William and Harry (23 page)

It was the middle of August; Iraq and Afghanistan were both possible destinations, and there was a real chance that Harry would be flying out the following spring. ‘Harry has started preparing himself for war,’ I was told. ‘He expects to be sent to Afghanistan to join the rest of his regiment.’ The Ministry of Defence appeared to confirm the story: ‘There is a requirement for reconnaissance troops in Afghanistan and there is a squadron from the Blues and Royals there at the moment. However, the current regime is due to change next spring.’ But within weeks the prospects of Harry going to war looked unlikely. Senior sources in Harry’s regiment explained that sending the prince off to war was proving a nightmare. Every day there were fresh reports in the press about where Harry and his men would be posted thus endangering not only the prince’s safety but that of his men.

Chief of the General Staff Sir Richard Dannatt was in the
unenviable position of deciding Harry’s fate. There was a real risk if he sent the prince to war that Harry would be targeted by insurgents, and the Taliban were already baying for his blood. Extremist websites were offering bounties for Harry’s head. He was a trophy as far as the enemy was concerned, and for the top brass at home sending Harry to the front line was an enormous worry. The Taliban were stepping up their attacks: forty-one British service personnel had been killed in just five months and there were real fears that Harry could become another casualty. Southern Afghanistan is one of the most dangerous places in the world, and no place, some argued, for the third-in-line to the throne. Even if Harry was to be stationed at headquarters in Kandahar, he would still face daily rocket attacks. A troop of a hundred Household Cavalry had been deployed to Helmand that spring, and one man had been killed and five seriously injured when their Scimitar armoured vehicle hit a landmine during an operation near Musa Qaleh.

General Dannatt’s decision would not be made lightly; it carried so many ramifications for the royal family and the country as a whole if the worst happened. But what was the point of spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money sending William and Harry to Sandhurst if they would never have the opportunity to put their training into practice? As head of the armed forces and Harry’s commander-in-chief, the Queen had made it clear to senior officials at the Ministry of Defence that she would support a decision to send Harry to war, and the prince later acknowledged, ‘She was very pro my going.’ The Queen was proud of her grandson’s achievements and did not believe that his hard work should be wasted. As the spare, Harry
was in a different position to his older brother and made his feelings clear: if he wasn’t going to be sent to war, he might as well hand in his uniform. His Uncle Andrew, the last royal to be sent to a conflict zone, had expressed similar sentiments in a BBC documentary in 1991: ‘Had I not gone to the Falklands my position within the navy would have been untenable.’

Harry had spent weeks training for battle at remote army stations around the UK. According to one officer who trained Harry on pre-deployment exercises at Castlemartin, the MoD’s 2,400-acre firing range on the south Pembrokeshire coast, he was an exemplary leader.

On 21 February 2007, after weeks of speculation, Harry finally received the news he had been waiting for. He was to join the Household Cavalry’s A Squadron on a six-month tour of duty in Iraq that spring. The Ministry of Defence released a statement approved by Clarence House:

Harry was finally going to war. It was to be the first time a senior member of the royal family had served on the front line since Prince Andrew had fought in the Falklands twenty-five years earlier. Harry was thrilled, and at the end of April Chelsy, who was travelling around South America on her gap year, flew back to London to accompany him at his sending-off party at Mahiki. That night Harry was on his best behaviour. Just a month earlier, having ignored his father’s instructions to stay away from his
favourite night spot, he had been involved in an embarrassing scuffle outside Boujis. Flushed from drinking the club’s signature Crackbaby cocktails, the prince, who once again had been partying with Natalie Pinkham, lunged at a photographer before losing his footing and falling over in the gutter. It was a humiliating end to the evening. At the sending-off party it was clear that his impending deployment had had a sobering effect on the prince, who left the party with Chelsy shortly after midnight. Once again the roles were reversed, and it was William who was last on the dance floor until the early hours with his friend Holly Branson.

Harry was on a high but his elation was to be short-lived. Within weeks of the announcement there was a dramatic U-turn. On the evening of 16 May General Dannatt announced that the twenty-two-year-old prince would not be going to Iraq after all. It was simply too dangerous. Just weeks before, two men from the Queen’s Royal Lancers had been killed when their Scimitar vehicle was blown up while out on patrol in the desert. ‘There have been a number of specific threats – some reported and some not reported – which relate directly to Prince Harry as an individual,’ explained Dannatt, who had just returned from Iraq. ‘These threats expose not only him but also those around him to a degree of risk that I now deem unacceptable. I have to add that a contributing factor to this increase in threat to Prince Harry has been the widespread knowledge and discussion of his deployment. It is a fact that this close scrutiny has exacerbated the situation and this is something that I wish to avoid in future.’

It had already been decided that Harry should lead a support troop doing deep desert patrols rather than reconnaissance, where
he and his men would have been more exposed, but even being a part of a much larger force was seen as too risky. There had been too much speculation in the press about where Harry and A Squadron would be sent, and the Ministry of Defence had learned of plots to seize the prince and smuggle him across to Iran, where a rescue operation would have been near impossible. Abu Mujtaba, a commander in the Mahdi Army, the Shia militia loyal to the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, told the
Guardian
newspaper, ‘One of our aims is to capture Harry; we have people inside the British bases to inform us on when he will arrive.’ A royal hostage crisis was something the Ministry of Defence was simply not prepared to risk. It was Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, the prince’s private secretary, who informed Harry of the eleventh-hour decision. Publicly he put on a brave face, but it was enough to make him reassess his career.

Clarence House acknowledged that the prince was ‘very disappointed’ but insisted that he ‘fully understands and accepts General Dannatt’s difficult decision’. There is no doubt it was the toughest test of his commitment to his military career to date. Harry knew there was no guarantee this wouldn’t happen again. He had no intention of being a toy soldier and was incensed when the pressure group Republic described his training at Sandhurst as a ‘scandalous waste of taxpayers’ money’. If his military future was twiddling his thumbs in an office, he would rather quit the army now and do something worthwhile with his life. He had set up his own charity Sentebale to help children in Lesotho. If the military could not find a place for him, Harry would find another outlet for his passions and talent. As far as he was concerned, he had spent his whole life defending himself
against accusations that he was little more than a playboy. Joining the army had given him the chance to prove his detractors wrong and show that there was much more to him.

Friends of the prince suggested it was no exaggeration to say that Harry slipped into a state of depression upon hearing the news. ‘Harry was devastated,’ an officer who had trained with him told me.

‘I have never seen Harry so down in the dumps,’ one of his best friends told me over a lunch at the Automat restaurant in Dover Street, just up the road from Mahiki. ‘His words are that he is absolutely gutted, he feels all his training has been a waste of time.’ Harry told his colleagues, ‘If I am not allowed to join my unit in a war zone, I will hand in my uniform.’ William, as always, was on hand to support his brother, but there was little comfort he could offer and he knew he would face a similar fate. As second-in-line to the throne, he realised that he too would have to watch his fellow officers go to war while he stayed at
home. Harry joined his brother in D Squadron of the Blues and Royals until the MoD decided exactly what to do with him. His senior officers assured him they would exhaust every option to get him to war; in the meantime they told him to sit tight.

It was not surprising that Harry’s rebellious streak emerged again. If he couldn’t be a soldier prince he might as well be a party prince, and he hit his favourite nightclubs hard. PR D
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was the
Evening Standard
’s front page. Aware that he was fast losing interest, the MoD decided to send him to Canada. Harry had had several talks with General Dannatt and senior officials, who explained that he was going to be retrained as a battlefield air controller. It was, they explained, the easiest way to get him to the front line, but it needed to be done covertly. In May Harry flew to Alberta, to the British Army Training Unit in Suffield 160 miles south-east of Calgary, to spend three months learning how to carry out live-fire exercises. But within days of his arrival Harry was on the front page of a local newspaper, photographed in a provocative clinch with a waitress. He had gone to a late-night bar, with two of his bodyguards and a group of army colleagues to drink sambuca shots and rum and Coke. The worse for wear, Harry couldn’t resist chatting up one of the waitresses, an attractive twenty-two-year-old called Cherie Cymbalisty. ‘He was very forward and told me I was stunning,’ she recalled. ‘He certainly didn’t mention anything about having a girlfriend. He sure didn’t act like he had one.’

This time it wasn’t just Chelsy asking questions. Harry’s men were fighting in Iraq, and here was the third-in-line to the throne chatting up girls apparently without a care in the world. While
one could forgive him for letting off steam, here was Harry acting the fool when the death toll of British servicemen in Afghanistan had just reached sixty. As his grandmother privately remarked, sometimes Harry just lacked common sense.

By the start of August Harry was back home from Canada. The speculation about his being posted to Afghanistan had finally subsided, much to the relief of General Sir Richard Dannatt, who had started secret talks with the Queen, Prince Charles and Harry’s private secretary about the possibility of deploying Harry to the front line by Christmas. It was therefore the epic concert that William and Harry were planning to commemorate the tenth anniversary of their mother’s death that filled the pages of the press.

They had first announced their intention of organising a memorial service and concert in memory of their mother the previous December. On 1 July 2007, after seven months of intensive planning, the concert was actually going to happen. It had always been William and Harry’s plan to celebrate what should have been Diana’s forty-sixth birthday, as this marked a decade since her death, but the event was not to be a maudlin affair. The brothers decided that the concert should reflect their mother’s
joie de vivre, and the eclectic line-up of West End show casts, performances from the Royal Ballet and some of the world’s biggest rock stars perfectly captured the mood. From the outset William had said that he and Harry wanted to ‘put their stamp’ on both the memorial service and the concert. ‘We want it to represent exactly what our mother would have wanted. So the church service alone isn’t enough,’ he said. ‘We want to have this big concert on her birthday full of energy, full of the sort of fun and happiness which I know she would have wanted. It’s got to be the best birthday present she ever had.’