Harry (14 page)
Authors: Chris Hutchins
Pledging to support the cause for the rest of his days, Harry said with obvious conviction:
I met so many children whose lives had been shattered
following
the death of their parents – they were so vulnerable and in need of care and attention. It’s time to follow on – well, as much as I can – to try to keep my mother’s legacy going. I believe I’ve got a lot of my mother in me and I think she’d want my brother and I to do this. Obviously it’s not as easy for William as it is for me. I’ve got more time on my hands to
be able to help. I always wanted to go to an AIDS country to carry on my mother’s legacy.
Not everyone took him at his word. His heartfelt
statement
fell on deaf ears, for example, when it came to the
Daily Express’
s acerbic columnist Carol Sarler. She wrote a piece describing him as a ‘horrible young man … a national disgrace who rarely lifted a finger unless it’s to feel up a cheap tart in a nightclub’. She described his gap year as a space between no work whatsoever at school and utter privilege at Sandhurst. As for his spell in Australia, she claimed he had spent it ‘slumped in front of the television waiting to behave badly at the next available rugby match’ and in Lesotho she said he was spending eight lavish weeks, during which ‘he has reluctantly agreed to spend a bit of the trip staring at poor people’. Harry’s new press guardian, Paddy Haverson, replied in detail pointing out that Sarler had, in effect, used her poison pen to put down a diligent, hard-working young man without having a clue as to what he was really like or what he was doing during his gap years. The Palace had had enough, just as the
Daily Express
would have done had anyone dared to describe one of their own in similar terms.
A leading London psychiatrist who had once treated his mother, says:
Forget the critics: I think the Lesotho experience turned young Henry’s [he insists on calling him by the name he was christened with] life around. For the first time in his life he
saw desperate poverty, terrible suffering. I remember Diana telling me how she took him to visit the poor and the
prostitutes
in London in the hope that it would stir his conscience, but they were brief visits to places surrounded by wealth and luxury. He would not have been able to understand why those surrounding these unfortunates could not take care of them, plus he was obviously aware that there is a welfare state and no one in the UK need die of hunger or lack of any medical treatment. In Africa he saw people who had nothing and little chance of getting anything. Now that did wake his conscience and I think if Diana were alive today she would be greatly relieved by this turnaround in him.
His subsequent insistence on going to war and living under those dangerous and uncomfortable conditions in Afghanistan also speaks volumes about wanting to gain experience outside his upbringing. To be honest, I think he was bored with the way the royals live and what they expect the world to provide for them. He never consulted me, of course, but from a distance I can see nothing in him of the terrible paranoia poor Diana suffered. There were times when I thought she might end her life; Harry lives his to the full. Now she couldn’t do that and I suspect that she would have been unwell whoever she was married to. Prince Charles may have exasperated her, but take it from me he did not cause her underlying illness.
The unfortunate orphans of Lesotho were not the only ones Harry met during his stay in Africa for it was there that he re-encountered the girl who was to become the love of his
life: Chelsy Davy, a girl who had first aroused his interest when they met during her time as a student at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, close to Highgrove and its Club H. Chelsy was a lively blonde just a year younger than Harry and the attraction was as instantaneous as it was mutual. A close friend says: ‘Because she is so attractive Chelsy has had many male admirers, but from the way she talked about Harry we all believed that this was the one she would end up marrying.’ It has to be said, though, that Harry was not the only thing Ms Davy had on her mind: as fiercely ambitious as she is intelligent, she was heading for a degree in philosophy,
politics
and economics from the University of Cape Town and had her sights set on a career in law. Fresh from his
ditch-digging
tasks, Harry was overawed by this particular beauty’s intellect, but their love of clubs, parties and vodka meant they had a great deal in common. During their early courting period, Harry got to know her parents when he went to stay with the family in Durban and once he had won Mr and Mrs Davy’s confidence the couple went off to stay in their seafront apartment at Camps Bay where the relationship developed despite the chaperoning presence of Chelsy’s brother Shaun.
In a letter home to a former school friend Harry wrote that Chelsy was ‘the love of my life – this one’s unreal’. Initially Chelsy was puzzled by his insistence that they keep their fledgling romance a secret: she soon found out why. They had been enjoying a peaceful relationship until the day they let their guard down and were photographed
kissing
at a polo field in Durban in 2004; from that moment on
Chelsy discovered what it was like to be public property and how the fledgling relationship was destined to change her life. Gone were the days when they could camp out and watch the wildlife on exotic safaris. From the moment she followed him back to the UK, however, Miss Davy felt at ease in royal circles. She would become close friends with the Duchess of York’s daughters Beatrice and Eugenie, and Prince William’s wife-to-be Kate and her sister Pippa Middleton. Her Facebook pages read like a who’s who of British society. She accompanied Harry to royal weddings and enjoyed nights out sipping vodka with him in London’s most exclusive – and expensive – nightclubs. She shared Harry’s annoyance when they were shadowed by the paparazzi, whom Harry called ‘the tossers’ – a phrase he had learned from his mother. It was to be a tempestuous affair, however, and several times they walked away from each other only to be subsequently reunited. Clearly devoted to her, Harry describes Chelsy as being as gaffe-prone as George Bush ‘but better looking’ and says it was the Essex-girl mentality in her that forced him to take her to the
X Factor
studios even though he had no great regard for the programme’s creator Simon Cowell, who had once had the audacity to say to him, ‘If you ever get tired of running the country, you can come and work for me.’
Although happy that his daughter had met ‘someone’, Charles Davy found himself the recipient of some unwelcome press attention when a newspaper claimed to have uncovered many misdeeds including an unsavoury friendship with the internationally despised President Mugabe. Davy vehemently
denied all the allegations made against him and asserted that he had never even met Mugabe. In any event, Davy had other things to worry about when his royal guest started a major security alert by leaving the family ranch without informing anyone after having drunk ‘one too many’.
It was July before Harry returned to the UK and revealed to his father that he was in love. Charles listened attentively but reminded him that he had his final Sandhurst entrance exams to study for and encouraged him to help out on a Duchy of Cornwall farm and to train with the Rugby Football Union as a rugby development officer. Charles was pleased that his son seemed to have changed his ways: Lesotho had made a difference; younger people were now his focus. He was told that girlfriends and what he called ‘emotional baggage’ would have to take a back seat. But Harry could never stop thinking about Chelsy and the two remained in close touch by telephone.
Meanwhile, James Hewitt wasn’t having the best of summers: to Harry’s amusement his mother’s former lover was arrested in July 2004 at the Cactus Blue bar in Chelsea on suspicion of possessing cocaine. The former cavalry officer, nicknamed Timeshare for his many dalliances, was with TV and radio presenter Alison Bell, who was also accused. Hewitt was locked in a cell at Notting Hill police station to sober up before he could be interviewed the following day. He could have faced a jail sentence of up to seven years if convicted, and Ms Bell (a former girlfriend of Prince Edward) a life term for the even more serious offence of supply, but the authorities
smiled on the pair, letting Hewitt off with a warning (though he lost his gun licence after police found a disassembled
shotgun
on his living room floor) and Bell without charge.
Harry did not see a great deal of his father that summer. Charles had taken Camilla to Birkhall, the Queen Mother’s former house on the Balmoral estate. Rupert Lendrum, who worked as Charles’s major-domo at St James’s Palace, Clarence House and Highgrove, as well as Birkhall, says that the Scottish house is by far the Prince’s favourite. ‘It’s a very big house, very big but not grand in the sense that some royal homes are,’ he says.
He worked terribly hard on the boxes of stuff we sent up to him during summer. He starts at breakfast and is often still at it at midnight. Sometimes we would think twice about including something in a box and think does he really need to read this, perhaps I should just ring him up and say ‘Look here, sir…’ but he likes to see everything in writing so the boxes just swell.
No one at Clarence House is sure of the exact date in the autumn of 2004 when Charles made his decision, but make it he did. He was going to marry Camilla and as soon as
possible.
It would have to be a civil ceremony since the Church of England – of which he will one day be the Supreme Governor – disapproves of remarriage of divorced people in church. In addition, a high-placed official of the Catholic Church pointed out that Camilla was not only a divorcee
but the husband she divorced in 1995 was still alive. Clarence House, nevertheless, said the ceremony would take place in the Windsor Castle chapel, St George’s (a statement it later had to revise as the pair married in a civil ceremony in Windsor Guildhall before a service of blessing at the castle chapel). Camilla would never be Queen but maybe that was no bad thing. Meanwhile, Queen Elizabeth is said to have sighed deeply when asked if it could be made known that not only was she very happy for them both but that the marriage had her blessing.
Charles broke the news to Harry on his return to the UK. It was never going to be an easy task for a man to tell his son that the woman blamed for the break-up of the marriage to his mother was to become his stepmother. But she had been that in all but name for a long while and she made Charles happy. What’s more, Harry had grown to like her, to love her even, and was bound even closer to her by the public criticism and negative comment she had received: ‘She’s not a wicked stepmother, she’s a wonderful woman,’ he said in one emotional outburst. And he meant it.
After the historic father–son chat and a brief discussion about how and when the marriage would be announced, Harry decided it was time to rejoin the real world and he took himself and William off to the Chinawhite club in Mayfair. Somehow a glamour model, one Lauren Pope, managed to inveigle herself into the VIP area where she made a beeline for the princes, leaping on to Harry’s lap and planting kisses on his cheek. For once he did not welcome the attention
from a young woman, probably anticipating the publicity it would create for the Page 3 girl who was later to join the cast of the bawdy television show,
The Only Way Is Essex.
Sure enough she subsequently gave interviews claiming that he spent hours chatting with her and later telephoned her for a date. Harry’s friend says: ‘Sorry, Miss Pope, but you are definitely not the Prince’s type. This was never going to be a Cinderella moment.’
There were more nightclub incidents during his UK stay as this was, after all, the double-gap year, the extended period in which Prince Charles hoped that Harry would get his wild days out of the way. But now, it was time for him to go back to work.
If Charles was burying himself in his work in the hope that the issue of his recent engagement to Camilla would go away, then he needed to think again. At a New York dinner party Prince Andrew had let his fellow diners know in no uncertain terms that he was not enamored by the thought of Camilla becoming his sister-in-law and perhaps Her Royal Highness or, heaven forbid, Queen Camilla, but the gap between brothers had never been wider. It was clear that no matter what the public or Prince Andrew might think, Prince Charles needed her at his side. This was one battle Andrew would have to fight on his own. Harry was acutely aware that his father and uncle were not on the best of terms. On
hearing of unsavoury goings-on in New York, Charles had asked his youngest brother to use a useful show-business contact he had in Manhattan to investigate. The information that Prince Edward brought back about certain individuals did not please Charles, and Harry had to put up with his father brooding over the matter at a time when he was doing his best to get his own life together.
In September Harry breezed through his Sandhurst exam but just as Charles was beginning to believe his younger son’s wild days really were over, the young Prince found himself back in trouble. After the highly successful summer PR offensive, he ‘lost it’ leaving the West End nightclub Pangaea, close to Piccadilly, at 3 a.m. on an October night. Despite his awareness of the part pursuing paparazzi had played in his mother’s death, he seemed, up to this point, to have found acceptance in the knowledge that the photographers would always be on his tail. That night, however, acceptance seemed to have deserted him. He had failed to accept the rejection of an aspiring actress called Anne-Marie Mogg, whose stunning appearance had attracted his attention. He made the mistake of sending a flunky over to ask her and her friend Josephine to join him at his table. The flunky bungled it by saying, ‘Harry would like to invite you to join him – that’s Harry as in Prince Harry.’ Ms Mogg declined the invitation declaring, ‘I wasn’t going to give him any special treatment because he was a royal. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a very good-looking guy. He’s much taller and stronger-looking than I thought from his photographs. If he hadn’t been a royal I probably would
have gone over.’ No way was this one going to be a groupie and Harry’s mood blackened as he downed his vodka, failing to appreciate the joke when his male companions chided him about being too shy to approach her himself. Finally he left the club at around 3 a.m. in a foul temper.