William and Harry (25 page)

While Camilla was said to be tearful over the criticism levelled at her and the invidious position she found herself in, Charles, who can be stubborn especially when it comes to the subject of his late ex-wife, insisted that Sir Michael Peat, his private adviser, continue to brief his press aides that the duchess would attend. William and Harry had invited their stepmother, but as the day drew nearer Camilla found herself under terrible pressure, and she and Charles argued on a daily basis over whether she should attend. It was only two years since Charles and Camilla had married, and the public had by no means embraced their potential future queen. Camilla was still viewed with suspicion and disliked by many, and her public image remained fragile. William and Harry were upset the service was being overshadowed by the controversy and there were fears of a public backlash if the duchess turned up. Eventually the Queen intervened at the eleventh hour and gave Camilla her blessing to stay away. Camilla issued a personal statement: ‘On reflection I believe my attend ance could divert attention from the purpose of the occasion, which is to focus on the life and service of Diana.’

At the service William sat in the front pew next to the Queen, who was dressed in vibrant purple. He had chosen to give a reading from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians; Harry would deliver the eulogy. The boys had asked 500 friends and family, including many members of their mother’s former staff from Kensington Palace. Diana’s chefs Mervyn Wycherly and Chris Barber, who had also attended William’s confirmation, as well as her former secretary Victoria Mendham, were invited. Representatives from the plethora of charities of which Diana was patron also filled
the chapel along with prime ministers past and present and stars from the world of show business. Twelve of Diana’s godchildren, her godparents, and all of her pageboys and bridesmaids were also there. Her former butler Paul Burrell, who had been at the centre of an inquiry into a number of the late princess’s missing personal artefacts, was pointedly not invited, nor was Mohamed Al Fayed. His daughter Camilla, who had shared the boys’ last summer with their mother in St-Tropez, was the only member of the Fayed family at the memorial. William and Harry had personally written to her and asked her to come.

When I interviewed Camilla Fayed much later she said,

Like many of the congregation, Camilla was moved to tears when Harry delivered his eulogy. Wearing his regimental tie, he spoke of his mother’s ‘unrivalled love of life, laughter, fun and folly’. She was, he said, ‘our guardian, friend and protector. She never once allowed her unfaltering love for us to go unspoken or undemonstrated. She will always be remembered for her amazing public work. But behind the media glare, to us, just two loving children, she was quite simply the best mother in the world.’ He added, ‘We would say that, wouldn’t we? But we miss her. Put simply, she made us and so many other people happy. May this be the way she is remembered.’ His lip quivered, but despite the emotion of the moment Harry did not lose his self-control. His heartfelt tribute was as spine-tingling and touching as the solitary card on top of Diana’s coffin, which had borne the single word ‘Mummy’ written in his hand.

When Harry returned to sit down, he walked across the church to the pews where the Spencer family was seated and joined them. It was the first time the two families had been together since Diana’s funeral, at which Earl Spencer had given his heartfelt but bitter eulogy in which he claimed Diana ‘needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic’. His defence of his sister, while applauded by the nation was seen as a thinly veiled attack on the Windsors, and the families had not spoken since. Many wounds were healed that day.

It was half past eleven on Friday 9 November 2007 when the promoter of the Amika nightclub received a call on his mobile from a rather refreshed-sounding Prince Harry. ‘We’ve just finished dinner. We want to come and party! We’re on our way down now.’ The newly refurbished nightclub was located on Kensington High Street in west London and had a VIP room that could only be accessed using a special swipe card. Harry, who was stationed just twenty miles away at Windsor, had become a regular at the club, which was popular with the well-heeled Chelsea crowd who could afford the fifteen-pound cocktails.

There was no chance of a repeat of the Boujis episode when Harry had lunged at a photographer: the prince was driven into a private car park beneath the club and whisked into the venue through labyrinthine corridors without the paparazzi even knowing he was there. He always shunned the VIP room, which came complete with its own team of staff, a vintage champagne bar and extravagant velvet wallpaper. Instead he preferred to sit
at a booth in the corner of the club’s main room, where he had a perfect view of the stage on which half-naked dancers performed in a cage. Anyone else would have to spend a minimum of £1,500 for the privilege of sitting at this, the best table in the club, but the bill was always waived for Harry.

He walked into the club, his baseball cap pulled low over his face, collapsed into the deep black leather seat and reached for the magnum of vodka already on ice. Several jugs of mixers had also been arranged on the table, but Harry was not interested in watering-down his drinks. He called over the waitress and asked for half a dozen shot glasses. It had already been decided who would be waiting on Harry and his group of friends that night, and as the gorgeous Trinidad-born Christiane made her way over to the table, Harry stood up to greet her.

On the last occasion he had dropped in with Chelsy, who had come to London for a break from Leeds University, where she had started a postgraduate course in law in September. Clearly happy to be reunited, the couple celebrated with two magnums of Möet et Chandon and sneaked off to share cigarettes in the corridor leading to the car park, another privilege reserved solely for them. At the end of the night Harry had laughingly tried to pay the £2,000 bill with his army identity card only to be informed that the drinks were on the house. So too were the magnums of vodka slipped into the boot of the protection officers’ Range Rover courtesy of the bar manager because the drinks fridge at Clarence House had, according to Harry, run dry.

On this occasion he was not with Chelsy but his friend Arthur Landon, the youngest man on the
Sunday Times
Rich List, and Arthur’s make-up artist girlfriend Charlotte Cowen. Harry was
uncharacteristically subdued and sat in the corner, uninterested in the elegant girls circling his table hopefully. It was only when Christiane sat down to chat with him that Harry perked up. He had known her from Boujis, where she used to wait on the VIP tables, and they got along well. Having secured her telephone number Harry had spent the past fortnight texting her, and the rumour among his friends was that she had recently accompanied the prince home to Clarence House. News of their friendship had even reached Christiane’s home town in Trinidad where her family and friends were devouring every detail of the burgeoning romance, even though Christiane loyally refused to discuss the relationship. ‘Trinidad society is abuzz with some girl who has been seeing Prince Harry,’ I was informed. It had not taken long for the news to travel halfway across the globe. Chelsy was furious and told Harry the relationship was over. It was not just his wandering eye; she was desperately homesick and miserable in Leeds. Things had got off to an inauspicious start in September, when Harry had kept her waiting at Heathrow airport for close to an hour after she landed. When he eventually arrived looking like he had just rolled out of bed, he swore furiously at the photographers who had gathered en masse in the terminal.

Just ten minutes away, Chelsy was hosting her own party at the trendy members-only Cuckoo Club in London’s West End. Dressed in a tight-fitting minidress, she was surrounded by her close group of girlfriends, including her best friend Olivia Perry, known to everyone as ‘Bubble’. As Chelsy leaned in and told them the news, the girls, champagne glasses in hand, were on the edge of their seats. ‘It’s over,’ Chelsy told them dramatically before draining her flute. ‘He doesn’t make enough effort, and
I need to be my own person. I don’t even know if I can trust him any more.’ As Bubble put a comforting arm around her, the others nodded their agreement that she had made the right decision. Harry was crazy to let her go, but Chelsy had already planned to go back to Africa for the Christmas holidays, where she planned a girls’ holiday to Kenya.

As far as she was concerned, she had sacrificed her family and a life that she loved to move to Leeds, which was grey, drizzly and miserable. It was unacceptable, she complained, that Harry had only been to visit her once that term. The town, which boasts a lively nightlife, had been Harry’s suggestion, but the glamorous picture he had painted of the northern town was not quite the reality. Chelsy was living in a shabby part of the city, and the terraced house, where her small ground-floor flat looked onto a rubbish-strewn front yard, was a world away from her £350,000 glass-fronted beach house back in Cape Town. Harry’s protection officers had voiced concerns about the Leeds property being so exposed, but Chelsy had insisted on ‘living like a student’. It meant the pair had had to meet up at a friend’s house when Harry did visit.

It was far from ideal, and Harry, she noted, had also changed. He had missed her twenty-second birthday that October. Instead he flew to Paris to watch England play South Africa in the rugby World Cup, which he celebrated with a marathon drinking session. It had been a different story the previous year, when Harry had secretly flown to Cape Town to celebrate Chelsy’s twenty-first birthday. The theme for the night had been the Roaring Twenties, and halfway through the evening Harry had taken off his shirt to reveal a white T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘Stylin’ (on to a good thing) hands off!’ It was a clear sign to
anyone remotely interested in Chelsy that she was Harry’s girl.

Ironically, now they were living in the same country, the relationship was beginning to suffer. Chelsy felt taken for granted and was lonely in Leeds. Although she had never been close to Kate Middleton, she was the only person who could understand the pressures of dating a prince. It was after all only a matter of months since Kate had been in exactly the same position. As with so many things, William and Harry’s love lives seemed to mirror one another. Leave him to get it out of his system, Kate counselled. Boys will be boys, and if he’s flirting, turn a blind eye. He loves you and will come back to you. Kate may well have been right, but her advice fell on deaf ears. Chelsy was not prepared to be made a fool of. Back in South Africa she had always been the prettiest girl in her glamorous and wealthy clique. She was never short of male attention, and Harry worried particularly about an old friend from Zimbabwe, Bradley Kirkland. Known to his friends as ‘Jabu’, he was close to Chelsy, and although they had never been romantically linked, Harry, who had heard that Jabu had once referred to him as a ‘wet fish’, felt threatened by the handsome student who hunted crocodiles as a hobby.

In truth Harry had nothing to worry about. Chelsy adored him. She had been saving herself for someone special, and Harry was her first love. This was just a blip – one of many break-ups – and within weeks they were back together. This time, however, their reunion was more brief and passionate than hitherto. Harry was being posted to Afghanistan.

It was the moment Harry had been waiting for. He had known ever since his failed deployment to Iraq in the spring that General
Sir Richard Dannatt had made it his personal mission to get him to the front line. Now he had found a way. Only Harry’s family, a handful of senior Ministry of Defence officials and Prime Minister Gordon Brown knew about it, but there were already whispers in the press that Harry could be heading for Afghanistan. Paddy Harverson wrote to news organisations warning them not to publish speculative stories, but General Dannatt knew that if it was to work Fleet Street had to be in on the secret. When Prince Andrew had fought in the Falklands a D notice had been issued. This was a blanket ban on writing about the prince’s mission. It had worked, and there was no reason it shouldn’t with Harry. The prince was not a fan of the British media: they photographed him when he fell over outside nightclubs, and deep down he still held them partly responsible for his mother’s death. This time he had no choice but to trust them. Together with Paddy Harverson, Dannatt held several off-the-record meetings at Clarence House with select members of the press, and it was agreed that there would be a media blackout on the prince’s deployment. Every editor promised not to break the embargo until Harry was safely home on British soil. There had to be a pay-off, however. In return for their cooperation, they wanted an interview before he left, and access to Harry when he was in the field and after he was back home. Harry agreed.