It’s exactly a week that the spare to the British throne has been shining shoes at Sandhurst. All eyes will be on the unfortunate gingerhead over the next few months while he attempts to iron his uniform, run with a backpack of rocks, scale walls and fall into ditches he fails to cross ? they’ll probably follow his bowel movements as well. In the classroom, for lessons on strategy manifestly not learnt, they’ll giggle when he admits defeat to the computer (he’s reported to have failed the army PC test), and outdoors, a sadistic sergeant major (is there any other kind?) will address him as “Hey, you, Wales” and bark rude imprecations at him. With the kind of discipline the English royalty have to undergo in their formative years, is it any wonder they later run amok?
Prince Henry Charles Albert David has had it particularly tough. His (some say dubious) birth was greeted by his father with a “Oh no! Not another boy.” Followed by “And red-haired at that.” And for a mother he had the bolter Diana (peace be to her soul). At the princess’s funeral, when Elton John soared into his Candle in the Wind, he committed that hugely unEnglish social gaffe ?he hung his head and wept. The trouble with Harry is that he is the second of two siblings. There’s a curse that befalls people like us. We are doomed to be regarded all our lives as Act II in the drama around us, an afterthought, an also-ran, a spare, if you like. A faulty one at that. It also doesn’t help that he lacks his brother’s showstopping looks.
No wonder he has all those booze binges. No wonder he hits photographers who try to shoot him when he has them. Who from a dysfunctional family wouldn’t? Who hasn’t walked a little on the junglee side at the age of 20? Would you have let wild horses drag you, at the same age, to work in an orphanage in Lesotho?
On Friday, thank God, his principal at Eton cleared him of cheating, saying it was impossible for an answer paper to be so full of mistakes if it had been copied. But the case is still on, and it is likely that some of the mud will cling to Harry.
And then, that absurd to-do about wearing a swastika on his sleeve at a costume party. Good God, doesn’t everyone go a little mad at a fancy-dress do? As a fair-minded royal-watcher pointed out at the time in the Independent, don’t some perfectly nice people fetch up dressed as the Devil?
Besides, we have Russell Crowe’s word that the boy’s not bad at all, only “unfairly tried by the media”. The actor’s relation with Harry was reported by The Sun as “the oddest celebrity friendship since Pamela Anderson and Liz Hurley stepped out together”. So, you see, even the lad’s pals are reported on.
The little boy lost is what he is. The poor potty little prince who’s lost the plot.
