So much of it went back to the 1997 death of Diana, of course.
‘I can safely say,’ he admitted, ‘that losing my mum at the age of twelve, and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last twenty years, has had quite a serious effect on not only my personal life but my work as well. I thought that thinking of her was only going to make me sad and not going to bring her back. So from an emotional side, I was, like, Right, don’t ever let your emotions be part of anything.’
Harry confessed that he had been ‘sticking my head in the sand, refusing to ever think about my mum because why would that help? … I was the typical 20-, 25-, 28-year-old going around going “Life is great. Life is fine.”’
Which helped to explain the difficulties that he had been experiencing with girlfriends …
Prince Harry was famous – notorious some might say – for his array of glamorous female companions. You can find entire websites devoted to the subject, complete with exotic photographs and details of assignations. But in the B.M. (Before Meghan) years, just two young women really made an impact – Chelsy Davy and Cressida Bonas. Both were strong, stand-up characters of substance and style who stood by their man when the going got tough, but in the end they both fell by the wayside.
Chelsy Davy was a bright and bouncy white Zimbabwean lawyer and businesswoman whom Harry had met in his school days. Chelsy had been at Stowe School where her friends knew Eton boys and introduced her to the prince – it was the start of an on-off relationship that would last more than half a dozen years.
‘I would love to tell everyone how amazing she is,’ Harry said in his twenty-first birthday interview in 2005. ‘But once I start talking about that, I have left myself open.’
Earlier that year, Chelsy had broken off from her studies in Cape Town and had flown back to England expressly to support Harry in the aftermath of his swastika armband disaster. She was a true friend – funny and tough, with the ability to laugh her boyfriend out of his insecurities. Initially she had been willing to tolerate the downsides of a royal relationship which even followed her home to South Africa, where photographers would put tracking devices on her car, and she appears to have accepted the reality that while she was away her prince might seek other companions.
In April 2006 Chelsy was at Sandhurst to celebrate Harry’s graduation as a second lieutenant, dancing passionately with him at the ball that night, wearing a much-remarked-upon backless turquoise satin dress. Dancing beside them that evening was William with his St Andrews girlfriend Kate Middleton – but while Kate would last out the bumpy royal marriage course, Chelsy would not. In 2011, after more comings and goings, she finally decided to go – and it was, ironically, Kate and William’s grand and glorious wedding that spring that did it for her. According to a friend, she told Harry that she could never make the sacrifices she had witnessed Kate making, particularly when it came to moulding her life around the unremitting attention of the press.
‘It was so full on – crazy and scary and uncomfortable,’ she told The Times later.
That was the very same verdict arrived at by serious girlfriend number two, Winchester-born Cressida Bonas, another intelligent and enterprising blonde (also educated for a spell at Stowe) who dated Harry from 2012 until 2014. A rising actress, Cressida did not enjoy the critical remarks that she could hear people making behind her back when she walked down the street in London – she felt that the fame of her relationship with Harry had put her ‘in a box’. In 2014 she was said to have been ‘completely spooked’ after watching the TV coverage of William and Kate touring New Zealand and Australia with baby George in tow – that was not the way she would want to enjoy her eight-month-old son, she regretfully explained to Harry.
Both women blamed the royal system for their eventual disenchantment and disengagement. They did not – politely – suggest any dissatisfaction with Harry himself nor his fondness for strip billiards parties and casual dalliances with the ladies who tended to present themselves along the royal way.
But Cressida did complain to friends about Harry’s neurosis concerning the media. He would rant and complain about paparazzi lurking where clearly there were none. The prince, she came to feel, was a damaged and self-obsessed young man, and in 2017 when he announced his engagement to Meghan, Cressida posted a cryptic quotation that can be read on her Instagram page to this day: ‘No matter how educated, talented, rich or cool you believe you are, how you treat people ultimately tells it all.’
These stand as damning words if they were a verdict on Harry personally. They were certainly no ringing endorsement of a boyfriend of two years’ standing.
As Prince Harry entered his thirties, Diana and Charles’s second-born could pride himself on much. His Sentebale charity in Lesotho was going from strength to strength, and in September 2014 his Invictus Games – the Olympics for injured veterans that he had both inspired and helped to organise in London – had proved a stunning success. ‘Invictus’ is the Latin for ‘unconquered’ or ‘undefeated’ – and the younger brother could surely claim to be that. His personal therapy was working.
But Prince Harry was also preparing to leave the army because he felt that his military career had nowhere to go. He had lost his position as number-one companion and counsellor to his elder brother. Kate had – quite rightly – taken over that function for William, and she was also accompanying her husband in a new direction: towards his role as senior heir and king. The 2013 birth of their son Prince
