On regular Sundays the brothers would take the walk down the High Street and across the bridge to lunch or tea with their grandparents, and many of their weekends would be planned around activities with Tiggy or Mark Dyer – or simply chilling out at Highgrove, which had become the brothers’ full-time home base. For security reasons Prince Charles had had a bombproof shelter constructed in the cellar, and for teenage-amusement reasons he allowed his two sons to adapt it into a disco-rumpus room – ‘Club H’, a black-painted dungeon-discothèque scattered with scruffy Manor House-style sofas, where Harry and William could entertain their school friends on holidays and at weekends. Club H featured a well-stocked bar – here was the first temptation for the young Harry – along with a state-of-the-art sound system that made every floor of the two-hundred-year-old building quiver.
Club H turned Highgrove into quite the hot spot when Dad happened to be away – which was an ever more frequent occurrence. What with the prince’s busy workload as heir, his extracurricular campaigning for good causes like ecology and his personal extracurricular activities with Camilla whom he could not yet bring ‘home’, Charles had not lived up to his promise to be a full-time hands-on father. In his absence, William ‘relaxed’ as intensively as Harry did – in fact, the sixteen-year-old was already a steady drinker. Club H had been very much the elder brother’s inspiration, with Wills’ older friends largely setting the social pace for Harry. And if Prince Charles did happen to be at home, the two brothers and their friends could all pile out together to the Rattlebone Inn in the village of Sherston five miles away.
It was illegal in British pubs then, as now, to sell alcohol to anyone below the age of eighteen, but in those years the landlord of the Rattlebone turned a blind eye to underage drinking – and the inn also allowed its young royal patrons to engage in after-hours ‘lock-ins’, where, it would emerge, cannabis was smoked. The cars of the royal bodyguards waiting outside meant that the local police were hardly likely to stage a raid.
So these were the years, when he was as young as fourteen or fifteen, when Prince Harry started to drink alcohol in serious quantities. He loved to swill it down like his brother, reported friends. And some of the Rattlebone circle also began sampling exotic substances.
At Eton the prince had already earned the nickname of ‘Hash Harry’ on account of the smoky aroma that emanated from his room, and it was not long before these cannabis rumours reached journalists who were rooting around Highgrove for scandal – specifically the Sunday Times and also the News of the World, whose editor Rebekah Wade (later Rebekah Brooks) had mounted an investigation into the young princes’ activities in Gloucestershire.
In 1997 new rules on the reporting of the young royals were being negotiated by Britain’s Press Complaints Commission (PCC). Chastened by the death of Diana, most newspapers had formally agreed that William and Harry would be neither photographed nor reported on – official photo ops aside – as long as they remained in full-time education.
It eventually became clear that the princes’ protection officers knew all about their charges’ after-hours drinking. But they had agreed that their responsibility began and ended with the efficiency of their guarding and protection duties. It was not their job, they felt, to act as surrogate parents nor to exercise moral judgements on William and Harry – though it has never been made clear how serving police officers could have connived in the breaking of the law when it came to after-hours lock-ins and the smoking of illegal drugs. A quiet word of warning in the right ear might have avoided what happened next.
The problem came to a head as early as August 2000 after William, now eighteen, had departed Eton and headed off to Belize for the start of his gap-year adventures. Lonely and left to his own devices, Harry, still only fifteen at that date, began getting stoned to excess, continuing his pot-smoking at Club H and at the Rattlebone throughout William’s absence in 2001, until someone – a member of the Highgrove staff, it is thought – finally took the responsibility of warning Prince Charles what was going on.
The timing of what happened next is confused, but it is known that sometime in June or July 2001 – several weeks before Charles was made aware of his son’s problem in August or September – Mark Dyer had escorted Harry on a low-key educational visit to the Featherstone Lodge rehabilitation centre in Peckham, south London. There the prince had spent a couple of hours talking to a number of ‘buddies’ – former heroin and cocaine addicts whose tales of their own personal drug disasters were intended ‘to teach Prince Harry about our work’, according to Bill Puddicombe, the head of the organisation that ran the centre. The buddies also briefed their visitor on ‘the consequences of taking drugs’.
But when the News of the World broke the story in January 2002 – ‘Harry’s Drugs Shame’ – it was implied that Prince Charles had organised this rehab visit at a later date specifically as some sort of therapy for Harry’s drug-taking in order to provide his son with what the paper described as a ‘short sharp shock’.
‘This is a serious matter which was resolved within the family. It is now in the past and closed,’ Charles declared in an official statement, with his mother backing him up. ‘The Queen shares the Prince of Wales’s views on the seriousness of Prince Harry’s behaviour and supports the action taken,’ said Buckingham Palace. ‘She hopes the matter can now be considered as closed.’
The Sunday Times and the News of the World had been investigating Harry’s pot-smoking and Rattlebone activities for several months to compile a ‘Gloucestershire dossier’, since the
