Harry (12 page)

All went well at Club H when he and William had Highgrove to themselves but when Prince Charles was in residence he made it clear that the noise emanating from the stereo sound system below stairs was intolerable. A new venue had to be found.

Just six miles from Tetbury lies the Wiltshire village of
Sherston and in its midst sits a particularly attractive Cotswolds pub, the Rattlebone Inn. The sixteenth-century pub is named after eleventh-century Saxon warrior John Rattlebone, whose ghost is said to haunt it, and it had a fine reputation, as indeed it does today having been restored to respectability since what is referred to locally as the Harry episode.

When Harry and his cronies discovered the pub (William was away on his gap year around this time) it was about as decadent as could be. Underage drinking was rife, late-night lock-ins were a regular thing for those who wanted to get drunk after hours, cannabis was openly smoked at the bar and behind a hut at the back of the building a dealer sold cocaine although, by all accounts, the quality of the product was not the best. According to the
News of the World
one of Harry’s acquaintances, 29-year-old John Holland, who was caught in a sting, made it known that in addition to supplying weed he was able get cocaine for £30 a gram but he had to go to Shoreditch in London to get it. Even so, it was half the price charged in the West End.

The centre of entertainment at the Rattlebone was a pool table and it was often the scene of many altercations. Harry was involved in at least one scuffle with two men during a particularly raucous game and he was thrown out after
calling
the pub’s French chef, François Ortet, a ‘fucking frog’. Younger than most of the Rattlebone’s customers, Harry was especially vulnerable but royal protection officers were loath to shop him to his father for fear of losing his all-important trust in them.

Reports at the time suggested that it was the staff at Highgrove who informed Prince Charles of Harry’s
pot-smoking
after they smelled the substance in his room and in the cellar. In fact the truth is far more sinister: unbeknown even to the Prince’s policeman, MI6 had been watching a Pakistani youth who was a regular at the pub and whose mobile phone was being monitored by GCHQ – the
government’s
listening post, located just thirty-five miles from the Rattlebone at Cheltenham – as part of an anti-terrorist operation. The MI6 report to intelligence chiefs included details of what was going on with the third in line to the throne and was secretly conveyed to Charles in much the same way as news of the Duchess of York’s secret flight to Morocco with her then lover Steve Wyatt was leaked from GCHQ to a journalist, effectively putting an end to the Yorks’ marriage.

Whether or not MI6 ever nailed their suspect in Operation Cotswold Pub, no one will say but one thing is for sure – Harry owes a great deal to that watched man; indeed, the surveillance of one Pakistani individual may have saved his life, for when Charles was given the details of the report in which his son was so damningly named, he acted without hesitation. Harry was summoned to his father’s side and asked point blank if he had been taking drugs and mixing in drug-taking company.

Realising the game was up, Harry came clean. Yes, he told his father, he had been smoking cannabis; yes, he had been drinking too much and yes, some of his more unsuitable friends were into heavy drugs (in fact three of the thirty of
those closest to him already had criminal convictions). And yes, again, much of his bad behaviour could be attributed to such indulgences: when, for example, he threw to an aide the skis he was due to return to a hire shop in Klosters, growling, ‘You take them back,’ he was suffering from a particularly punchy hangover. Charles’s belief that Harry’s drinking until he was sick was just a phase he was going through, was shattered in an instant. His distress was clear in a telephone call he then made to his close friend Gerald Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster, who responded by saying that he had frightened his daughters, Lady Tamara and Lady Edwina, off drugs by taking them to a rehab centre in Liverpool to see for themselves the horrors of addiction.

Next Charles had a heart-to-heart with his adolescent son explaining that a fondness for alcohol had long been
something
of a problem in both families. The Queen Mother was known to enjoy her daily tipples, Princess Margaret drank a bottle of whisky a night and four sons of King George V all had alcohol problems – the Duke of Windsor, his brother King George VI and the Dukes of Kent (who was also addicted to cocaine) and Gloucester. Furthermore, both of Diana’s parents were fond of the bottle – Earl Spencer’s fondness for more than the odd dram was cited when he was accused of cruelty during his divorce from Diana’s mother who herself was given a driving ban for driving under the influence – and her sister Sarah was expelled from school for drinking vodka. It was William who heightened the alarm first raised by the MI6 report when he discovered that Harry
had gone out of his way to befriend Camilla’s son Tom Parker Bowles who had been arrested in 1995 for being in possession of marijuana and ecstasy and had admitted using cocaine. The Prince’s erratic behaviour on some occasions suggested that he might have tried mind-altering substances, and more than once Charles had to tell him to calm down when he
inexplicably
went wild – often in front of photographers who were by now ever on the lookout for instances of the young man they now tagged ‘His Royal High-ness’ going crazy. From the smells often thought to be coming from Harry’s room at Eton, he got a different nickname from his fellows: Hash Harry. Certainly there was a culture of joint-smoking behind the college’s hallowed walls at the time so no one could be certain which room the smells of weed being used emerged from, but Harry was high up on the list of suspects.

Something needed to be done: acting on Gerald Grosvenor’s advice, Charles remembered a drink-and-drug rehabilitation centre in south London he had officially opened the
previous
year. He summoned his former equerry Mark Dyer and acquainted him with the situation. Harry should be taken there to see what terrible harm the substances could do – and left there if necessary. He couldn’t take him himself for fear of the publicity such a visit would arouse, but it was no problem for Dyer. One school of thought suggested that Dyer did it on his own initiative without consulting Charles but he would never have done that. Charles was fully informed throughout and was a party to later disclosure of the visit.

In the event it took just a one-day visit to the Featherstone
Lodge rehab in Peckham, one of London’s toughest areas, to convince Harry that he had embarked on the road to hell. His escort, or ‘buddy’ for the day, was a chap of similar age to himself who was addicted to heroin. Initially
embarrassed
to be there at his father’s command and as a potential inmate, and after being shown a room he might one day be required to occupy for an extended period of recovery, Harry sat in on groups where inmates poured out their sorry tales. He met men of his father’s age who had lost everything – homes, wives, children and careers – as a result of
drinking
the way he had started to: a girl from a respectable middle-class family who had turned to prostitution after a cannabis habit had led to harder drugs, a crack addict who collapsed in a West Kensington crack den and was told: ‘Get out, we don’t call ambulances around here, we put bodies on skips.’

A counsellor had relayed to him the Japanese definition of alcoholism: ‘The man takes a drink, the drink takes a drink and the drink takes the man.’ He was told that only he could say whether he had reached the stage of alcoholism or
addiction
which demanded giving in to the craving every time the thought came into his head, but if he had there was no cure, only a treatment and the treatment would involve regular attendance at meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and/or Narcotics Anonymous. When he asked if that would be for the rest of his life, he was given a simple answer: ‘Yes, if you like happy endings.’

There was one moment of laughter when he heard an old
drunk declare: ‘Giving up drink is easy, I’ve done it hundreds of times.’

Despite that moment of light relief, Harry left Featherstone Lodge pale, shaken and clutching a handful of literature about the illness he was showing early signs of suffering from. The realisation that despite his highly privileged background and lifestyle, his fate lay in no one’s hands but his own made tough hearing for a man who was used to being take care of. If he wanted recovery, he had to work for it. If he didn’t want to be sick and put to bed at anyone else’s party, he had to learn to say ‘No’. And above all he had to choose the company he mixed in: ‘stick with the winners’ was to be his new motto.

In the early days those winners were his father and brother. His weekend passes were limited and strictly monitored and that Christmas he was made to spend the entire break in the company of Charles and William. When, during one fireside chat, his father told him of his own teenage drink scandal, it sounded pathetic: Charles had gone into a pub on the Isle of Lewis with four other boys during a sailing trip to Stornoway and ordered a cherry brandy, the only drink he could think of when encouraged by his companions to ‘have something’. How Harry would have sniggered, considering the quantity of hard liquor he was putting away.

When the story broke shortly after Christmas, praise was subsequently poured on Charles for his responsible action in ordering Harry to the rehab, but all was not quite as it seemed. Charles’s media manipulators were subsequently accused of shamelessly using the story of Harry’s disgrace for his father’s
benefit. Charles’s former spin doctor Mark Bolland (Harry named him Lord Blackadder) was obliged to pour cold water on reports that he had leaked the exclusive ‘Harry’s drugs shame’ story to his holidaying friend Rebekah Wade (now Brooks), then editor of Rupert Murdoch’s scandal-obsessed
News of the World,
in order to show Charles as a loving and caring father who would go to any lengths to do the right thing. Privately Charles admitted that his policy of giving advice instead of imposing rules had not worked, that it was far too lenient, but that did little to enhance Bolland’s denial that any such funny business had gone on. In any event, Charles got the praise, the
News of the World
got its scoop (and under the terms of a tight media agreement to leave both young princes alone at this delicate stage in their lives, that could not have happened without royal assent) and Bolland had good reason to resemble the proverbial cat with the cream. A remarkable development followed when the Press Complaints Commission, which had always regarded the protection of children’s privacy as a
priority
, backed the newspaper’s decision to publish the story. Some regarded it as no coincidence that the boss of the industry’s self-regulating body, Guy Black, was Bolland’s live-in partner and the two men had been on holiday with
News of the World
editor Rebekah Wade the previous summer.

Regardless of how the story had been broken, the Queen insisted on a public statement being issued. It read: ‘The Queen shares the Prince of Wales’s views on the seriousness of Prince Harry’s behaviour and supports the action taken. She hopes the matter can now be considered as closed.’ A
spokesman for Charles declared, ‘This is a serious matter which was resolved within the family,’ adding somewhat
optimistically
, ‘It is now in the past and closed.’ Some hope! Tony Blair – whose own son Euan narrowly escaped being arrested for being drunk close to 10 Downing Street – got in on the act too: ‘[The Royal Family] have handled the situation quite properly: they have done it in a very responsible and, as you would expect, a very sensible way for their child.’

Nevertheless the episode was not forgotten at Eton where Harry’s hopes of becoming a prefect, as William had been, were dashed. One teacher says:

There was some saving grace – in his final year he was made house captain of games having excelled in physical sports, particularly swimming and athletics.

As for the Rattlebone Inn, it was soon under new
management
and a local man was successfully prosecuted after
pleading guilty to supplying cannabis in the pub’s toilets, though it had taken a newspaper sting to catch him. The police said they had no intention of charging the Prince over allegations that he smoked the drug there and that, like the First Family, they considered the matter closed. As for Harry, he was removed from the pub for a second time, this time not by the management but by his father.

It was during his time at Eton that Harry’s honesty was put to another severe test. On one occasion his father’s press secretary Sandy Henney received a call from a Highgrove gardener: Charles’s beloved moorhen had been shot, would she be so kind as to pass on the bad news to His Royal Highness? Knowing how fond he was of the bird, the already-overworked Henney refused to inform the Prince herself but told the gardener to call HRH direct. Charles was mortified when he got the news and immediately demanded to know where his sons – who had been at Highgrove that weekend – were when the shooting occurred. When he was informed that they were in the vicinity of the crime scene, the pond, he said they had to be questioned by their housemaster, Andrew Gailey, who was to ensure that one of them came clean. When Dr Gailey told them their father was upset because his beloved moorhen had been shot, William said, ‘Which moorhen is that, Dr Gailey?’, at which point Harry cut in with: ‘The one you told me not to shoot.’ Harry was given twenty-four hours to phone his father and own up, which he did, saying, ‘I’m so sorry Papa, it was me, I shouldn’t have done it.’ For Charles the confession was reminiscent of that
delivered by George Washington when he owned up to his father that it was he who had chopped down a cherished cherry tree (actually, he had only mortally wounded it): ‘Father, I cannot tell a lie, it was me’ and, like
Washington’s
father, he was more pleased by the honest admission than distressed at the loss of his precious bird.