Harry, royal Houdini

All the world knows that Harry likes to party, but this will be an altogether more grown-up event organised by the Duchess of Cambridge and Pippa Middleton: 30 friends will enjoy dinner and dancing within the confines of the palace walls.

The message is, of course, that Prince Henry of Wales — by dint of his experiences as his alter ego, Captain Harry Wales, dedicated soldier and Afghan war veteran — has himself grown up.

Can he fulfil his role in this morality tale as the lost boy who achieved manhood in the blood and dust of Helmand? In public, certainly, he is the people’s prince. In private, however, questions remain about the real Harry, his girlfriends and his ability to steer safely through the next 30 years as such a senior member of the royal family.

These days he is much more concerned about his public image, regularly scouring Twitter to find out what is being written about him and even admitting to reading the comments posted about him under articles on newspaper websites. Harry tells friends of his frustration that people judge him by the snapshots they see, not as the person he feels he really is.

After years of grumbling, however, he is starting to realise that if he wants a private life while living the goldfish bowl existence of the royal family, he must take control to ensure it stays private. By now he has weeded out the friends who sold stories about him to the tabloids and his most trusted confidant of all is the one who has seen him through thick and thin — his brother.

The Invictus Games are a chance for the prince, always viewed as the unpredictable but exciting foil to his dutiful elder brother and his obedient sister-in-law, to strike out publicly on his own. For once, William will be in the subsidiary role.

IF William has been one stabilising influence for Harry, the army has been the other. The horror of war, which he witnessed during his two tours of Afghanistan, particularly the permanent scarring of men much younger than himself, has had a profound and enduring impact.

He did not want these soldiers to be the forgotten collateral damage of conflict, hence his enthusiasm for the Invictus Games which involve more than 400 wounded personnel from 14 nations competing in nine adaptive sports.

The event started as an off-the-cuff idea that Harry borrowed during a visit to America, where he heard of a similar contest called the Warrior Games. Ironically, given that some of Harry’s worst ideas have started in a pub, the plan came to him at an English-themed inn in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Sipping nothing stronger than water, he spoke about a rough plan to hold a similar event in Britain.

He felt that if the army, rather than government quangos, was in charge then it might get off the ground. Outlining his plan he grew more passionate, punctuating his ideas with his trademark phrase: “Do you know what I mean?”

On his return to Britain, and against protests from his superiors, Harry asked to be transferred to a job that would free him up to immerse himself in the preparations for the Games.

Months later, when he was asked to write his article about the Invictus Games for The Sunday Times, he disappeared for a weekend with his laptop and produced a heartfelt article inspired by his battlefield experiences in Afghanistan.

He wrote: “I wish I could say we had a lot of detailed discussions among the team about how, or if, we could help promote a larger version of the Warrior Games, but the reality is that the intention to host an international event the following year was already a commitment in my mind. ‘We will’ host the event in the Olympic Park and ‘we will’ fill those venues and create the most incredible atmosphere for these men and women.”

Harry’s passion has captured the public’s imagination. Millions are expected to watch the televised opening ceremony. Even Brad Pitt has got in on the act, sending a goodwill message challenging the Brits to “bring it on” against the American contingent.

Most of the venues are full and the closing Sunday night concert, which headlines Foo Fighters, Kaiser Chiefs and Ellie Goulding, is a sell-out. The blonde singer has already nominated Harry for the ice bucket challenge. If she sings him a chorus of Happy Birthday, it will be no more than he deserves.

The prince has been working full-time on the Games since January when he was transferred from flying Apache attack helicopters to flying a staff desk in central London. While he has had a small army of helpers and a high-powered organising committee, including London 2012 Olympics veterans, he has been the public figurehead, pushing the project along and making speeches.

He considers it very much his baby, jealously guarding it from political interference. George Osborne has pledged £1m and David Cameron has lent his public support, but the prince has made clear in private conversations that he does not want the chancellor and prime minister “muscling in” and “stealing all the glory”.

Doubtless his endeavours will be recognised by the Queen when next April it is expected that she will appoint him a Knight of the Garter, joining his brother as well as Princes Charles, Andrew and Edward and Princess Anne in this elite order of chivalry. It will be an acknowledgment that the royal apprentice is now a fully paid-up member of the family firm, that dirty Harry has cleaned up his act. “Very grown up,” as his mother was fond of saying.

Diana plays a benign part in his birthday celebration, as the prince is inheriting a £10m legacy from his mother. He and William will also take custody of her iconic wedding gown, certain jewellery, letters, photographs and other items of sentimental value which her brother Earl Spencer had kept for them.

With Diana at St Tropez in 1997 (AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau)

IT IS closure of sorts. With a new girl on his arm — Camilla Thurlow, a 25-year-old charity worker and former Miss Edinburgh, who was introduced to him by his cousin Princess Beatrice — the prince genuinely seems to be embarking on a new chapter in his life.

He has learnt to enjoy it while he can, aware that adulation can quickly turn to reproach.

He is certainly not the first, nor likely to be the last, prince to enjoy drugs, alcohol and wild women. But he is the first to have his excesses — be it Harry emerging bleary-eyed from a nightclub or, most notoriously, unveiling his crown jewels during a game of strip billiards in his Las Vegas hotel suite — made public around the world in real time, a prince seemingly trapped in the electronic nightmare of Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.

Despite the scandals — or more probably because of them — he is one of the most popular members of the royal family. With his easy, unaffected manner, slightly awkward gait and the open, ruddy face of a West Country farmer, the royal cheeky chappie has spent a lifetime being forgiven for his bad boy behaviour.

With that roguish twinkle in his eye, Harry was able to get away with describing men about to embark on a charity trek to the South Pole as “nutters”, “slave drivers” and “dinosaurs”. Not that he neglected to praise their “strength, comradeship and courage”. It is a nice balancing act, one that has been Harry’s calling card since he was a youngster.

“He was always the risk-taker, the one getting into mischief,” observes Ken Wharfe, his police bodyguard for six years. Another veteran from Kensington Palace recalled: “When he was little, if you wanted him to do something you had to ask him the opposite.”

As his mother noted early on, Harry had the Spencer gene in full measure — red hair like his aunt, Sarah McCorquodale, as well as a puckish recklessness that has affected many in the Spencer clan over the years. He shared Diana’s optimistic streak but also inherited her self-destructive genes. By contrast, her eldest son was anchored in the Windsor camp both in his conscientious and self-disciplined temperament and in his physical demeanour. Although yoked to the same institution, from an early age both were aware of their different destinies, Harry famously teasing William for his ambition to be a policeman so that he could look after Mummy. “No you can’t,” said young Harry. “You’ve got to be king.”

What is remarkable is how perfectly they fit the pattern for sibling relationships. First-born are normally hard-working, dutiful, reliable, responsible and academically successful. Second sons are extrovert risk-takers, attracted to the novel, the new and the unconventional.

As the psychology professor Frank Sulloway, author of Born to Rebel, observes: “The elder son is more dominant, conscientious and dutiful, following his parents’ wishes, while the younger one is more sociable, funny and affable. For the younger child, humour is a great way to be noticed.”

Those who have watched Harry and William grow and develop agree with this analysis. Harry is the acknowledged mimic of the family, able to keep a dinner party amused with his impersonation of his grandmother. On one occasion he even mimicked her voice for her mobile phone voicemail greeting. The Queen only learnt of the hoax when Lord Janvrin, then her private secretary, called her mobile.

She too fell long ago for the Harry magic. He was said to have been instrumental in ensuring that the James Bond routine with her, which stole the show at the opening ceremony for the London Olympics, went ahead.

Royal courtiers are often glad of Harry’s sense of humour to defuse and deflect tricky situations. He is the one who is able to tease his obdurate elder brother and encourage him to change his mind.

He has also been a huge help to Kate during her induction into the family. Harry still regularly gives the duchess pep talks and calms her nerves with jokes during formal engagements. On the balcony at Buckingham Palace for this summer’s trooping the colour, he kept her laughing during a flypast by the RAF as he mimicked talking into his sleeve like a security guard.

It is evidence of how he has developed the role of being the spare to William’s heir. When he appears alongside the Cambridges at public engagements he is the third wheel in their relationship — the third person in the marriage, but evidently a loved and trusted one.

DIANA always saw Harry as “a back-up but in the nicest possible way”. Her emphasis, as she told me during our interviews for her biography, was on grooming William for “what’s coming his way”.

During the boys’ early childhood she was, as is usual in aristocratic families, the dominant influence. Her abiding philosophy, which she expressed frequently, was to raise her children as “normally” as possible. Essentially she meant exposing her children to stimulating life experiences without the formality of court life.

While that meant well publicised visits to Thorpe Park and McDonald’s, the new royal normal was played out against a familiar privileged background, a social set of well-bred and well-heeled folk with long drives, deep pockets, double-barrelled Purdeys and triple-barrelled surnames.

Prince Charles added a dash of culture and country to his son’s education, introducing Harry to Kipling’s Just So stories and taking him and William to see the Royal Shakespeare Company perform at Stratford-upon-Avon. Like his own father, he showed them the traditional ways of the countryside, so much so that Diana jokingly referred to the shotgun-toting Harry as “killer Wales”.

Harry often accompanied his brother and mother, however, on their private visits to hospitals and homeless shelters. The focus was on shaping William’s sensibilities, but Harry looked and learnt.

Family life was no laughing matter. The boys were aware of the fierce rows between a couple who could no longer stand the sight of each other. On one occasion Harry, according to the biographer Sarah Bradford, attacked his father, beating his legs with his fists and shouting: “I hate you, I hate you, you make Mummy cry.” Yet when Diana asked the boys what they wanted for Christmas after the royal separation they replied: “Our father back.”

One positive by-product of the split was the introduction of Tiggy Pettifer (then Legge-Bourke) and later Captain Mark Dyer into their lives by Charles. Tiggy was on hand to organise their lives when Charles had custody of the boys while the red-haired captain, initially an equerry, took them rock climbing, showed Harry guns and tanks and talked to him about Sandhurst and a career in the military.

It was advice that fell on fertile ground. As Harry began to catch up with William physically, the second son proved himself the more skilful shot, the more daring skier and aggressive polo player. But Harry always looked up to his smarter brother, who instinctively looked after him.

William’s last conversation with his mother concerned his fears for Harry, worried that once again his younger brother would be sidelined as the Buckingham Palace press office wanted only the future king to pose for photographs at the beginning of his third-year half at Eton.

Harry was 12 and William 15 when they followed their mother’s funeral cortege, heads bowed in grief, on Saturday, September 6, 1997 — 17 years ago yesterday. It is an image stained on popular consciousness, as is Harry’s floral tribute that said simply “Mummy”; a word and a context that made even the most hardened cynic gulp and mothers long to hug him.

Yet within seven years the prince, still only 19, was described as a “national disgrace” and a “horrible young man” by the columnist and TV pundit Carol Sarler writing in the staunchly monarchist Daily Express under the headline “Spoiled and lazy Harry is one of a kind”.

Sarler, capturing a mood of disenchantment, berated him for a series of stories linking him to drunken parties, drug-taking and clinches with topless models. Even though the media and the royal family had entered into a compact to give William and Harry privacy and a “normal life” during their time at Eton and beyond, some stories could not be ignored such as the somewhat dubious tale that Harry and a friend had apparently drunk too much and stripped naked among the guests at his father’s 50th birthday party.

During a holiday in Cornwall the prince, by then a heavy smoker, was seen throwing cider bottles; and he was regularly indulging in underage drinking at the local pubs around Highgrove, his father’s Gloucestershire home.

When a tabloid newspaper discovered Harry was smoking marijuana, all bets were off. In a sweetheart deal it was agreed that a redemptive narrative would revolve around the fact that Charles, as a concerned father, had instructed the shamefaced prince — aka “His Royal High–ness” in the tabloid — to spend a day at a drugs rehabilitation centre in Peckham, south London, to shock him out of his behaviour.

As the visit took place before rather than after Harry admitted to smoking dope, the story gave the prince the illusion that the palace machine could scrub away his future misdemeanours, too.

While he had scuffles with paparazzi outside nightclubs, fuelled by vodka and a visceral loathing of the breed, it was the prince himself who was the architect of the majority of his well documented misfortunes. One of the most notorious was during his time as an officer cadet at Sandhurst when he made a camcorder recording about some of his colleagues, referring to one as “our Paki friend” and another as a “raghead”. Even his one-time media adviser, the Guyanese-born Colleen Harris who was the first black press officer at Buckingham Palace, was critical, describing his comments as “disappointing”.

Perhaps the worst, however, was his appearance at a fancy dress party in January 2005 wearing the uniform of an Afrika Korps officer complete with a red swastika armband.

He only had himself to blame when his picture, taken by a fellow reveller, appeared on the front pages. He faced a chorus of criticism, not only from the Jewish Board of Deputies but also Michael Howard, then Tory party leader. It did not help that Prince Edward was due to represent the Queen at a ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

The episode exposed not only the lack of a dominant male figure in his life — where was his father? — but also the different mindset between the older and younger royal generation.

A senior member of the royal family, now deceased, once said that he had an iron rule for every request or public decision that he had to make. He always asked himself: “What would the Queen think?”

It seems that Harry had not been given that reminder, certainly not by his father. It is a common complaint among courtiers that while Charles is a loving father, he leaves the hands-on parenting to his staff. On one occasion, when Harry petulantly refused to attend a royal engagement, Charles simply put on his headphones, turned up the opera he was listening to and told an official: “You deal with it.”

While the arrival of Camilla Parker Bowles has greatly changed Charles — much more relaxed, says his second son privately — the reality is that she has little sway over his children. “Their relationship is distant,” says a former courtier. “They do their thing for the camera and then [go] back to their different lives.”

In the opinion of this former courtier, Camilla’s influence on her husband is considerable — “she is a much underestimated figure” — but on Harry it is “zero . . . essentially Harry has to discipline himself”.

Some of the burden also falls on William. For Harry, his relationship with his elder brother has been the most important of his life. As he once said: “Every year we get closer. It’s amazing how close we’ve become. Ever since our mother died, obviously we were close, but he is the one person on this earth who I can talk to about anything. We understand each other and give each other support.”

They are the Morecambe and Wise or, perhaps more relevantly, the Gervais and Merchant of the royal family, organising together the memorial pop concert held at Wembley for Diana, playing off one another in television interviews often with the main American networks.

The arrival of Prince George has taken up more of William’s time as a hands-on family man — to the extent that a prince can be one — and has left Harry to define himself apart from his brother.

Not only is he a seasoned combat veteran but his ebullient personality is never far from the surface, throwing himself into encounters with superstars such as Usain Bolt, whom he challenged to a sprint during a visit to Jamaica and met again at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow this summer.

Affable and unaffected, Harry travels light — there are no butlers or valets on his payroll — which makes him seem more accessible. He has a natural empathy for the disadvantaged and dispossessed. After a visit to a hostel in Sao Paulo, Brazil, this summer, the prince said he was near to tears himself when talking to youngsters who had lost their parents to drugs and violence.

Diana would have approved and she would have admired his enthusiasm for the charities that help those whom society would rather forget. Just as she championed the victims of leprosy, landmines and Aids, so Harry supports disabled servicemen and youngsters with Aids.

As her one-time friend and astrologer Penny Thornton observes: “She would be delighted that he had taken on the mantle of campaigning for the wounded. She would have seen so much of herself in him. It is clear that Harry has inherited her ability to relate from the heart to people in crisis and in so doing [to inspire] their healing. This is a gift: it cannot be learnt.”

AT A memorial to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Diana’s death, Harry said: “William and I can separate life into two parts. There were those years when we were blessed with the physical presence beside us of both our mother and father. And then there are the 10 years since our mother’s death.”

Now, perhaps, Harry is entering the third section of his life and looks better equipped to make the transition into his role as a senior member of the royal family.

He has loyal staff whom he trusts implicitly. Last year he appointed his first private secretary, Ed Lane Fox, an army captain who began his military career in the same regiment as Harry.

His press secretary Nick Loughran continues to deal with the media requests for a prince who has become more open to press attention. When he wanted to raise ticket sales for the Invictus Games, Harry gave a rare interview to Chris Evans, the BBC Radio 2 DJ — another newly tamed party animal.

What of his personal life? While his vibrant personality and jaunty good looks have girls swooning, the prince talks of staying married to the military for the foreseeable future.

When, as a young man, his ambition was to be an African safari guide, he seemed to have found the ideal mate in Zimbabwe-born student Chelsy Davy who was not only beautiful and brainy but also bush-wise. Perhaps the only thing she and his other long-time girlfriend, the model and dancer Cressida Bonas, had in common was that they loved the prince but not his position.

“Who is going to be brave enough to take me on?’ is his perennial complaint, his royal status getting in the way of romance.

Clearly there are no hard feelings as both young women are said to be on the guest list for his birthday bash. And the fact that he is fourth in line to the throne did not stop him quietly taking Thurlow away on holiday recently.

If a tricky love life is the price of being a prince, then the prince may appreciate this week that the payoff is that being different can make a difference. Not many people can fill a sports stadium for five days. That must be the best birthday present he could have wished for.