William and Harry (31 page)

Juggling William and Harry’s charitable commitments with their careers and private lives is no easy feat. Among other organisations, William is patron of the English Schools’ Swimming Association, Mountain Rescue England and Wales, Skill Force, HMS Alliance Conservation Appeal, The Tusk Trust and the Royal Marsden Hospital – which his mother also had close connections with – as well as Centrepoint charity for the homeless and The Child Bereavement charity. He is also president of the Football Association and vice-patron of the Welsh
Rugby Union and most recently was made the president of Bafta, the British Academy of Film and Television. In addition to Sentebale, Harry’s portfolio includes Dolen Cymru, MapAction, and WellChild of which he became the first royal patron in March 2007. He is also vice-president of the England Rugby Union, which inevitably leads to a spot of healthy sibling rivalry with William sporting a daffodil at matches and Harry a red rose for England.

But despite their numerous patronages the boys still faced criticism. On 23 February 2009 the investigative TV programme
Dispatches
accused them of being lazy and pointed out that William had only carried out fourteen royal engagements in 2007 while he was serving with the army, five of which were linked with either rugby or football. The programme noted that when Charles was the same age he carried out around eighty-four royal engagements a year while in the Royal Navy. William was incensed. In 2008 he and Harry had carried out close to sixty engagements between them despite having full-time careers with the armed forces. According to one senior aide, ‘No other member of Her Majesty’s forces would ever be regarded as lazy, so the criticism is wrong at best, at worst insulting to Prince William’s colleagues in the forces, who work as hard as he does.’ Despite his punishing work schedule, William told his grandmother he wanted to increase his charitable engagements, although he complained to friends that he wished he had more siblings to share the workload with.

Keen that Harry should also be established as a working royal, the Queen agreed to allow her grandson to visit New York in May. Harry had come up with the idea, having been invited to
play in a charity polo match to raise money for Sentebale. Both William and Harry had given up playing the game regularly as neither had time, but they were delighted to compete in charity matches. With Britain in the middle of its worst economic recession since the 1930s, the Queen decided to finance the £25,000 trip from her own purse. ‘As it’s not a full-fat royal trip, the Queen has very graciously offered to foot the bill, which is very kind of her,’ explained Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton.

Harry arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Friday 29 May. While visiting Ground Zero he met families who had lost loved ones in the 11 September terrorist attacks, and planted a tree at the British Memorial Garden in downtown Manhattan, where screams of ‘Marry me, Harry’ greeted his arrival. Harry mania gripped America. ‘He’s so handsome,’ cried one fan as she reached out for an autograph. ‘Cuter than William – I love his ginger hair,’ remarked another. The trip generated huge interest in the American media, which wanted to know everything about him. Ahead of his arrival,
Time
magazine had written about Harry’s ‘long alcohol-fuelled nights’ while the
New York Daily News
recalled his ‘hard partying ways’. I was invited on to
The Early Show
on CBS and asked where Harry would be drinking during his visit. He wouldn’t. He had already been warned in no uncertain terms that he was expected to be on his best behaviour – there were to be no incidents outside nightclubs – and Harry was determined not to let his grandmother down.

He was genuinely moved by the stories of war veterans he met and in his element when he visited the Children’s Zone in Harlem, an echo of his mother’s famous visit in 1989 during which she
famously hugged a child with Aids. As he raced around an assault course with the youngsters popping balloons during a relay race, Harry could not hide his glee. The weekend ended victoriously on Sunday afternoon when Sentebale won the Veuve Clicquot Manhattan Polo Classic on Governors Island 6–5 and raised £100,000 for his charity. Harry’s whistle-stop tour proved that the American public’s adoration for the British royal family had only increased since Diana’s death. The trip had been a wise investment for Her Majesty.

It was clear from New York just how valuable both boys were in promoting the House of Windsor overseas. By now William had just turned twenty-six and Harry was twenty-four. At William’s age the Queen had already come to the throne, while Charles and Diana were married and well established in their public roles, and there was a growing feeling within the upper echelons of the Palace that William and Harry should start taking on more high-profile engagements. Charles, who was declared the hardest-working royal in 2008 ahead of the Princess Royal, agreed. Previously he had wanted to protect his sons from the limelight, but now they were older there was a strong argument for them to raise their public profiles.

The princes agreed to give the media access to their professional lives in return for privacy the rest of the time, and in June 2009 they gave a rare joint interview at RAF Shawbury, where they were living together in a rented cottage close to the airbase. It was as normal a life as they could expect to lead save for the presence of their usual round-the-clock protection. They did the housework themselves and ironed their own shirts. During the televised interview they joked and teased one another.
‘Bearing in mind I cook – I feed him every day – I think he’s done very well,’ said William. ‘Harry does do washing up, but then he leaves most of it in the sink and then I come back in the morning and I have to wash it up … I do a fair bit of tidying up after him. He snores a lot too. He keeps me up all night long.’ Harry pulled a face and groaned, ‘Oh God, they’ll think we share a bed now! We’re brothers not lovers!’ He vowed it would be the ‘first time, last time we’ll live together’, while William drily observed, ‘It’s been an emotional experience.’ It was a far cry from the strained press conferences that their father so dreaded.

Joking aside, there were serious points they wanted to make. Harry reiterated his determination to get back to the front line: ‘To get out to Afghanistan again would be fantastic and my best chance is to do it from a helicopter … I’m a bit of Lynx lover since I started this course. Lynx is more challenging, it’s more my cup of tea.’ William said he remained ‘hopeful there’s a chance’ he too will make it back to Afghanistan. ‘I didn’t join up to be mollycoddled or treated differently. As far as I am concerned, in my eyes, if Harry can do it, then I can do it.’ It was a fascinating insight into William. Some called him naive for holding out hopes of ever serving on the front line, but most respected his willingness to fight for his country.

With so many charitable commitments and so little time, the boys agreed that they would be more effective if they combined forces. In September 2009 they set up the Foundation of Prince William and Prince Harry. Charles had created The Prince’s Trust with his £7,500 severance pay from the Royal Navy and William and Harry wanted to establish their own charitable forum. So in
2006 they created The Princes’ Charities Forum in order to team up their assorted charities. Between them they are presidents or patrons of over twenty charities and the foundation, which is the culmination of their charitable work so far, will become a grant-giving body in years to come. William said that he and Harry derived inspiration from both their parents, who had ‘instilled in us from the word go that with these great priviliges goes an absolute responsibility to give back’. The princes invested a six-figure sum from their personal fortunes into the foundation and decided that at least a third of all the money it raises will go to the armed forces. As head of the armed forces, the Queen backed the decision whole-heartedly. She appointed her trusted former secretary, now Lord Janvrin, chairman of the board of trustees, while Sir David Manning was also drafted in to work alongside Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, president of the Historic Houses Association Edward Harley, City financier Guy Monson and the Prince of Wales’s divorce lawyer Fiona Shackleton.

It was clear that their parents’ prodigious campaigning talents had rubbed off on both of them, and in May William and Harry appeared in a ninety-second advert produced by the Prince’s Rainforests Project with their father, the Dalai Lama and a host of celebrities to draw attention to the climate crisis. ‘I’ve been trying to take the best bits of both of their [Charles and Diana’s] charit -able lives and trying to amalgamate them into making them even better,’ said William. ‘I’m not in their league, but I’m warming up, hopefully, and I’m trying to do what I can. My grandmother inspires me obviously. I think she has done a fantastic job. I wouldn’t say it’s a third way. I think it’s just trying to find your own way.’

They were already joint patrons of the Henry van Straubanzee
Memorial Fund, set up in memory of Harry’s schoolfriend killed in a car accident during his gap year, and the princes had seen how successful they could be when they worked together. ‘We feel passionately that, working closely together with those who contribute to our foundation, we can help to make a long-lasting and tangible difference,’ said William. The memorial concert for their mother had been a huge success, and in May 2008 they had staged the City Salute, a pageant in the heart of London which raised £1 million for the Headley Court military rehabilitation centre and the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association to support injured servicemen and their families. In July the following year William visited the Lake District to join an expedition up Helvellyn, the third-highest mountain in England, with a group of homeless people. It was a novel way of combining his work with Mountain Rescue and Centrepoint, and it worked. Among those he climbed with was a former homeless eighteen-year-old called Jonny Glendinning. ‘People see him for the fact he’s got nineteen piercings, but he’s nothing like he looks,’ said William. ‘It’s people like that I want to relate to. They have fantastic characters and they just need opportunity and hope and confidence.’

It was an echo of their mother’s empathy and philanthropy, according to Diana’s friend Vivienne Parry.

Although William loves Africa, in terms of charitable work this is very much Harry’s domain, and in March 2009 he made his most political public speech to date on Sentebale’s third anniversary. ‘Prince Seeiso and I founded Sentebale in memory of our mothers. They worked tirelessly to help the deprived and the afflicted and – in our own way – we aspire to follow their great example.’ He called on the British public to help: ‘Unless we help Lesotho … these wonderful people will be decimated and their society destroyed.’ It was an emotive speech and every word was his own. The charity had nearly been forced to close down because of insufficient funds, but was rescued when Lord Ashcroft, one of the Conservative party’s richest benefactors, made a £250,000 donation in 2009. At Harry’s request and to save money, the charity moved into the princes’ private office at St James’s Palace, and Harry speaks to Kedge Martin, the charity’s chief executive, on a daily basis.

Like their mother, who famously said she didn’t want to ‘just be a name on a letterhead’, neither William nor Harry wants to be figureheads. ‘There is a time and a place for being an ornament, or shaking people’s hands and being at an engagement. But I think there’s an awful lot more from actually doing stuff,’ William explained at a press conference at St James’s to discuss the work of the princes’ foundation at its biannual meeting in September 2009. ‘You could just turn up and open things – and don’t get me wrong,
there’s always a good reason to do that – but it’s about bringing some other things into it as well.’ This was why William had chosen to spend his twenty-seventh birthday in June meeting former gangsters in an attempt to understand street culture in Britain and why he spent a night before Christmas sleeping on the streets of London in minus-four-degree tempera tures. ‘I hope that by deepen ing my understanding of the issue I can help do my bit to help the most vulnerable on our streets,’ he said. ‘I cannot after one night even begin to imagine what it must be like to sleep rough on London’s streets night after night.’ According to Vivienne Parry, this was something Diana would have been immensely proud of.

Ironically it is in the company of strangers that William allows his guard to slip. When, as their new patron, he addressed The Child Bereavement Charity in London on Mother’s Day in March 2009, he drew on the most painful experience of his life in order
to connect with ordinary people. ‘Never being able to say the word “mummy” again in your life sounds like a small thing. However for many, including me, it’s now really just a word – hollow and evoking only memories.’