The Prince, Next King and Diana Watching Over Them

‘We used to say that Harry was like a firecracker and when other pupils saw him coming they used to warn each other, “Don’t light the blue touch paper”,’ says a former housemaster.

‘He needed some outlet for his anger and he found it when he discovered the Combined Cadet Force. 

'That, for a while, curbed his frustration and diverted much of the aggression he had been displaying outside the classroom. We knew then that he was destined for a career in the military, where he could channel it usefully.’

Close: Prince Harry pictured with his brother William

The emergence of the young hell-raiser had already been in evidence before he even hit his teens. 

Harry’s first serious experience with alcohol had come during a Mediterranean holiday with his mother and brother as Mohamed al Fayed’s guests in July 1997, when he got ‘happily squiffy’ after sampling a local brandy, according to one of his friends

There was worse — far worse — to come. In 1998, Harry and his brother had helped arrange a Highgrove party ahead of their father’s 50th birthday. 

HOW DODI TRIED TO GET HIM A GIRL

In the summer of 1997, Diana had a surprise for her 12-year-old son: they were all going on holiday together to the south of France.

Mohamed al Fayed — a close friend of her stepmother Raine Spencer — had invited them to spend time with him and his family at his palatial home above St Tropez. 

What’s more, he had spent more than £10 million on a new yacht, the Jonikal, with his royal guests in mind.

He had another ‘treat’ in mind, too: his son Dodi would be joining them. 

Al Fayed was matchmaking and he badly wanted Diana in the family.

Harry did not like Dodi  any more than he liked Al Fayed’s ten-year-old son Omar, whose ‘arse he kicked’, according to one of the bodyguards who witnessed ‘a severe altercation’ between them.

Harry grew deeply suspicious when Fayed arranged a disco for him and William at which there were a number of scantily clad young girls. 

One of them told Harry they had never met Dodi before, but they had been recruited by two of his ‘team’ scouting the beach at St Tropez for some girls who would like ‘some fun’ with their boss’s guests.

The trio returned to London on July 20. 

It was Charles’s turn to have custody, on board Britannia for its last ever cruise. 

Diana was not to know she would never see Harry and William again.

‘This is a real ship,’ Harry told his father, ‘not like Mr Fayed’s. His is a boat.’

Guests included the actors Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson. William and Harry had persuaded them to stage some comedy sketches poking fun at their father along the lines of Atkinson’s Blackadder.

It was not long into the night, however, before a drunken 14-year-old Harry stripped completely naked and ran around the surprised — to put it mildly — distinguished guests.

‘Charles was visibly shocked,’ remembers a guest. 

‘In fact he turned crimson, but he told a group of us later that it was just teenage high spirits and he himself had done much the same. It was the only time in my life that I didn’t believe him.’

Harry’s Eton contemporaries swear he did not drink during term time but made up for it when he invited them to Highgrove during the school holidays. 

He founded Club H, with a well-stocked bar in the cellars, which soon became the venue for wild parties.

It was the staff at Highgrove who first informed Prince Charles that cannabis had been smelled in the house. Summoned to a summit with his father, Harry came clean.

Yes, he said, 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 those closest to him already had criminal convictions).

It took only a one-day visit to a rehab centre in South London, which Charles had officially opened the previous year, to convince Harry that he had embarked on the wrong road.

‘Stick with the winners’ was his new motto.

Harry’s love of risk and danger is now, for the most part, channelled into more worthwhile activities: his career with the Army and the tremendous success he has enjoyed in helping to modernise the Royal Family.

But as Diana’s friend, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, recalls: ‘Harry was always the more mischievous of the two.’ 

Her opinion is endorsed by the society interior director Nicky Haslam: ‘Harry is obviously fun. He’s sort of irresistible in his naughtiness.’

It’s a view with which many would agree — including some of the many women who, as I will reveal on Monday, have fallen for his charms.

‘I then told him to go to the police officer on the gate and report back to me when he got there — but he didn’t call.’

After a few failed attempts to contact the young prince on his radio, Wharfe began to get worried.

‘Eventually he came in with the “Ken, this is Harry” call sign.

Harry the brave: Even as a schoolboy, Prince harry, pictured centre, showed a sense of adventurer

‘“Wow, Harry,” I said. “Where on earth are you?” because I could hear traffic in the background.

‘“Just a minute while I check,” he said. “Oh right, I’m outside Tower Records.”

‘Needless to say, my feet didn’t touch the ground as I ran to fetch him from the pavement on Kensington High Street, where he’d ended up.’

‘We worried about him a little,’ says a former teacher at his pre-prep school, Wetherby, in West London. 

‘He always did what he wanted, with no fear of the consequences. When I warned him about walking in front of oncoming cars, he simply sniffed and said he wasn’t bothered because they weren’t allowed to knock him down.’

But despite his lack of physical fear, the young prince suffered severe mental anguish during the painful disintegration of his parents’ marriage. 

Although Charles and Diana did their best to shield their sons from marital discord, say friends, Harry was highly sensitive to atmosphere, suffering long and exhausting screaming fits that could be calmed only by his brother.

When his parents finally announced their separation in 1992, it was Harry, then eight, who begged repeatedly to know if there was anything he could do ‘to make Mummy and Daddy happy again’.

Devoted to both of them, he had been found crying in the garden at Sandringham one Christmas after the split, sobbing to an estate worker that he was missing his mother.

But insiders say that as a young child he was, if anything, even closer to Charles, with whom he would spend hours in the garden at Highgrove. 

Happy: Prince Harry was devoted to both of his parents. The family are pictured on Prince William's first day at Eton College in 1995

                                                          

Extracted from Harry: The People’s Prince by Chris Hutchins, to be published by The Robson Press on April 25 at £20.  © 2013 Chris Hutchins. To order a copy for £15 (incl p&p), call 0844 472 4157.