Archer-Burton was ‘the only man capable of telling Lieutenant Wales to do press-ups’, in the view of one contemporary Sandhurst witness, ‘or stand on one leg for as long as he feels necessary.’
Major Tom became the supervisor of organising Harry’s next assignment – to Afghanistan. The prince would be the first member of the royal family to serve in a warzone since his Uncle Andrew flew helicopters in 1982 in the Falklands War. As a family man, a philanthropist and a committed Christian, Archer-Burton would also be credited with gently helping move Harry along from costume parties and racial jokes, stimulating the young man to deeper spiritual reflection in his personal life.
Travel plans were discreetly set in motion, and that December 2007 found the prince on active service at last – in Afghanistan. ‘[The Queen] was very pro my going then,’ Harry commented later, ‘so I think she’s relieved that I get the chance to do what I want to do. She’s a very good person to talk to about it. Her knowledge of the army is amazing for a grandmother. I suppose it’s slightly her job.’
That Christmas Elizabeth II bowed her head over the table and led family prayers for Harry as everyone sat down for lunch in Sandringham. Harry himself was eating goat curry at the time, he revealed – and the prayers were needed. Sergeant Tom Pal from an anti-tank platoon, recalled meeting up with Lieutenant Wales shortly afterwards.
‘I was sitting chatting with … Prince Harry about random stuff,’ he said, ‘when the camp was hit by a Chinese 107mm rocket … Whoosh, bang, wallop!’ The rocket struck a ‘breath-stopping’ fifty metres from where the prince and Sergeant Pal were sitting, and they rushed to put on their protective body armour and helmets.
‘At that time of year where we were working, it was pretty mental,’ said Pal. ‘Various checkpoints were getting attacked every single day.’
Harry had been assigned to serve as a forward air controller in some of Afghanistan’s most remote and dangerous areas, responsible for controlling military air movements from the ground and calling in lethal air strikes on Taliban positions – killing the enemy, in other words.
Miguel Head was the defence ministry official in charge of keeping Harry’s presence in Afghanistan out of the newspapers. In 2006 Head had tried and failed to smuggle Prince William out to the war in Iraq, and he was determined to do better with Harry – creating a taskforce of newspaper editors and broadcasters that he later described as ‘the circle of trust … we were very transparent about everything’.
‘Look, this is going to happen,’ Head told the group of media bosses in late 2007, speaking on behalf of Des Browne, the Labour defence minister of the day. ‘We don’t know how it’s going to happen, but we want it to happen … So let’s discuss how it might work for you.’
To start with the BBC caused trouble – news censorship during a major war would be ‘against our editorial guidelines’, it felt. But Head explained that this project was about more than letting one young prince go out to play war games. Harry had trained seriously for several years. He was a professional army officer, and he had the rights of any other citizen and officer to do his national duty – and to set an example to others.
‘The competitive nature of the media,’ recalled Head a dozen years later, meant that none of the editors wanted to be seen as ‘the bad person’. Prince Harry was enormously popular – he was still very young.
‘It had been only ten years since Diana, Princess of Wales had died,’ Head would remember. ‘There was still a very strong sense in the country of the public, in effect, bringing the two young princes into their arms and saying, “We will look after them – and You Press, you had better keep your hands off them! Don’t you dare do to them what you did to their mother.”’
The reporting blackout that was finally agreed on Harry’s Afghanistan activities did not involve lawyers.
‘It was a gentlemen’s agreement,’ said Head. ‘But it was written down on paper. It was codified about who would get access to what’ – along with the details of which reporters and broadcasters would conduct a succession of interviews that would be retained to be broadcast at the end of Harry’s assignment, which in the end would last for just seventy-seven days.
Eleven weeks was less than he had been hoping for, but, when events failed to go according to plan, it was more than might have been feared. After just four weeks, an obscure Australian magazine called New Idea somehow discovered that Prince Harry was on active service with the British army in Afghanistan and, not being part of the UK agreement nor even being aware of the blackout, it posted the story on its website.
‘We saw this in the press office,’ recounted Head, ‘and thought, Oof! This is it! It’s over, four weeks in! It’s done.’
But the defence ministry held its nerve. These were still early days for the Internet, before many publications had started distributing content online, and relatively few people then were looking to the Web as their main source of news. The Sun spotted the story straight away, and it contacted the ministry privately. But the Murdoch tabloid did not want to break the agreement unilaterally.
‘There was still a sense,’ said Head, who shared the problem with the whole of the taskforce, ‘that nobody wanted to be the first to go.’
Miraculously, the blackout held for six more full weeks – until the Drudge Report, an investigative US website that had broken the Monica Lewinsky scandal, stumbled on New Idea and unhesitatingly ran the story on 28 February 2008.
‘It went BOOM! on the website,’ remembered Head – though it was not so much the American muckrakers as their
