‘Harry the Nazi’ read the headline – ‘Prince’s Swastika Outfit at Party’.
Just about a year after this, by then a cadet training at Sandhurst, the twenty-one-year-old would generate another set of similar headlines. Delayed and bored in an RAF departure lounge while awaiting his flight home from a military exercise in Cyprus, Harry got hold of a video camera and panned it around the sleeping faces of his fellow officer cadets.
‘Ah,’ he could be heard to say quietly, homing in on one fellow Sandhurst comrade, ‘our little Paki friend Ahmed!’
If this remark was overheard by Cadet Ahmed Raza Khan, who would later be awarded the Best Overseas Cadet prize at Sandhurst as the prelude to a distinguished career in the Pakistani army, he did not react at the time.
And that was not all … In another sequence filmed at night, Harry greeted a fellow cadet who was wearing a camouflage hood with the salutation, ‘Fuck me, you look like a raghead!’ – ‘raghead’ being army slang for Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, as St James’s Palace had to explain with some embarrassment when the videos became public.
‘All is good in the empire,’ Harry was heard to comment, chuckling, on several occasions, as film shot by some other cadet showed the prince kissing a comrade and asking another whether he felt ‘gay’, ‘queer’, or ‘on the side’.
Harry then conducted a mock military briefing, dressed in combat gear, cigarette in hand, pretending to finish off a mobile phone call to his famous grandmother before he started. ‘I’ve got to go, got to go!’ he said. ‘Send my love to the corgis and Grandpa … God Save You!’
At the end of the briefing, he asked his colleagues if they had any questions, to which one responded, ‘Are your pubes ginger too?’
‘Yes,’ replied the prince laughing. ‘They are!’
The national response to both these cringeworthy episodes when they hit the media in 2005 and 2009 was predictably one of outrage, led in January 2005 by the Israeli foreign minister and numerous Jewish organisations. They were understandably incensed by the unthinking crassness of the prince’s behaviour just two weeks before Holocaust Memorial Day. On 27 January Harry’s uncle, Prince Edward, was due in Auschwitz to represent the Queen at a ceremony marking the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the death camp.
‘I’m very sorry,’ said Harry in a statement released immediately, ‘if I caused any offence or embarrassment to anyone. It was a poor choice of costume and I apologise.’
‘A poor choice of costume’? Viewed from 2020, the prince’s apology could surely have displayed more understanding on his part of his disastrous frivolity and ignorance.
But there was an element of ritual to this public outrage too. Harry’s behaviour was deemed ‘totally unacceptable’. Everybody had to have their say – the leader of the Tory Party, the statutory anti-crown left-wing MP, a former armed forces minister, plus the inevitable ‘royal expert’ filmed outside some palace or other, a royal ‘talking head’ – among whom was this author at the time, not striking a very sympathetic tone, as I recall. All of us were eager for our forty-five seconds of indignation and screen time – and all of us were missing the point entirely.
Was Harry really a neo-Nazi, as one Labour MP alleged? Obviously not, since he would fall in love with and marry a woman of mixed-race origin, and it is difficult to imagine that anyone really believed it at the time. The boy was naughty, not Nazi – naughty, but nice – as Harry’s Sandhurst comrade, the now wide-awake Ahmed Raza Khan, wasted no time in telling the Sun: ‘We were close friends when we were training,’ he said, ‘and I know he is not a racist … [He] called me by a nickname which is usually very insulting, but I know he didn’t mean it that way.’
By 2009, when the controversy was raging, Harry and Khan had both long departed Sandhurst and, by that date, had also seen active service in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban. They had both killed and had risked being killed, and they discussed their experiences together when Harry rang his friend to apologise.
‘Forget about it,’ said Raza Khan.
Yes, indeed. But let us not forget the main point. Foolish and thoughtless though Harry may have been at the age of twenty-one and twenty-two, he was the victim of a national process that has to be seen as a mutual popular conspiracy. The young man had been typecast – he had been ‘categorised’.
November 2016: Prince Harry complains at press ‘abuse and harassment’ of Meghan Markle and her mother Doria
In 2006 there were dozens of other young men going to Sandhurst who talked about ‘Pakis’ and ‘ragheads’. We know that from all the giggling on the video by his fellow cadets – who today are senior officers in our upstanding British army. Some of this future military elite might even have been willing to dress up in Afrika Korps uniform for a laugh – and we certainly know that when Harry turned up at the home of Richard Meade in January 2005, there were several hundred posh and horsey folk who smiled and nudged at the young prince’s costume complicitly. There is no record of any of them dashing their champagne glass to the ground with a cry of ‘totally unacceptable!’
Most clearly of all, we know that Harry chose his costume in conjunction with his elder brother the future King William V, who laughed all the way back to Highgrove with the younger sibling he was supposed to be mentoring – and then onwards to the party together. But did a single newspaper or Sunday morning commentator remark on Prince William’s role in the debacle?
We are back again to the personal, social and national stereotyping that we noted at the time of ‘Harry’s Drugs Shame’ in 2002. It was the function of the elder brother to be perfect, whether he truly was
