William and Harry (30 page)

It was no wonder the party felt ill the following morning. Kate however was feeling better, and she and William were up at first light. He had promised to take her deerstalking before they all went shooting and Kate couldn’t wait. She had learned to stalk on the Balmoral estate in October 2007 with Prince Charles’s gillies and was proving an expert shot. She loved the peace and solitude and it wasn’t always the kill she was after. She enjoyed the time with William. After all it had been weeks since they had been alone together.

* * *

Harry pulled Chelsy towards him and planted a kiss on her lips. They were coming to the end of their nine-day holiday in Mauritius and Harry didn’t want it to end. He had flown to the paradise island on Boxing Day after spending Christmas with his family at Sandringham, and splashed out on a £1,000-a-night beachfront suite. Chelsy’s parents Charles and Beverley and her brother Shaun were also with them, which helped to take some of the pressure off Chelsy and Harry, who had been arguing recently. Chelsy had been studying hard at Leeds for her finals and they had only seen each other fleetingly. She had decided to stay in London once she graduated in June after being offered a solicitor traineeship with a leading London law firm Allen and Overy, whose co-founder George Allen had advised Edward VIII during his abdication. Chelsy had spent two weeks working in the company’s private equity department before Christmas and it was a fantastic opportunity. The problem was, things with Harry weren’t going so well. When she returned to Cape Town for Christmas she confided to her best friend Kirsten Rogers that she was beginning to doubt whether she could actually tame Harry. Kirsten liked Harry, but as she pointed out to her best friend it was only a year ago that they last went through a rocky patch and now they were talking about their future again.

Since Harry had returned from Afghanistan the couple had seen little of one another. In July 2008 Harry had flown to Lesotho with twenty members of the Blues and Royals to build a children’s school. Then in October he was posted to Canada for a month’s training. He rushed home when Chelsy had to have her wisdom teeth taken out in hospital, but before the end
of the month he was back in Africa with William taking part in a 1,000-mile motorbike rally from Port Edward on KwaZulu-Natal’s southern coast down to Port Elizabeth. The eight-day event, called Enduro Africa ’08, entailed motorbiking more than a hundred miles a day in forty-degree heat. It was the perfect chance for the princes to mix adventure with charity work and spend some time together, which they rarely got to do, according to Harry. ‘We never really spend any time together – we’ve got separate jobs going on at the moment.’ The boys are both accomplished riders. William drives a powerful Honda CRC Blackbird at home, while Harry owns an £8,000 Triumph, but as Harry observed, ‘It’s not just a bimble across the countryside … We’re expecting to fall off many a time. We’ve got a secret bet with everybody else about who’s going to fall off between us.’ It was the first time they had joined forces since organising the concert the year before, and it was worth the sweat and toil. Together they helped raise £300,000 for children’s charities in southern Africa including Sentebale.

By Christmas Harry was home and about to embark on the next stage of his army career, training as a helicopter attack pilot with the Army Air Corps. When he enrolled at its headquarters at Middle Wallop in Hampshire on 19 January 2009 a few days after he returned home from Mauritius, it was under a cloud. Video footage of him fooling around with his fellow cadets three years before when he was at Sandhurst had found its way into the hands of a tabloid newspaper. The prince had taken the footage himself and could be clearly heard narrating over the grainy footage recorded on his hand-held camera. As he panned over his colleagues sleeping in the airport while
waiting for a flight to Cyprus, where they were going on a training exercise, he zoomed in on his fellow cadet Ahmed Raza Khan. ‘Anyone else here?’ asks the prince. ‘Ah, our little Paki friend.’

The
News of the World
published the full transcript of the ‘bombshell home video’, along with pictures on its front page, nine days before Harry enrolled at Middle Wallop. At one point he could be heard saying to another cadet, ‘F*** me, you look like a raghead,’ offensive slang for an Arab. During another sequence, filmed at a camp with his fellow cadets looking on, he pretended to be speaking to his grandmother on the phone. ‘Send my love to the corgis,’ he joked to raucous laughter. ‘I’ve got to go. Got to go. Bye. God save you … Yeah, that’s great.’

It was only four years since Harry had endangered his army career by dressing up as a Nazi at a fancy-dress party. Now he was at the centre of another race row. His colleague Ahmed, now serving in the Pakistan army, said he had taken no offence, but Harry was still advised by Clarence House to apologise. The story was soon old news. Two days later it was revealed that the Prince of Wales called his good friend Kolin Dhillon, an Indian business man and member of the Beaufort Polo Club, ‘Sooty’. Of course Harry should have known better, but even the press concluded he had committed no real crime. ‘In battle all that matters is whether Harry would take a bullet to protect his comrade Ahmed. The answer would be an unequivocal yes,’ columnist Jane Moore concluded in the
Sun
, summing up the public mood.

If she was embarrassed by the episode, the Queen did not
make it known. Harry had always been the more troublesome of the two princes and even she had been on the receiving end of his pranks. One Christmas she was given a mobile telephone and asked Harry to activate a standard voicemail greeting. Harry insisted on recording a personalised message. ‘Hey, wassup? This is Liz,’ he recorded to snorts of mirth from William, who could be heard guffawing in the background. ‘Sorry I’m away from the throne. For a hotline to Philip press one, for Charles press two, for the corgis press three.’ The Queen was told of the hoax message when her private secretary Robin Janvrin called up and ‘got the shock of his life’, according to an aide.

With the race row fortunately behind him Harry set to work. He had eighteen months of training ahead of him which started with four weeks of intensive tutorials in the classroom before he was allowed in the cockpit. He was also enrolled on an army diversity course to make him more racially aware. He divided his time between RAF Cranwell, where William learned to fly, and the nearby RAF Barkston Heath. Like his older brother, Harry quickly discovered becoming a pilot meant a lot of hard work, no drinking and little time for girlfriends. For £150 a month he had rented a small room with a single bed and en-suite bathroom. From nine in the morning until 5.30 p.m. he had classes, but he struggled with the theory, according to one officer: ‘William is proving to be a good stick monkey. Harry has struggled more with the technical aspects.’

Harry later admitted, ‘The flying is fantastic, but there are times I’ve thought I’m not really cut out for this mentally. It’s really intense. I knew it was going to be tough, but I never
thought it would be this tough. I hope I’ve got the physical skills to fly a helicopter. But there are exams and everything. I can’t do maths – I gave that up when I left school.’ Harry was being trained to fly a Firefly, a small fixed-wing aircraft. Initially he had set his heart on eventually flying an Apache attack helicopter but acknowledged, ‘Brain capacity? I don’t know if I’ve got it for the Apache.’

While Kate had been prepared to wait for William as he embarked on his flying carer, Chelsy was not. She was lonely and desperately homesick. As she had feared, things went straight back to how they had been before as soon as they returned from Mauritius. She told Harry she felt the relationship had run its course and removed from her finger the blue topaz ring he had given her as a birthday present. Then she did something which infuriated him: she changed the status on her Facebook page to ‘Relationship: Not in one.’ The relationship was over in the click of a button. Harry could not believe that Chelsy had done it so publicly, and he was angry and upset when the story broke on the front page of the
Mail on Sunday
. He had not even had the chance to tell his father. ‘Chelsy was fed up of just being Harry’s girlfriend,’ said one of her friends. ‘She felt she was making all the effort and he wasn’t making enough. She also wants to be her own person, not just Prince Harry’s girlfriend. She fully respects his career, but they just don’t get enough time together and she’s a bit fed up of always coming second.’

Just a few weeks later Harry was photographed with Natalie Pinkham at Kitts nightclub in Chelsea, and this time it was Chelsy who was angry and upset. With his looks and eye-catching red hair, Harry was not short of female admirers. Paris
Hilton had reportedly asked him out on a date, while Harry had secretly exchanged telephone numbers with Australian singer Natalie Imbruglia. They had been introduced through their mutual friend Sam Branson at the singer’s fancy-dress thirty-fourth birthday party at the Kensington Roof Gardens in west London in February. Harry had dressed as a surgeon and was, according to guests, immediately taken with Natalie, who he pursued with late-night texts and phone calls. He was back to his partying ways, and started going to all-night raves at warehouses in south London which his cousins Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie told him about. The parties, attended by wealthy young aristocrats, are by invitation only, but just to make sure he wasn’t recognised Harry wore a black Rastafarian wig. As a result of his nocturnal activities Harry’s work suffered, and unsurprisingly he failed the first of his theory exams in February. Charles was concerned. He had seen the same thing happen in Harry’s last year at Eton and knew how much his son needed to concentrate if he was going to pass. Harry was given extra tuition and passed the exam the second time round before the end of the month. He was relieved and elated, and finally qualified to fly the Firefly solo.

While he was making progress with his flying, Harry’s private life seemed more chaotic than ever. In March the newspapers were linking him with another glamorous young woman, Astrid Harbord, a twenty-seven-year-old Bristol University graduate and friend of Chelsy. Blond, pretty and single, Astrid was perfect girlfriend material and mixed in the same social circles as Harry. She and her sister Davina had been christened the ‘Hardcore Sisters’ by society magazine
Tatler
and both are good friends of
Guy Pelly. Astrid was also a guest at Arthur Landon’s shoot at which Harry had confided that he and Chelsy were having problems. When they were photographed together on the back seat of Harry’s chauffeur-driven car entering the rear gates of Clarence House at three o’clock in the morning, this appeared to be confirmation, to the press at least, that Harry and Astrid were a couple. In fact the friendship has only ever been platonic and they slept in separate rooms that night. Astrid was the worse for wear and had passed out on Harry’s bed while he stayed in the spare room. ‘Astrid was mortified,’ said a friend. ‘The next morning she woke up to find William and Kate standing in the doorway offering her a cup of tea. Kate was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, William was laughing, and Astrid just wanted the ground to swallow her up.’

It was in fact a young TV presenter called Caroline Flack who Harry took a shine to. The pair were introduced through Natalie Pinkham at a poker tournament in London that April. Just weeks later they were pictured leaving Mark Dyer’s west London flat, and by June Harry had brought the Sky Sports presenter back to Clarence House. But the fling never got off the ground as Harry was still in love with Chelsy, although there was a problem – she had started dating a thirty-three-year-old property developer called Dan Philipson, and the relationship appeared to be getting serious. Ironically it was Astrid who had introduced them, and Dan had made several trips to Leeds. Needless to say, Harry was riled.

Back in February on Valentine’s Day Chelsy had received a number of cards and rather bizarrely a copy of the movie
Crocodile Dundee
, sent anonymously. She immediately suspected Harry. She
knew he had always been jealous of her old friend Jabu Kirkland. There were pictures of Jabu on Facebook stripped to the waist with a dead crocodile slung across his shoulders and also holiday snaps of him and Chelsy enjoying a Christmas break with friends in Cape Town while Harry was in Afghanistan. The reality was nothing had ever happened between them, but Chelsy secretly liked the fact that Harry was jealous. ‘Chelsy laughed out loud when she got the present in the post,’ recalled a friend. ‘The card that came with it was anonymous but Chelsy had a feeling it was Harry and she called him up. Harry said he had nothing to do with the present but Chelsy just said, “He would say that, wouldn’t he!” and laughed. Ironically that was when they started talking again.’

By early May Harry had graduated from fixed-wing aircraft to the Squirrel helicopter and was about to join William at the Defence Helicopter Flying School at RAF Shawbury near Shrewsbury. After his problems with theory exams he had worked hard to keep up with his studies, and when he graduated from RAF Barkston Heath Harry received the Horsa Trophy, which is awarded to ‘the man you would most want on your squadron’. But with their careers literally taking off, there were concerns at the Palace that William and Harry should not just be seen as royal members of the military.

The princes were already regularly appearing in the
Court Circular
, the official record of the royal family’s public activities, and in January 2009 the Queen allowed them to set up their own household in Colour Court within the St James’s Palace compound. Charles had been given a private office after his
investiture at Caernarfon Castle in 1969, when he was twenty years old, and the decision to give William and Harry their own was seen as an important part of their gradual move into the public arena. It also gave them some independence from their father, who financed the cost of setting up the office through his estate, the Duchy of Cornwall. The princes had stationery embossed with their personal crests and their own team of staff, which included private secretary Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, personal secretary Helen Asprey and, at Harry’s suggestion, Miguel Head, the bright and astute Ministry of Defence press officer who had helped coordinate his trip to Afghanistan, was appointed assistant press secretary. Until now Charles’s long-standing press secretary Paddy Harverson had always commented – or more often not – on stories concerning the princes. Now William and Harry would be briefing their own aide. The Queen insisted on one condition: that Sir David Manning, former British ambassador to the United States, was appointed as a part-time adviser. Sir David was regarded by Her Majesty as a safe pair of hands who would have the authority to intervene as and when he felt it was necessary.