Diana had badly overplayed her hand. In doing so, she had lost the sympathy of her most loyal supporters, had alienated the entire Royal Family with the exception of her two children, had also antagonised the Establishment, and found herself so bereft of supporters that she was cold-shouldered in all but her most intimate environments. Thereafter, she would have to play a serious game of catch-up to re-establish herself as a respected and respectable public figure, and by the time of her death had only partially succeeded in retrieving her position. Although the genuine tragedy of her unfortunate end wiped the slate clean, this also provided a whole new host of complications for her children, in particular her younger son.
How much of their mother’s antics Harry and William were aware of as the divorce loomed, is a moot point. It is likely, off Harry’s subsequent statements, that he has never delved deeply into the twists and turns of his parents’ relationship, or of the tenuous nature of many of his mother’s statements and positions.
What is certain, however, is that both Harry and William remained devoted to Tiggy. Indeed, in 1996 William refused to have either of his parents at the Eton Fourth of June celebrations, inviting Tiggy instead. And when Diana died, Tiggy immediately flew to Balmoral to be with the boys. Harry did not leave her side until he left the castle, and, according to Liz Anson, ‘The boys were always welcome at her house in Norfolk. They loved being with Tiggy’s entire family. There were a lot of weekends when the boys were at a loose end after Diana died. They got bored with being at Highgrove and it had a lot of memories of Mummy.’
Harry’s half-term holidays in October 1997 coincided with Prince Charles’s scheduled trip to South Africa. This was only six weeks after Diana’s death, so he decided to take Harry along with a school friend, Charlie Henderson, and Tiggy. This was an inspired choice. Not only was Harry distracted, but he was being introduced to an entirely new world: one which would hook and inspire him in equal measure. He met President Nelson Mandela and various tribal chiefs and elders, went on his first Safari, saw the Spice Girls, and was given a vivid description of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, in which the Prince Imperial, heir to the Emperor Napoleon III, died.
In 1999, Tiggy married Charles Pettifer. She stepped down from her role of Gouverneuse but not from the continuing friendship with William and Harry, both of whom went to her wedding. She, of course, attended theirs, and has remained a close friend of the family. She also attended the Sovereign’s Parade at Sandhurst in April 2006 for Harry’s passing out as an officer in the Blues and Royals, the prestigious Household Cavalry regiment of which the Queen is Colonel-in-Chief and Princess Anne is Colonel.
By this time, Harry was well on the way to finding himself. His teenage had been something of a wasteland. The loss of his mother had caused him to shut down emotionally, although it is arguable he would ever have grown up without some emotional baggage, considering his parents’ troubled marriage and his mother’s ever-shifting perspectives as well as the way she spoilt him. He had also inherited her unacademic but highly emotional tendencies. This legacy caused him as much conflict as Diana’s own unresolved issues arising out of her parents’ divorce had caused her. Like his mother, Harry grew into a sometimes volatile, unpredictable, antagonistic, aggressive, but also charming, endearing, and energetic personality. When The News of the World published a lurid account of his drug-taking and underage drinking at Club H, the black-walled nightclub Charles had allowed the boys to install at Highgrove, and of his incursions to a nearby pub, The Rattlebone Inn, the Prince of Wales responded wisely. He sent him to Featherstone Lodge, a drug rehabilitation clinic in the then-unfashionable district of Peckham, south-east London, where he sat in on therapy sessions with addicts and learnt that many of the former heroin addicts had started out on cannabis. Harry was accompanied by Mark Dyer, a former Welsh Guards officer whom Charles had appointed as equerry in 1997 and who had accompanied Harry to South Africa, acting as Tiggy’s male counterpart. By this time, Marko, as Harry called Dyer, had become something of a male role model for him, and though Harry was hardly teetotal after this episode, it was enough of an eye-opener for him to avoid surrendering entirely to the lure of drugs.
Instead, he surrendered to the embrace of the Army. ‘Since I was a kid, I enjoyed wearing the combats, running around with a rifle, jumping in a ditch, and living in the rain and stuff,’ Harry said. He intended to enter The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst to train as an officer in the Army, but first he headed for Australia in September 2003 for the first leg of his gap year. This was at the behest of his father, who had himself spent a year at the Timbertop campus of the Geelong Grammar School in the south-eastern state of Victoria while he was a teenager. Harry had actually proposed spending his time playing polo in Argentina and skiing in Klosters, but Charles, mindful of the dangers of too much partying, had insisted that Harry follow the example of William, who had gone to Belize and Chile, where he did humanitarian work for the sustainable development charity Raleigh International. Charles therefore organised for Harry to work as a jackeroo at Tooloombilla, a 400,000 acre sheep station in Queensland, after which he would go to Lesotho, to work with children in emulation of his mother.
The Australian part of the gap year was not altogether successful. Although
