William and Harry (14 page)

It was a miserable start for Harry, and things would get worse before they improved. While William had enjoyed a peaceful
and private gap year, the Australian press would not leave Harry alone. He flew by private jet to Tooloombilla, 370 miles west of Brisbane, where he was to be based for a month at a simple weatherboard cottage on a farm owned by Noel and Annie Hill, son and daughter-in-law of the millionaire polo player Sinclair Hill, who had coached Prince Charles when he visited Australia. A competent horseman, Harry couldn’t wait to get into the saddle, but he spent the first days of his trip hiding from the swarm of photographers that plagued the estate. Harry was furious. He had posed for a photocall in Sydney in return for being left alone to get on with his £100-a-week job on the farm. It was worse than anything he had experienced in England and he threatened to go home. The situation was so serious that St James’s Palace was forced to issue a statement urging the media to leave the prince alone. ‘He wants to learn about outback trades, not dodge the cameras,’ one Palace official complained.

As always, it was down to Charles to convince his son to stick it out. As he’d been promised, Harry was allowed to return to Sydney before Christmas to watch the Rugby World Cup. At Eton he had played scrum half and whenever he could went to Twickenham to watch England play. His cousin Zara Phillips was in Sydney with her boyfriend Mike Tindall, who was in the England squad, and together they worked their way through Sydney’s finest bars and clubs. The fact that Harry was busy celebrating with an England player and coach Clive Woodward did not escape the Australian media. ‘This [trip] is a waste of money,’ Professor John Warhurst, chairman of the Australian Republic Movement, told the
Daily Telegraph
.

When he returned home to England it had already been
announced that Harry would be extending his gap year. With his father’s approval, he postponed Sandhurst for a year so that he could follow in his brother’s footsteps and explore Africa. Having become quickly reacquainted with his favourite London nightclubs he packed his bags in February and flew to Lesotho before he had the chance to read the salacious story of his night with Lauren Pope, a twenty-year-old topless model who he had partied with at Chinawhite. The glitzy London nightclub could not be more of a contrast to Lesotho, a tiny, mountainous land-locked country in southern Africa with one of the highest rates of Aids in the world. Lesotho, which translates as ‘forgotten kingdom’, has a population of less than two million, more than half of whom live below the poverty line. It is so tiny it often falls off maps of the continent, which is why Harry called the charity which he launched two years after his first visit Sentebale, which means ‘forget me not’. While Australia had been intended as a bit of fun, Harry’s two-month trip to Africa was all about his pledge to continue his mother’s humanitarian work.

Just to make sure Harry stayed focused, his father’s head of press Paddy Harverson accompanied him to Africa. ‘He is showing a real and genuine interest in the welfare of young people in Lesotho,’ said Mr Harverson. ‘By coming here he is bringing attention to the problem.’ Harry had struck up a warm rapport with Prince Seeiso, the younger brother of Lesotho’s King Letsie III. The two filmed a documentary called
The Forgotten Kingdom
about their work at the Mants’ase Orphanage in Mophatoo, a small town two hours from the capital, Maseru.

As soon as Harry arrived, he adapted to life in the blistering African heat. He visited the local barber and had his head shaved
to keep him cool during the day and immediately set to work with eight volunteers building fences and planting trees at the orphanage to provide shade for the children, most of whom had lost their parents to Aids. It was hard physical work, but there was plenty of time for fun, and whenever he had a spare hour in the day Harry would gather the children for an impromptu game of rugby. He had packed a football and a rugby ball and patiently explained the rules of the game before splitting the children into teams. They ran around screaming and shouting and kicking up red dust, and Harry was in his element. Like his mother he adored children, and like Diana he was not afraid to get involved with children infected with the HIV virus. ‘This is a country that needs help,’ said Harry as he appealed to charities in England. He was not afraid of taboo subjects and was close to tears when he held a ten-month-old girl who had been raped by her stepfather. Harry was so moved by the little girl, called Liketsu, that he handwrote messages of support to her carers and secretly returned to Lesotho the following September to see how she was progressing.

The prince was genuinely at home in his new role, and the trip was judged a huge success in the media. While his work in Lesotho had the desired effect of distancing Harry from his wild-child reputation, there was nothing engineered or fake about his enthusiasm. But, being Harry, it wasn’t all work, and in April 2004 he made his first of many trips to Cape Town, where he met up with the girl he had been hoping to bump into. Harry had first met Zimbabwe-born Chelsy Davy when she was in her final year at Stowe School. Chelsy had been living in England since she was thirteen when her parents Charles and Beverley, who
had moved from Zimbabwe to Durban in South Africa, enrolled her at Cheltenham College where she was a model student. She met Harry through a mutual friend called Simon Diss who was a member of the Glosse Posse and a regular visitor to Club H. According to one friend; ‘Simon and Harry were great friends. On one occasion Simon introduced Harry to Chelsy thinking that they would make a good match, but nothing happened at that stage because Chelsy was about to finish at Stowe and go back home to South Africa.’ Bright, blond and pretty, Chelsy had notions of becoming a model, but she had a brain and planned to use it. After finishing her A levels she took up a place at the University of Cape Town to study politics, philosophy and economics.

When he met her Harry had been immediately smitten. He had listened raptly as Chelsy enthralled him with tales of riding bareback and how she could strangle a snake with her bare hands. When he travelled to Cape Town that April he had every intention of reconnecting with her. He contacted Simon and asked him for Chelsy’s address. ‘Harry was desperate to meet up with Chelsy,’ recalled a friend. ‘He called Simon in the UK and said he wanted Chelsy’s details and he got straight on the phone to her. Chelsy wasn’t impressed that he was a prince, she just thought he was cute so they met up.’ When they did, the chemistry was immediate. They had gone out with mutual friends to a fashionable nightclub called Rhodes House and by the end of the evening were locked in a passionate embrace on the dance floor. Harry made several trips to see Chelsy again before he returned home to England. Sometimes he would fly to Durban with his protection officer and stay at the Davys’ family home. On other
occasions he stayed with Chelsy and her brother Shaun at their beachfront apartment in Camps Bay. They were wonderful weekends away made all the more exciting by their secrecy. Chelsy wanted to show Harry as much of Cape Town as possible and they spent hours exploring the coast in her Mercedes convertible. When he kissed her goodbye that summer he promised it would not be long before they would see each other again.

Back in England Harry was counting the days until he would see Chelsy again when he got into a fight with a paparazzo outside a London nightclub called Pangea. He had been enjoying a night out with friends and as he left the club a scuffle broke out when the press pack tried to get pictures of the bleary-eyed prince. Fuelled by drink and startled by the flashbulbs, Harry lashed out at photographer Chris Uncle. As his protection officer pulled Harry away, Uncle was left nursing a cut lip. Fortunately he chose not to press charges, but this would not be the last unedifying episode between Harry and the paparazzi. As was becoming a pattern, Harry again left England under a cloud.

The sound of cicadas filled the night air as Chelsy and Harry stared at the stars and raised their glasses to propose a toast. They had travelled by private plane to Entre Rios province in the Mesopotamia region in north-east Argentina for a romantic weekend, and it had been perfect. They had dined by candlelight on fresh barbecued fish after an energetic day of hunting and slept in a king-size bed in a private lodge. As the moonlight caught her beach-blond hair, Harry marvelled at his catch. Chelsy was everything he wanted in a girl. For the first time and to his absolute amazement and delight, he was in love.
Even more astonishing, he privately marvelled as he finished a glass of wine, was the fact that he had managed to keep Chelsy a secret. While some of her friends in Cape Town knew about their romance, Harry had only confided to his brother. Mark and Luke Tomlinson, who were staying with him at the El Remanso polo farm in Buenos Aires, also knew about Chelsy, but no one else. But by the end of Harry’s trip in November the story of their romance was out. The staff at the lodge had been aware of Harry’s new girlfriend and told the
Mail on Sunday
, which broke the story: ‘Harry and Chelsy were like any young couple in love, kissing and holding hands and he seemed quite besotted. They looked madly in love and at one point Harry admitted that she was his first true love.’ Unlike his father, it seemed Harry knew exactly what being in love meant. In the past there had been flings and infatuations, including a crush on his friend Natalie Pinkham, but as she would later confide to me, Harry was a drinking pal and nothing more. Chelsy was Harry’s first true love and he was head over heels.

After their reunion in Buenos Aires, which only strengthened their feelings for each other, it was apparent that the relationship was serious. By December Harry was back in South Africa, holidaying with Chelsy’s parents. The fact that the prince was holidaying with a multimillionaire Zimbabwean businessman and landowner, whose company had been reported to have close links with the country’s president Robert Mugabe, was said to be something of a concern to the royal family as were other press claims that Mr Davy’s company HHK Safaris offered those prepared to pay the opportunity to shoot elephants and lions. Mr Davy, however, robustly denied any such links stating that he had ‘never even
shaken’ Mugabe’s hand, while Chelsy in her first and only public statement made clear that her father’s company had nothing to do with poaching. Harry joined his girlfriend and her family on the island of Bazaruto off the coast of Mozambique and spent the pre-Christmas break snorkelling. They saw moray eels and giant grouper and fished for sand sharks in the sparkling Indian Ocean. At the end of the day, Harry, who had become close to Chelsy’s brother Shaun, would join the family for ‘jolling’, drinking games on the beach, when they would knock back ‘volcanoes’ – vodka shots with chilli sauce. It was the sort of family holiday Harry had never experienced, and he was happier than he had been in a long time. But soon after he arrived home for Christmas, his dream holiday quickly became a distant memory as he became engulfed in the biggest political storm of his life, an episode which threatened to ruin his military career before it had even started.

It was January 2005 and William and Harry had been looking forward to their friend Harry Meade’s twenty-second birthday party ever since the stiff card invitation had arrived at Highgrove. Harry’s father, a former Olympic showjumper, had organised a grand marquee in the grounds of the family’s sprawling estate in West Littleton, Gloucestershire, and guests had been promised dinner, champagne and a night of fun and frivolity. All they had to do was dress up in accordance with the ‘native and colonial’ theme. William had opted for the fun take and went as a lion with tight black leggings and furry paws. The princes’ close friend Guy Pelly went as the Queen. Harry, however, had other ideas, and as he trawled through the rails of Maud’s Cotswold Costumes in Gloucestershire around the corner from Highgrove it was
a Second World War Nazi outfit that caught his eye. He had, he later confided, chosen the sand-coloured uniform because he thought it complemented his colouring. Of course, he was to have no idea of the devastating repercussions of his ill-starred choice. While the Afrika Korps costume was in poor taste, what is more surprising is that none of the coterie of aides or the protection officers who accompanied Harry to the store thought to tell the prince that his outfit was offensive and potentially inflammatory.

According to guests at the party, who were dressed in safari suits, cowboy outfits and as Red Indians, the chatter dimmed to an awkward silence when the prince arrived, leading one of the 250 guests to remark, ‘That’s going to land him in trouble.’ The off-the-cuff comment couldn’t have been a bigger understatement. When one of the guests sold a picture of the prince in his uniform to the
Sun
, Harry found himself at the centre of the biggest storm of his life. There he was on the front page smoking, drinking and sporting the German flag on the arm of his jacket and a red armband emblazoned with the swastika on his left sleeve. The timing of the pictures could not have been worse. It was just days before the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and Harry’s uncle Prince Edward was due to represent the Queen at the extermination camp in Poland as a mark of respect.

Horrified and stunned by the reaction, Harry immediately issued an apology admitting that his choice of outfit had been ‘poor’. While a public apology had sufficed several years ago, this time sorry wasn’t enough. There were angry calls for the prince to make a personal apology by the Tory leader Michael Howard,
while the former armed forces minister and Labour MP Doug Henderson insisted that the prince be excluded from Sandhurst, where he was to enrol in May. ‘If it was anyone else, the application wouldn’t be considered,’ Mr Henderson remarked. ‘It should be withdrawn immediately.’ The Board of Deputies of British Jews denounced Harry’s outfit as ‘clearly in bad taste’ while the British press pointed the finger once again at Charles, wanting to know why Harry had been allowed to step out in such an offensive costume. Where was Charles to offer his son the advice he obviously needed and why was he not keeping a closer eye on the wayward prince? The answer was that Charles was in Scotland enjoying a New Year break with Camilla and was refusing to return to London. For the first time William, who had escaped from Harry’s drugs scandal unscathed, was also implicated. Hadn’t he the foresight to warn his younger brother that wearing a Nazi outfit would only land him in yet another scandal?