This was the role that all of us shaped for Prince Harry over the years every time that we scoffed at a newspaper picture of him playing the court jester – and thus encouraged the papers to print still more. Harry’s departure from Britain in March 2020 has become known as ‘Megxit’ and his relationship with Meghan Markle undoubtedly played a role in that decision – we will be looking into all of that very closely. But Meghan was not the original factor in Prince Harry’s decision to get shot of his family – he already had very solid reasons to get shot of the rest of us with our patronising laughter.
In January 2005, following the ‘Colonials and Natives’ costume fiasco, we now know that the prince was drawn to re-evaluate his elder brother’s involvement and the unfairness of William’s subsequent emergence smelling of roses. It made Harry feel alienated. Friends recall ‘no-speaks’ and quite a serious rift between the two brothers at the time – as there had been after the ‘Drugs Shame’ of 2002, when Harry had first started to realise the price of playing the functional scapegoat. On that occasion he – and Guy Pelly – had shouldered all the blame for the wild antics of the Rattlebone crowd, when the real Rattlebone ringleader had been William.
‘For the first time their relationship really suffered, and they barely spoke,’ said one former aide, speaking to Katie Nicholl. ‘Harry resented the fact that William got away so lightly.’
William himself felt guilty, confiding in his St Andrews tutor, John Walden, that he was ‘having a bit of a crisis’. But the ability and the willingness of the brothers to keep talking to each other at this age helped them both to move on – and while William had his geography exams to worry about, Harry had Sandhurst.
That summer of 2005 saw the perpetual ‘spare’ setting off to the Royal Military Academy to start his officer training. On arrival, along with every other cadet, Harry had his head completely shaved and was assigned a room not much larger or different in character than a prison cell. He was given his own iron and ironing board, which he had never used before – and he later admitted that Sandhurst was the first time in his life that he wielded a lavatory brush.
At 5 a.m. every morning the prince would jump out of bed with his fellow cadets, all brushing their teeth and tidying up around themselves, folding their shirts and jumpers into perfect A4 rectangles. Socks had to be rolled into special balls that made them look like smiley faces, and clothes were organised in their wardrobes by colour. By 6 a.m. Cadet Wales and his fellows had to gather in the corridor outside their room to sing the national anthem – no jokes now about God saving Granny.
The young man revelled in all this – in living a life just like everyone else’s.
‘I wasn’t a prince,’ he said. ‘I was just Harry.’
He was plain Officer Cadet Wales – with no bowing or scraping. For these forty-four weeks of obeying orders without argument and getting bossed around, Harry could take a few steps towards being ordinary and learning how the real world worked.
‘If you want to be a success you have to be a team player,’ he later told Angela Levin. ‘You get taught in the army that you can’t get anywhere without the support of other people. I agree.’
On 12 April 2006 the twenty-one-year-old prince marched stoutly in the Sandhurst passing-out parade, now Second Lieutenant Wales in the Household Cavalry, Blues and Royals. For the first time in fifteen years the Queen had come to take the Sovereign’s Parade in person, since not only was Harry graduating, William had joined Sandhurst a few months earlier as a regular cadet – which meant that he actually had to defer to his younger brother.
‘He is determined not to salute me,’ said Harry. ‘But it is the army and you have got to do things.’
The next step for most of Harry’s fellow graduates involved service in the Iraq war, and Harry was intent on joining them.
‘There’s no way I’m going to put myself through Sandhurst,’ he said, ‘and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country.’
Harry joined the Household Cavalry training course for Iraq with a group of Blues and Royals, but the news of his plans soon found its way into the newspapers – drawing an almost instant response from the battlefield.
‘We are awaiting the arrival of the young, handsome, spoiled prince with bated breath,’ declared Abu Zaid, commander of the Malik Ibn Al-Ashtar Brigade. ‘He will return to his grandmother – but without ears.’
The Shia leader boasted that his spies would have no trouble locating the prince within weeks of his arrival, and General Sir Richard Dannatt, chief of the general staff, regretfully agreed. The threat could not be ignored, and on 16 May 2007, just days before his departure for Iraq, Harry was informed that his deployment had been cancelled. When the news became public, many felt relieved, but other voices complained that all the prince’s training had been a ‘waste of public money’.
The young man was understandably depressed. ‘If I’m going to cause this much chaos to people,’ he said, ‘then maybe I should just, well, bow out and not just for my own sake, for everyone else’s sake.’
‘It was a very low point in [Harry’s] life,’ recalled a colleague at the time, ‘because he felt as though everything he’d trained for had been a waste of time.’
Richard Dannatt let it be known to the Queen that he would manage it better next time, liaising with Major Tom Archer-Burton who had become
