Diana did not particularly like, always insisted on being present – after a blistering row broke out on the night of Harry’s christening of which more follows.
This marked a watershed in hostilities among the family. The Queen was frank with her daughter-in-law and, picking on what she regarded as Diana’s unwise choices, told her she was misguided in choosing AIDS as a cause to support, although it is likely that the Palace realised that by doing so she had tapped into a well of unexploited popularity.

‘Diana told me way back then that whatever happened between her and Charles she would never let go of her boys despite their obvious importance to the Royal Family,’ said Kanga – a woman so close to Diana that she helped Charles choose her as his bride, ironically in league with Camilla Parker Bowles, in those days known as Kanga’s twin-set-twin. ‘She doted on those two, they couldn’t have wished for a better mother but she gave Harry special attention because she felt he needed it. The royal court, the government, indeed the people, she said, would look after William.’

Kanga said that Diana told her about the Windsor Castle night of love over a ‘tiddly’ dinner at their favourite Knightsbridge haunt, the restaurant San Lorenzo.

Praise indeed from the woman who at one time would dearly have loved to marry Charles herself (they had a brief fling in the 1980s) but Diana and Kanga had a common cause: both women by then had come to loathe the present Duchess of Cornwall, then plain Mrs Parker Bowles. They often met for lunch or dinner either at San L, as it was affectionately known, or in Diana’s apartment at Kensington Palace where they exchanged cruel gossip about Camilla: according to Kanga Charles complained that the Parker Bowles home was ‘a bit smelly’ and that when Kanga asked him in a
particularly
indiscreet moment what Camilla was like to kiss he complained that she smoked too much.

Harry Wales came into the world at 4.20 p.m. on Saturday 15 September 1984, nine days earlier than expected, putting an end to thirty-four years of the first two royal children being born a boy and then a girl.

With Prince Charles beside her in the royal limousine, Diana had been rushed to the grim-looking St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, a stark contrast to the magnificence of the 1,000-room Windsor Castle – Diana had adamantly refused to give birth in one of the royal homes. There, the Princess had been resting in preparation for the birth of her second child and had been ‘putting up’ with the morning
sickness
that troubled her through most of her pregnancy. Things had gone decidedly downhill in her marriage since the
glorious
night of Harry’s conception described by Lady Tryon.

Never comfortable in such intimate situations, Prince Charles nevertheless stayed at Diana’s side in the private but small and drab £150-a-night room in the hospital’s Lindo Wing throughout the nine-hour labour, feeding her lumps of ice to suck and applying cream to her dry lips. Both were required to use a bathroom on the other side of the corridor. Delivered by the eminent gynaecologist Dr George Pinker (who did not approve of home births), the new arrival weighed in at 6lb 14oz and, as his nervous father was about to tell the world, the baby had light blue eyes ‘and a bit of, er, brownish hair’. Diana was later to say: ‘If men had babies they would only have one each.’

Charles telephoned his mother, in summer residence at Balmoral, with the news that all was well, then drove to Kensington Palace to tell an excited two-year-old William he had a brother. After telling his valet he needed a stiff scotch to overcome the stress he’d been through, he phoned a
polo-playing
friend to announce that now his second son had been
safely delivered he would be available to play in the match at Windsor Great Park the following day.

Charles was happy, the Queen was ‘delighted’ and other members of the family were busy declaring that it was indeed a joyous time – at least all apart from Diana. As proud as any mother could be with a healthy newborn baby in her arms, she was suffering more than the physical pain of
childbirth
: she was secretly being treated for depression, certain in the knowledge that she had lost her husband’s love. They no longer slept together and Diana told her voice coach, an American actor called Peter Settleton, that they managed to be intimate ‘sort of once every three weeks’. The reason: Charles had returned to the arms of Mrs Parker Bowles and Diana was powerless to prevent it. She had not extracted a confession nor had he offered one but, as she was to say later, servants talk, policemen talk, even so-called friends talk.

While bells rang in churches throughout the land, she had to suffer alone the hurt of knowing that while the nation had a new prince, she had introduced a child into a
dysfunctional
family. Life was certainly going to be comfortable for Harry but never easy, she decided. She would have to work extra hard to try to turn that around. What a difference nine months had made.

The world, of course, was not to know what was going on in the hearts of the unhappy parents and it has to be
remembered
that Prince Charles is not a callous man and never has been. Because of his own strict upbringing – one
psychological
expert describes it as cruel – he has always had immense
difficulty in showing normal affection to a woman. Because the Queen felt obliged to put her immense duty first, he grew up seeking motherly love elsewhere and eventually found it in the arms of his mistress rather than his beautiful young bride. One can only imagine how painful it was for both the Prince and Princess of Wales to watch people, not just in Britain but all over the planet, celebrating the birth of their child with their loved ones while they were compelled to live a lie.

And that was the state of the marriage when, the day after Harry’s birth, Charles collected both his new baby and his wife – smiling and looking radiant as always for the
photographers
and the 2,000-strong crowd of onlookers – and drove them the short distance home to Kensington Palace in his blue Daimler. There he promptly switched cars. His polo gear already having been loaded into the boot of his Aston Martin, he set off for Windsor Great Park where his teammates showered him with champagne and hearty congratulations. All in all he had a good day, scoring a hat trick in his team’s victory over Laurent Perrier. No wonder his son was destined to excel at the sport Diana always hated.

Harry’s birth sold newspapers around the world. Harry Wales was a star from the moment he arrived in the world. All over Britain people were buying flags, hastily
manufactured
mugs and postcards as souvenirs of the kingdom’s new arrival. In America, unscrupulous dealers attempted to sell sheets from the birth bed until the hospital was obliged to make it clear that sheets from the maternity ward were always incinerated regardless of the baby’s identity. Within
hours of his birth Harry souvenirs were as hot as Elvis Presley memorabilia. Gifts were bountiful, including £500,000 from his other grandfather, Earl Spencer, who acted like a man possessed. From an upstairs window at Althorp, his stately pile, he shouted news of the newly born child to visitors
touring
the grounds below and then phoned everyone he could think of to share his joy. Believing he had reached Prince Andrew, to the astonishment of the landlord the Earl even called the Duke of York public house in Windsor to tell him about the new arrival.

Dressed in a white-laced gown, Harry was obliged to tolerate his first photo shoot when he was just five weeks old, but he was not fazed. The man behind the camera was no member of the paparazzi he would loathe in later life, but his
great-uncle
Lord Snowdon, a member of the ‘Firm’, or ‘that fucking family’ as Diana was to call it.

With Diana in agreement, Charles chose St George’s Chapel, in the grounds of the castle where the baby was conceived, as the venue for Harry’s christening instead of the Music Room at Buckingham Palace where most royal babies were baptised. The ceremony took place on 21 December and was conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie. Charles also chose the new Prince’s names – though this time Diana was not in agreement. Charles’s choice – Henry Charles Albert David – was too royal, said
Diana, to which Charles is alleged to have declared: ‘Well those are the names he’s going to have. You can call him whatever you [expletive deleted] want.’ From that moment on he was never anything other than Harry to her, though when Charles chastised her on a later occasion for ‘corrupting’ the boy’s Christian name she pointed out to him that an uncle of Charles’s own mother had been affectionately known as Harry though christened Henry.

When it came to the godparents, Diana was adamant she had a say. She chose her chum Lady Celia Vestey, Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones (daughter of the divorced snapper Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret) and her former flatmate Carolyn Bartholomew.

Charles was permitted to choose three and he opted for his brother Andrew, then courting the soft-porn film starlet Koo Stark; Gerald Ward, a mega-wealthy polo player and farmer and once a suitor of Princess Anne’s; and the perfectly decent artist Bryan Organ, whose 1981 portrait of Diana was his favourite.

Controversially, Princess Anne was overlooked, a turn of events that left her seething. Diana would not even have Charles’s sister at the ceremony. She had also been
overlooked
as godparent to Prince William. Charles – who is godfather to Anne’s son Peter and had promised his sister that he would reciprocate when the time came – had selected Princess Alexandra; his mother’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Susan Hussey; his pal the ex-King Constantine of Greece; Earl Mountbatten’s grandson, Lord Romsey; the South
African mystic Sir Laurens van der Post and the Duke of Westminster’s wife, Tally.

The reason made known in royal circles at the time for Anne’s exclusions was that it was because she had made Andrew Parker Bowles, husband of the much-unloved Camilla, godfather to her daughter Zara. There was certainly no love lost between Anne and Diana and they ignored each other whenever they found themselves in the same company. Prince Philip was incandescent with rage about Anne’s exclusion and didn’t have anything to do with his eldest son and daughter-in-law for weeks afterwards. But since it had taken him six weeks after Harry’s birth to even call on the lad, he was not much missed. There was some consolation for Anne: clearly aware that she was deeply hurt by Diana’s snub, Her Majesty subsequently gave her the highest honour a Sovereign can bestow on a female member of the family: she made her the Princess Royal.