Harry The People's Prince

By Chris Hutchins

PRINCE Harry is the most interesting – indeed the most exciting - member of the Royal Family and this no-holds-barred biography tells his story for the first time. Son of the late Princess Diana – the most famous woman on Earth – and Prince Charles, the next king, and brother of William, the king after that, he is determined to live by his mantra: ‘I am what I am’. From a childhood overshadowed by his parents’ troubled marriage and scarred by the tragic death of his mother, to his brilliant public performances at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, the London Olympics and his brother’s wedding, this book charts the remarkable journey of a young man with an extraordinary destiny. It also reveals details of his extraordinary love life, telling for the first time what caused his affair with Cressida Bonas to collapse. The author has enjoyed unparalleled access to a wide variety of people whose lives Harry has touched: senior aides, humble members of palace staff, aristocrats, bodyguards, school friends, comrades-in-arms . . . and old flames. They piece together the tale of a young man who admirably has created a life so different from the one set out for him by what he describes as ‘an accident of birth’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9780957434592

Chris Hutchins

CHRIS HUTCHINS became fascinated by all-things-Russian when he co-wrote the definitive biography of the Russian oligarch who bought Chelsea Football Club – ABRAMOVICH: The billionaire from nowhere. An investigative journalist, Hutchins hasbeen a columnist on the Daily Express, Today and the Sunday Mirror. He began writing biographies in 1992 starting with Fergie Confidential after uncovering the Duchess or York’s affair with American oil billionaire’s son, Steve Wyatt.

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PROLOGUE

Harry has something very rare, very special – his mother’s amazing charisma.

‘Kanga’, Lady Tryon

IN an earlier biography of the-then third in line to the British throne, I described him as a daredevil pilot, soldier, and bon vivant. At that stage, in April 2013, I might have added that the Queen’s grandson was also one of the world’s most eligible bachelors.

My, how close that came to changing thanks to the arrival in his life of Cressida Bonas (an interesting woman if ever there was one - as will become evident to the reader in later chapters).

With the help of those closest to him I had back then been able to pinpoint Prince Harry’s greatest love: the Army. Despite his great attraction to the opposite sex, he was never happier than when he was fighting the bad guys on the most dangerous battlefield on earth, Helmand in war-torn Afghanistan. On his return to England, he would party hard, drinking more than was good for him on his nightly round of clubs frequented by the more louche members of society.

More formally known as His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales, Harry is the first to concede that this is his job description in the family firm. While courtiers make plans for his working life, Harry Wales gets on with living it. Since the birth of his nephew, Prince George, he is now fourth in line to the throne but there are goals out there to be achieved which have little to do with his royal duties.

And while he could never forget for a moment that his grandmother is the Queen and his late mother was the most famous woman in the world for all kinds of reasons, Harry Wales is Harry Wales and not a day in his life is to be wasted. If anyone has good reason to keep it in the day, it’s him. The past is the past and whatever the future holds will happen whether he likes it or not. As he was once heard to say: ‘If I have one foot in yesterday and the other in tomorrow, I’m in the perfect position to piss all over today.’

I make no apologies for the frequent references to his mother – particularly in the chapters dealing with his early life – for it was undoubtedly Diana, Princess of Wales who moulded Harry, and just about everything that happened to her had a profound effect on shaping him.

Getting people to talk about HRH was never going to be easy. When they get to rub shoulders with a member of the Royal Family, the privileged ones often tend to consider themselves part of that circle and honour-bound to protect its members’ air of mystery. One such person even quoted to me the words of the Nineteenth-Century essayist Walter Bagehot. He concluded that the monarchy’s survival depended largely on its mystique and distance from the masses: ʻIts mystery is its life. We must not let daylight in on magic.’ Fortunately, not every royal ‘friend’ had read Bagehot and the words of those exceptions to Bagehot’s decree make interesting reading on the following pages. They do indeed let the daylight in.

Those who know Harry Wales well placed no such restrictions on themselves. They saw the man as I did: an individual with a healthy mind who had overcome numerous obstacles on the road he has travelled. He has become not just an interesting individual but an inspirational man who deserves our attention and can comfortably withstand close scrutiny. I am obliged to those who shared their experiences of Harry so generously and I respect their wish in many cases to remain anonymous lest they be vilified by the Bagehot faction.

Now, let’s get on with it.

Chris Hutchins

August 2014

1

HARRY’S DILEMMA

‘These Windsors don’t make great husbands’

Captain Harry Wales, formally styled His Royal Highness the Prince Henry Charles Albert David Mountbatten-Windsor, knows as well as any of his royal namesakes that the course of true love never did run smooth. At the very moment he might have expected his relationship with Cressida Bonas to move perceptibly closer to being solemnised at Westminster Abbey she slipped through his fingers – for the time being, at least.

By long-standing tradition love and marriage have been notoriously difficult for members of the Royal Family despite the exemplary union of the Queen and Prince Philip. That Harry struggled to come to terms with Cressida’s independence and her reluctance to sacrifice her hard-won career was evident from the start. Add to that the media frenzy that engulfed the couple from the moment they appeared in public and the path to matrimony headed steeply uphill until the North Face of the Eiger might have seemed easier to climb.

Cressida was just five when her parents Jeffrey and the Hon. Mary-Gaye Bonas (née Curzon) divorced. Her mother took her and her siblings to live at the grand Hampshire home of Christopher Shaw, a merchant banker, whom she married in 1996. This was the very year the divorce between Harry’s mother and father, Prince Charles and Princess Diana, was being finalised.

Both Harry and Cressida are from broken homes, a member of her family told this author.

As children, both were profoundly hurt by the conduct of their parents. Both are determined not to visit such suffering on children of their own. Hence we see the extreme manner in which they are, or were, as it now appears allowing their relationship to develop.

So what went wrong? Harry was still running the tape through his head as the big metal Music Gates swung open. His limousine motored up the curved driveway to the two stone lions guarding the portico of one of the most famous homes in the world: Elvis Presley’s ‘Graceland’. Compared with any of the Royal Family’s piles, the two-storey colonial-style mansion, set among towering oaks in fourteen acres of rolling countryside at Whitehaven on the outskirts of Memphis, was a modest enough residence. But it had a history that was oddly appropriate to Prince Harry’s situation. When I first met Elvis in 1965 he was with his very own princess, Priscilla Beaulieu Presley and she was even wearing a tiara! Following their breakup in 1972, ‘Graceland’ became a monument to his lost love (and a prison in which he drugged himself to an early death).

Harry took in the gaudy grandeur of the main rooms and would have noted among the glittering rock regalia a photograph of young Elvis proudly posing in his military uniform. For like Harry, the Army had been the making of Elvis. He had been called up as a conscript in 1958 and had spent two years in Germany with the United States Third Armoured Division. Army life had shown him the outside world, given him discipline and self-confidence, and turned him into a solid American patriot. But it’s a fair bet that as he paused to pay his respect at Elvis’s graveside, Prince Harry’s thoughts were not on the King of Rock ’n Roll at all, but on a slim girl far away.

***

The summer of 2014 was a testing time for Harry. As he approached his 30th birthday on September 15, he faced a dilemma: what should he do with the next thirty years? Already regarded by many as the most popular member of the Royal Family. He is a national hero both on and off the battlefield, a credit to his late mother and a tower of strength to his grandmother, Her Majesty the Queen. Yet, Harry was in great need of a new challenge.

Just a few months earlier, having given up the job he had proved to be so good at, flying military helicopters, he had taken a temporary desk job in Whitehall. But that was never going to be enough. There was plenty to do for the many charities he patronises. He had brought to the UK the Warrior Games which had so impressed him when he saw the wounded servicemen and women in action during his first official visit to America the previous year. The Paralympic-style Invictus Games, as they were named for the British event, promised to keep him busy for the four days leading up to his birthday.

Sentebale, the African charity set up in his mother’s memory, was another of the good causes to which he and his brother, Prince William, devoted a lot of attention. But these were causes which he could largely handle by telephone from the desk he occupied in Horse Guards. This was a man who had recently been engaged in active war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and the previous winter had undertaken a gruelling 200-mile trek to the South Pole with a group of injured servicemen – his Walking With The Wounded comrades.

Behind palace walls there had been talk of him succeeding Sir Peter Cosgrove as the next Governor-General of Australia. But a man in such a position needed a wife and Harry seemed to have blown his chances of marrying the woman he was in love with: the eminently-suitable Cressida Bonas.

The realisation had hit him hard on the night of Thursday May 2 when he settled into his bed at the Peabody Hotel on Union Street, Memphis. The Peabody is just a few blocks from Sun Studios in which Elvis had cut his first records. He was in the music world’s capital with Prince William for the wedding of their friend Guy Pelly to an American socialite (and hotel heiress) Elizabeth Wilson. He had been far from his high-spirited self on the flight across the Atlantic. During a stopover in Miami he joined the others to dine on stir-fried Chilean sea bass, Bahamian lobster and cocktails in the Fontainebleau Hotel’s Hakkasan restaurant. But even the fine fare appeared to do nothing for his sullen mood. When, at 1am, the group slipped out of the hotel to go to the LIV nightclub, he went with them but according to another clubber, he drank and danced alone.

Reaching Memphis, the Prince had little to offer the turnout of fans who called themselves Harry-etas. One, Rachel Silver, said she had flown from California as soon as she heard the royal would be in Tennessee: ‘I would follow him anywhere,’ she said, ‘but this time he wasn’t himself. It was like he wasn’t there. Sorry, but for me, it wasn’t worth the trip.’

And when he got back to the Peabody after the outing to ‘Graceland’ he went to bed early, according to a member of staff, leaving William and the others to romp through the hotel lobby wearing lit-up hats while downing champagne cocktails and shots. What had driven him into this spiral of deep depression? The informative member of the Peabody staff, says ‘I handed the Prince a letter which had been delivered to the hotel by a courier. All I can tell you is that I believe it was from England. Of course I don’t know what was in the letter but my girlfriend who was standing nearby said he took it into a corner and read it and it made him weep. She said it was so sad and she wanted to go and put her arm around him but of course that would not have been right. All I can tell you from what I witnessed is that the courier’s message I’d handed him obviously did not bring His Royal Highness happy news.’

So for Harry, the Peabody had turned into Heartbreak Hotel. No one can recall him ever being in such a depressed mood. After the 6pm wedding the following day, it was William who was the life and soul of the party for 400 guests staged in tents in the grounds of the Memphis Hunt and Polo Club. It was the future king who hit the dance floor all night. He even jumped on stage to join in with the Jimmy Church Band’s rendition of ‘Shout’. Royal training teaches its students one simple lesson: bury the hurt and show a brave face. But a seemingly forlorn Harry divided his time between the bar and a corner table.

On the evening of April 27 he and Cressida had quarrelled bitterly and that evening she made a series of calls to those close to her to say, ‘It’s over. We’ve split up. It’s terminal.’ The quarrel ensued after she told him she had changed her mind about joining him on the American excursion. She regarded it as a ‘boys’ outing’, a ‘glorified stag party’, and she had never been over fond of the company he kept. Guy Pelly was a nightclub entrepreneur and other members of the party were those with whom he had associated in the days when partying till dawn was the norm.

Cressida now had a job in theatre marketing which paid her just £20,000 a year (she had long ceased accepting hand-outs from her well-off parents) and £640 for the plane fare to Memphis was an extravagance she was not prepared to indulge in. As part of his bid that they should be a normal couple, they had already agreed that they should go ‘dutch’ on their meals out. Cressida dutifully handed over her half share after each bill was settled (and he often argued with the waiter about those). Even when they went to the cinema, it was usually Cressida who got the tickets and paid for them. Her Prince had no money worries, of course. On his forthcoming birthday he stood to inherit his next half of the £20 million sitting in the trust fund left to him and William by their mother (£17 million of which had come from Prince Charles via their divorce settlement). He faced a £4 million tax deduction unless he made a considerable donation to charity, but that still left him £6 million better off.

But petty differences about money were not at the heart of the matter when Harry and Cressida decided to go their separate ways, for the time being at least. The secrets of the heart are known only to the couple themselves, but love was there. The insurmountable problem was that Cressida never wanted to be a princess. She always dreamed of being a dancer, an actress, and she had no wish to see the inevitable headline: ‘The Prince and the Showgirl’. She was devastated when, a few months earlier, a show business agent phoned her the days after agreeing to take her on his books, to say he had changed his mind. ‘If I get you a part in a show the reviewers will say you only got it because of whom your boyfriend is and they will tear the show apart. That would be no good for you and no good for the show, so no, I can’t represent you,’ he told her.

Not for nothing had the couple been referred to among friends as H&C, for Hot and Cold rather than Harry and Cressida. And this author was warned in April that the affair might soon be over. So the royal romance was hanging by a thread and with one last phone call the thread snapped and the plans they had been making turned to ashes. It did not unduly upset those close to Cressida, one of whom described Harry as ‘unsatisfactory’. ‘I think she is better off without him,’ said a helpful family member. These Windsors don’t make great husbands.’

What no one had taken into consideration was that Harry’s irrational mood swings might well indicate that he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In addition to the violent death of his mother when he was a young boy, two tours of Afghanistan had exposed him to the full horrors of war . . . .

2

HARRY’S WAR

‘The highest of distinctions is service to others’

King George VI

Travelling on the 10.45 train from King’s Cross to King’s Lynn, the Queen arrived several days early for the 2007 family Christmas at Sandringham. She wanted to ensure that her meticulous arrangements had been strictly adhered to so that the festive holiday for her twenty-eight guests would go without a hitch. A fastidious organiser, Her Majesty even used to insist on helping maids to make her sons’ beds prior to their arrival for summer holidays in her castle at Balmoral. She would carefully place favourite cuddly toys on Prince Edward’s bed until he was in his early teens.

One by one the guests arrived on Christmas Eve headed by Charles with Camilla. She was to enjoy her third yuletide at the monarch’s country home after the Prince had made her both an honest woman and Harry and William’s stepmother by marrying her in April 2005.

Prince William had not been allowed to invite Kate Middleton because they were not yet married or even engaged, and for the same reason Prince Andrew had to restrict his female company to that of his daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie. Their brother Edward, now the Earl of Wessex, had his wife Sophie with him as well as their daughter Louise and new son James. The Princess Royal was accompanied by her husband, Vice-Admiral Timothy Laurence.

On arrival each paused in the grand entrance hall to admire the elaborately decorated tree, a Norfolk spruce taken from the 20,000 acre estate before being ushered to their rooms. They might have especially savoured the moment had they known that the grand Victorian house, their home for the next several days, was almost delivered to private ownership. Seventy years earlier, the Queen’s uncle, Edward VIII, put the whole estate up for sale following his abdication. A butcher, one Mr Parker, had signed a contract to buy it. On hearing the news Queen Mary persuaded Mr Parker to release her son from the contract. A deal was done to keep it in the royal family.

Having changed into suitable outfits for tea, the guests assembled at precisely 4pm to join the Queen and Prince Philip in the White Drawing Room where they were to enjoy homemade scones and Earl Grey tea. ‘Is there any other kind?’ Queen Mary once asked. Each of the guests was presented by the Master of the Household with a timetable and room plan so they would know where and when to marshal themselves.

Then it was time to place the presents they had brought for each other on trestle tables set up in the Red Drawing Room. Sections of the tables, laid out in order of precedence, had been marked off with tape showing where each family member’s gifts should be placed. In line with German tradition, the presents were then opened. The Queen has always regarded Christmas Day as being one for religious activity rather than giving and receiving material things.

To please the Queen, the family always compete to see who can buy the least extravagant gifts. Having learned from an earlier mistake by Diana, who had bought cashmere and other luxury presents, the Duchess of York once brought a pleasing smile to her mother-in-law’s face with a gift. The Duchess presented the Queen with an ashtray which spun like a top to consume and conceal its contents. A non-smoker herself, Her Majesty said it was ‘ingenious’. This is more than she had to say when she opened Harry’s gift to her one year: it was a bath hat bearing the slogan ‘Ain’t life a bitch!’. Princess Anne hit the right spot when she selected a white leather loo seat which her brother Charles still uses.

Following the lengthy present-opening ceremony, those assembled moved through to the hall for drinks beneath the tree before going back to their rooms to bathe and change once more (up to five changes a day can be required on some occasions). As they sipped their pre-bath martinis, mixed to the servants’ special formula, there was one question on everyone’s lips: ‘Where’s Harry?’ When someone joked: ‘He’s confined to barracks at Windsor, been a naughty boy’, the Queen smiled. Only she, her husband and eldest son were in on the secret.

While the Queen and her guests were beginning their festive celebrations, 2nd Lieutenant Wales was in fact more than 3,500 miles away in Southern Helmand, the most dangerous province in war-torn Afghanistan. On this evening he was looking around the tiny room allocated to him in FOB (Forward Operating Base) Delhi; the ruins of a former madrasa, a school of Islamic theology once occupied by the Taliban. Even as Her Majesty’s guests were plumping up the pillows on the four-poster beds in the Eighteenth-Century mansion’s opulent suites, Harry was checking out the blanket-covered cot he would sleep in for the next several nights. Harry is the first senior royal to fight on a battlefield since Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Maurice in the First World War.

For the formal Christmas Eve dinner at Sandringham, heralded (as are all the meals) by the sound of a gong at precisely 8pm, evening dress is obligatory. Black tie for the men, gowns and jewels for the ladies. In Helmand there was no such adornment for Harry. He wore full ‘battle rattle’, including body armour, over his camouflage fatigues, and helmet. At all times he carried his SA80A2 rifle and 9mm pistol together with the necessary ammunition. Around his neck he wore a band to which were attached his ID tags and a small quantity of morphine in case of injury. While the royals looked out on the magnificent gardens beneath the windows of the sovereign’s palace-away-from-home, the Queen’s grandson surveyed the rock-strewn desert which surrounded his quarters. A splash of orange here and there was the only evidence that this was the poppy breadbasket of the region. But he was where he wanted to be. Not for him the upstairs-downstairs, Downton Abbey kind of existence where the have-alls are waited on hand and foot by the have-nots.

The only ‘enemy’ the royals had to contend with was the band of photographers they referred to as the ‘Nikon Army’ kept more than half a mile away by officers of the Royal Protection squad. However, Harry knew that just a few hundred metres from where he stood was the real enemy, the Taliban – and they wanted him and his like dead.

‘Within an hour of arriving here he crossed no man’s land to meet the Gurkhas who were his men,’ says Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Connor, who was there in his capacity as Lead US Advisor for the province. Connor was the man who would decide how American troops might be deployed to back up the British Army as well as Afghan soldiers. Connor was to become Harry’s confidant and friend over the ensuing days and weeks.

I couldn’t believe it when he arrived at our tiny base. There was no special security detail, no SAS, he came in like a regular soldier and that’s how he remained throughout his time there. This was a Prince, the third in line to the British throne yet he made it known that he wanted to be treated just as the junior officer he was at that time. I called him Harry and he called me Bill although I was a Major then and in the American military officers between different ranks normally call each other by rank or ‘sir’.

Connor was wrong about there being no special security detail with Harry. Six SAS troopers had in fact been detailed as his ‘guardian angels’ but they remained in Helmand on standby. They did not shadow him as armed royal protection officers had done all his life, but they were never more than a short Chinook flight away in case an unforeseen emergency involving the Prince arose.

There were few more dangerous locations in Southern Helmand than FOB Delhi. The sparse area between the base and JTAC (Joint Tactical Air Control) Hill where Harry was to greet his men was ‘high risk’. It was in view of the Taliban snipers who, from time to time, raised their heads above the trenches and made full use of the mortars and missiles they were armed with.

‘He went up there on to the hill without showing any sign of fear, I take my hat off to him,’ says Connor, who at thirty-nine was sixteen years Harry’s senior.

The men were mostly Gurkhas and they had no idea he was coming. When they came down from the hill that night they all wanted their pictures taken with him. He was happy to oblige but pointed out that the photographs were not to be seen by anyone until he had returned to the UK in March or April. Not for nothing was he known as the bullet magnet. As it was the Taliban would probably have been able to see the men lining up to have their pictures taken with him.

So clearly the enemy was unaware that the man being photographed shaking the soldiers’ hands was an heir to the British throne or they would surely have stepped up their assault. Back in FOB Delhi he tucked into his army rations enhanced with a little cooked chicken before going over the instructions he had been given for his part in the war.

***

It was a cold winter’s night on the Norfolk estate and the two-bar electric fires placed in each of the enormous bedrooms did little to heat them. Abundant blankets – but no duvets – were made available. Downstairs, however, roaring log fires kept the partying royals warm. There was no such luxury for Harry: ‘It was bitterly cold and none of us got much sleep that night, including Harry,’ says Connor. Much the same could be said by the royal guests since their hostess did not retire until past midnight and no one could leave the room until she had.

The following morning, as the Queen and her party braved the forces of the Nikon Army. They were rewarded by cheers from a 1,000-strong crowd of well-wishers waiting in pouring rain to greet their arrival at the Sandringham Parish Church of St Mary Magdalene. Harry and Bill Connor stepped outside for morning exercises at their desert outpost:

We were actually working out when the Taliban opened up. It was one of those fire fights they regularly mounted from their trenches close by. Harry and I made a run for the buildings. We had no body armour on, just our PT kits.

It was like a 50s movie, a First World War situation with everybody in static positions. Every now and again they would pop their heads above the trenches and fire at us with machine guns and, of course, we would return their fire. You just never knew when it was coming.

Although they didn’t celebrate Christmas as such because they were mainly Hindus, the Gurkhas put on some great entertainment for everybody that morning. There was one raucous game where they had to chase, capture and kill a freed chicken. Then they staged some very rough wrestling for us. As Harry said: ‘God knows how they managed not to break any bones.’ But the highlight was their wonderful bagpipe playing. Can’t imagine what the Taliban thought of the Gurkhas’ bagpipe music coming from FOB Delhi to greet Christmas.

The royals’ lunch menu was the same as it has been for many years: clear soup; lemon sole; roast Norfolk turkey and a selection of cold meats arranged on silver salvers. This was followed by mince pies, Christmas pudding and custard. The fare was served by an army of liveried servants of which the junior members would have been allowed to eat earlier at 11am. The butlers and footmen had to wait until 4pm. There is no record of what the royals discussed as they feasted, but there is some knowledge of what the servants were talking about below stairs: Paul Burrell and the pantry diary. In his tell-all book A Royal Duty, the indiscreet butler had