By this time, everyone understood that Harry truly felt for those less fortunate than himself. He had been a patron since its inception of Walking With The Wounded, founded in 2010, had walked to the Arctic on their behalf in 2011, and would walk to the South Pole in 2015. He also beat the drum for Sentebale, putting both the charity and its country on the map in a way no one and nothing ever had done before. His sense of humour also garnered him many admirers, such as the time in 2012, when, on an official visit to Jamaica, he ‘beat’ the fastest man on earth, Usain Bolt, by out and out cheating, running to the finish line before the race had begun. When Bolt then did his characteristic Lightning Bolt movement, Harry was right there beside him, doing it as well. ‘The Jamaicans loved him,’ the Jamaican High Commissioner told me. ‘They couldn’t get enough of him. He was just such a delight.’
In March 2015, the palace announced that Harry would leave the Army in June. The constraints he had had to endure would help in his personal life, should he find himself a girlfriend or wife. Whether the lack of structure he would have to cope with in civilian life would be beneficial to him personally, was another matter. All his life Harry had needed to be kept occupied. He had flourished in the Army, because he was the sort of personality which needed structure to bring out the best in him. Even as a little boy, he used to beg Ken Wharfe to give him assignments. He had leadership ability of the median rank, was also good at taking orders, had energy and courage, and he loved being surrounded by the men and mucking in with them. He was the perfect Army man, but he did not possess the inner spark or self-discipline that enables people to flourish in an unstructured environment.
To further complicate matters, Harry was headstrong and had been brought up by Diana and, to a lesser extent his father, to overestimate his importance in the scheme of things. He was a second son, whose role could never be as well delineated as his elder brother’s, and, with the passage of time, that role would become of increasingly less consequence constitutionally. It was inevitable that he would suffer the fate of Prince Andrew, who had started out as second in line to the throne and found himself being pushed further and further down the table of succession with the birth of each child who supplanted him. There were doubts that Harry had the internal resources to realise his full potential without the clear boundaries that an institution like the Army provided, but the enthusiasm with which he embraced royal projects in civilian life heartened observers. Maybe he did have what it took to become a successful civilian prince after all.
In contrast to his public life, privately Harry struggled to find a girl who wanted to take him on full time. No one wanted the job. Although he was a nice enough guy, and undoubtedly physically appealing, with the robust athleticism of a fit soldier, he had emotional problems. He was often unjustifiably angry. I know of one instance when he tried to attack a contemporary of his father’s for no reason at all. He was dragged off by his protection officers and is only lucky that nothing was made of the incident. He could be churlish and placed many demands on those closest to him. He could be overly clingy while being out of touch with his emotions. He seemed to believe that his troubles all stemmed from his mother’s death, but people who knew the family well, disagreed. Relations of his tell me that he was always going to be trouble, ‘Because Diana simply refused to provide consequences.’ Patrick Jephson, her Private Secretary, bore this out when he recounted the three year old Harry deliberately riding his tricycle at full speed into the shins of a senior cavalry officer who had come to pay his Colonel-in-Chief an official call. Although Diana scolded him, she did not punish him, and Harry rode off without contrition or consequences.
Such a joke did Harry’s quest for a girlfriend become that his sister-in-law Catherine even gave him a Grow-Your-Own-Girlfriend kit in 2016. It was no secret in aristocratic circles that he desperately wanted to marry and start his own family. Unlike many men, who want to sow their wild oats and will flit from woman to woman with no thought of emotional involvement, Harry had an almost feminine attitude to relationships. They were more about love than sex. And while he could get sex easily, lasting love had proven so far to be depressingly elusive.
Indeed, Harry’s quest for love had become almost pathetic. He would ask friends to set him up with girls who were well bred and attractive, and, to ensure that they wanted him for himself and not for his name and rank - the very things, ironically, that turned off most well-bred girls - he would pretend to be someone else. He did this with a friend of my children’s, Baroness Jessica Heydel, who found the whole experience so bizarre and discomfiting that she was hamstrung into stupefaction. How does one of the most famous men in the country expect a well-educated, well-bred, intelligent girl to react when he tries
