Some sort of eavesdropping or phone-hacking seemed to be the only, if scarcely believable, explanation. So William’s office contacted the police, and eight months of inquiries would lead to the arrest of a freelance private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, along with Clive Goodman, the News of the World’s royal editor. Both men pleaded guilty to illegally intercepting phone messages, for which they were respectively sentenced in January 2007 to six months and four months in jail. The police eventually presented evidence that, in the course of this intrusion, Prince Harry had been hacked 9 times, Prince William 35 times, while Kate Middleton – beginning in December 2005, soon after she had left St Andrews when she was just starting work – had had her phone hacked on no fewer than 155 occasions.
These extraordinary figures came out of a later trial resulting from the discovery that the News of the World had been phone-hacking far beyond the royal family, including numerous celebrities (Elton John, Uri Geller, Hugh Grant, Elizabeth Hurley, Jude Law, Heather Mills) and the voicemail of missing British teenager Milly Dowler who was later found murdered. The deletions of Milly’s voicemails in 2002 – when Rebekah Wade was editing the paper – had resulted in the missing girl’s parents being led to believe that their daughter was still alive.
Such was the public outrage at these revelations that in 2011 Prime Minister David Cameron announced a wide-ranging inquiry into the British media, and shame-faced proprietor Rupert Murdoch felt compelled to shut down the News of the World. The disgraced newspaper ceased publication on 10 July, after nearly nine thousand issues spanning 168 years, printing a full-page apology for its involvement in the hacking scandal.
This destruction of the detested ‘News of the Screws’ came just ten weeks after William and Kate’s marriage of April 2011, and it provided William, in particular, with the sweetest wedding present of all. Finally he and Harry (and Kate too) had secured some sort of revenge over the hated media rat pack that had killed their mother and made their own lives such a misery for so many years – with the particular piquancy that this involved the humiliation of the very newspaper that had gloried in ‘Harry’s Drugs Shame’.
This had all stemmed from William inviting his mate Bradby for a beer, and it cemented the friendship and position of the newsman in his life, and in Harry’s too. It would be in the course of a Tom Bradby interview in 2019 that Harry would reveal that the two brothers found themselves on different paths – and the Bradby–brothers’ relationship remains significant to this day.
In 2020 Tom Bradby must be considered one of Britain’s foremost newscasters. The BBC has its traditional sit-up-straight news ‘readers’ who deliver the script that has been written for them in the same fashion that the Beeb has been nattering out the news to the nation for nearly a century now. ITN, or Independent Television News, on the other hand, has, since its debut in 1955, prided itself on giving its newscasters (news-broadcasters) the right – and the licence – to present analysis and informed opinion in their own conversational style.
Bradby is the master of this, which gives his presentation of royal news a particular edge. He is getting it from the horse’s mouth – and it shows. If you want to know what Prince William really thinks about his Uncle Andrew, for example, you have only to watch newscaster Bradby scornfully tearing into the Duke of York’s antics and ‘apologies’ with regard to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein on ITV’s News at Ten. The prince who was the victim of the press for so many years has found his own way of fighting back.
19
Line of Duty
‘There’s no way I’m going to put myself through Sandhurst, and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country.’
(Prince Harry, September 2005)
Boujis, Mahiki, Club H – there was seldom a shortage of venues for the perpetually partying princes. And then, in January 2005, along came ‘Colonials and Natives’, the theme of a fancy dress celebration planned for the twenty-second birthday of their friend Harry Meade – son of Princess Anne’s one-time boyfriend Richard Meade, the Olympic gold medallist event rider.
Guy Pelly said he would accompany the boys down to Maud’s Cotswold Costumes to select their outfits. Guy himself rather fancied going as the Queen – ‘My husband and I take great pleasure in each other …’ After a few drinks, Guy could do a very good Queen Elizabeth II.
But was Granny a colonial or a native? Looking through the available garments on Maud’s rails it was difficult to pick out costumes that really fitted the declared – and mildly dodgy – theme of the party. In the end William opted to go as a lion – or was it a leopard? – with tight black leggings and furry paws. As for Harry, he chose a khaki-coloured uniform that, he later explained, he selected for the sandiness of the shirt: he thought it complemented his colouring. The trouble was that the shirt’s left sleeve was encircled by a bright red and white armband bearing a stark, black Nazi swastika.
The rest, sadly, is history. If there was one incident in the youth of Prince Harry that would be taken to represent his wild, foolish and totally unjudged side, it was that Nazi costume. A sneaky fellow guest used their mobile phone to snap a photograph of the prince, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, and a few days later, there was Harry parading on the front page of the Sun of 13
