
As he turns 30, a brilliant new book by a top royal biographer exposes the inner torment of Prince Harry. On Saturday, in this exclusive Mail serialisation, Penny Junor revealed his wild binges, tensions with the Middletons and his many flirtations. Today, we uncover the toxic upbringing that shaped his life...

Harry and William were just eight and ten when they went on their first holiday without their parents in the summer of 1993, almost two years after Charles and Diana’s very public separation.

The recent revelations about their parents had been beyond extraordinary.

Squidgygate, a 30-minute tape recording of Diana having a flirtatious conversation with her lover James Gilbey, had been followed just a few months later by Camillagate.

It was an 11-minute tape of their father’s late-night phone ramblings to his mistress which could be distilled to just one thought: the heir to the throne wished that he could always be with the woman he adored and mused on the possibility of turning into a Tampax to achieve it.

At the boys’ boarding school, Ludgrove, every effort had been made to ensure that the most lurid headlines were kept out of sight. But there were more than 180 boys at the school aged between seven and 13 and it was impossible to keep it from every one of them. The stress that Harry and William were under is simply unimaginable.

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Mother love: A hug for two-year-old Harry from Diana during a family holiday in Majorca in 1986 and the prince, aged four, with his downcast mother on Necker, the island privately-owned by Sir Richard Branson in the British Virgin Islands

So they were certainly in need of a break when they went to Polzeath in Cornwall with their good friends the van Straubenzee boys, whose parents rented the same clifftop house there every year. On that first visit, Harry cut his leg on some barnacles and started to cry. The poor little boy was in agony.

His leg was bleeding profusely and the salt water was making it sting. In the absence of his mother, father or even a nanny, his Police Protection Officer, Graham Cracker, stepped in.

‘Harry, pull yourself together and stop whingeing,’ he said brusquely. ‘It’s just a scratch.’ When a concerned Mrs van Straubenzee tried to intervene, he batted her away. ‘He’s perfectly all right.’

It’s a small vignette and hardly the most traumatic of incidents. But it took place against a backdrop of appalling family misery and is indicative of a childhood in which the young Prince was left, not for the first time, bereft of every child’s most basic requirement: a mother’s reassuring comfort.

Those who know Prince Harry generally agree the fact he is never going to be king is a good thing.

It’s always said with an affectionate laugh because people love Harry. But he’s always had a wild, unpredictable streak to him, even as a little boy.

His detractors say he’s not very bright — and there was a time, granted, when he behaved like a mindless Hooray Henry with no self-control. A time when one wondered whether the terrible combination of his mother’s death and the chaos of his childhood had set him on a dangerous and perhaps irreversible downward spiral.

Wildly emotional, Diana expected little Harry to comfort her

Not only did he lose his mother at a desperately difficult age, just two weeks before his 13th birthday — he lost her in a spectacular manner that made headlines around the world.

There can surely be few whose hearts were not broken by the sight of Harry as a little boy walking so bravely behind his mother’s cortege.

But even before her death he’d endured the misery that comes with a broken home, warring parents and a dad who was often absent.

Like his brother, he had to endure his parents’ very bitter divorce, the revelation of their affairs and even their most intimate secrets, from Diana’s eating disorder and self-harming to Charles’s excruciatingly embarrassing phone conversations with Camilla.

It wasn’t just that his mother wasn’t there to comfort him when he hurt his knee. What was far worse was that she expected him to comfort her as she ricocheted from one terrifying emotional outburst to the next. Some were played out on the front pages of the national newspapers.

Others I am revealing here for the first time.

Contrary to what Diana believed, there was no campaign to discredit her following the separation. In fact, quite the reverse. Charles had given specific instructions to his staff to say and do nothing to reflect badly upon the Princess.

Last moments: The Prince with his mother on a jet ski in St Tropez weeks before her death in Paris in 1997

He made it blindingly clear that no matter what Diana did or said, she would always be the mother of his children and anything that hurt the Princess would hurt them.

For all that, Diana saw conspiracies everywhere and sent anonymous, unnerving and sometimes poisonous messages to a range of people, including her Private Secretary Patrick Jephson and 28-year-old Tiggy Legge-Bourke, who’d been hired by Prince Charles to look after the boys following the separation. Even Camilla had threatening telephone calls from her. They were always made in the dead of the night, when Camilla was alone in her country house in the middle of nowhere.

I’ve sent someone to kill you,’ Diana would say. ‘They’re outside in the garden. Look out of the window; can you see them?

‘I’ve sent someone to kill you,’ Diana would say. ‘They’re outside in the garden. Look out of the window; can you see them?’

The Prince picked up many of Diana’s cast-off staff — and she drove him to distraction in many ways. Charles found conversations with her difficult and upsetting. He seemed to provide a focus for her anger; but he did care very much that she should be looked after.

He worried about her and was always there at the end of a telephone, right to the end, when things went wrong with a love affair or the children or even the Press.

She would ring him up in tears and he would do whatever needed to be done to sort out the problem.

A lot has been written about his parents’ marriage and why it failed, but the facts need to be reiterated because it affected Harry deeply. The man he is today is a product of that broken home and all that he heard and felt during his childhood.

The marriage did not fail because of Camilla Parker Bowles, the woman Diana famously called the third person in her marriage. It failed principally because it was a tragic mismatch. Each had married the wrong person, unable to provide the other with even a fraction of what they thought they needed.

Her eating disorder, she later told author Andrew Morton, began just one week after Prince Charles proposed. She became moody and wilful, angry and suspicious — and Charles couldn’t understand it.

First steps: The toddler Prince has a barefoot run while a cheeky Harry, aged three, sticks his tongue out at waiting photographers in the backseat of a car

He found it difficult to cope with her mood swings and his own moods became increasingly unpredictable and volatile. Mental illness is not an exact science.

The root cause of bulimia is believed to be major trauma in early childhood, but the trigger is usually some sort of emotional stress in the present. In Diana’s case that trigger was the loneliness and uncertainty she suffered when she moved after her engagement from a giggly, all-girl flat in Fulham to a suite of rooms at Buckingham Palace.

Bulimia dogged her for most of the rest of her life, and destroyed any chance of happiness that she and Charles might have had. The arrival of Prince William the year after their marriage brought some respite but it didn’t last long, as she plunged almost immediately into severe post-natal depression.

By the time of Prince Harry’s birth two years later, however, she felt she was better. She believed she no longer needed professional help and stopped seeing her psychiatrist.

But although she put on a brave face in public, behind closed doors she and the Prince continued to have volcanic exchanges.

She sacked all the nannies her boys loved

She was convinced his friends were conspiring against her. She didn’t want anything associated with his old life to be around them — not even his old Labrador, Harvey. Charles was so desperate to make her well he did everything she asked. And though it distressed him greatly, everyone went — including Harvey, who was sent off to see out his days with the Prince’s comptroller at his house in Kent.

The irony was that by then the Prince and Princess of Wales were an unbeatable double act, a sensation around the world, thanks largely to Diana’s beauty and her unparalleled ability to charm, communicate and empathise with ordinary people.

At home it was a different story.

As the years rolled by with no let-up in her behaviour, Charles became hardened and at times downright callous in his attitude towards her.

When she became hysterical, made dramatic gestures or self-harmed, he walked away. Not because he didn’t care — but because he knew he couldn’t help.

And what of Harry in this maelstrom? Perhaps unsurprisingly, for the first two or three years of his life, he was known as the quiet one.

William, by contrast, was exuberant and cheeky — some would say, completely out of control. His behaviour didn’t change until Diana broke his heart by getting rid of his beloved nanny, Barbara Barnes, whose bed he climbed into every morning.

Sadly, Diana saw the nanny — whom she herself had hired — as a threat.

She loved her boys more than anyone else on earth — but she wanted them to love her better than anyone else, too. She wanted 100 per cent of them, in the same way that she had wanted 100 per cent of Charles, to the exclusion of all others.

Heartbreaking: William, Harry and Charles stand alongside the hearse at Diana's funeral in 1997

Her love for them was almost obsessive, and it was possessive. One of her favourite phrases was: ‘Who loves you most?’

The real problem was that Diana had never been properly mothered herself and therefore didn’t know how to be a mother. She behaved more like a big sister to William and Harry — at times, the nannies must have felt as though they had three children to look after.

Certainly her relationship with Barbara Barnes deteriorated — as Diana’s relationships often did — until finally, without a thought for her children’s psychological wellbeing, she peremptorily relieved her of her post. Had Diana only been able to take a step back she would have realised that what she was doing to William and Harry was precisely what had happened to her when she was a child.

When she was just six years old, her parents divorced and her mother Frances left the family home for a man with whom she felt she would be happy; she had every expectation that her four children would follow.

But her own mother gave evidence against her in court during custody proceedings and custody went to their father.

She planned a final bombshell for the royals

As a child Diana knew nothing of this and surmised that her mother didn’t want her. She felt worthless and unwanted. Now Barbara Barnes had gone from William and Harry’s lives with no explanation either.

Two other nannies followed, but neither stayed for more than two or three years. Jessie Webb (who came out of retirement to help William and Kate with Prince George) vanished from the household when Harry went to boarding school at the age of seven. She had looked after him for two years after William started boarding, at a time when things were particularly difficult at home.

She was another one who was frozen out by the Princess. Finally Olga Powell, who had been deputy to both nannies, stepped into the role.

She was a 52-year-old widow with no children of her own, and, fortunately for the boys, became their rock of security in the desperately difficult years to come.

Although the Princes — and Harry especially — were happiest at Highgrove, Diana disliked the country. Consequently they spent most of their week in the family’s apartment at Kensington Palace. Despite her carefully projected image as a hands-on mother, they spent most of their time in the top floor nursery suite, where they ate, slept and lived for most of their childhood.

Nevertheless, the walls were badly soundproofed and they were painfully aware of their parents’ frequent rows.

By the mid-Eighties Charles had given up all hope of ever being able to change things. He was once again seeing some of the friends Diana had disliked, while she was separately seeing her own friends. They spent more and more time apart.

It was his old friend Patty Palmer Tomkinson who — worried about how unhappy Charles was and how dramatically he had changed — put him in touch again with Camilla, knowing that she had always been able to make him laugh.

Call of duty: Harry stands alongside the Duchess of Cornwall on the balcony at Buckingham Palace during a Lancaster Bomber flypast in 2008

DID SHE GET HER FINAL WISH? Diana had said she wanted to be interred in the family crypt at Great Brington, Northampton, alongside her father and grandmother, but it was deemed that the small churchyard would be unable to cope with the volume of visitors. So after the funeral, her coffin was driven slowly to nearby Althorp, her ancestral home, past thousands of spectators on the roadside, while the Prince of Wales, William and Harry and the Spencers all made the journey in the Royal Train. Diana was buried instead on an island in the middle of a lake on the estate where, in life, she had been refused a home. It has become a shrine and her brother has turned the old stable block into a permanent exhibition in her memory, which the public can visit. But there are some who think her body was later quietly placed where she had wanted to rest. Advertisement

Slowly, Charles began the long haul out of the abyss. Along the way, they became lovers once more. It was an easy, happy, uncomplicated relationship.

Diana’s five-year relationship with James Hewitt, by contrast, was not. Although he was not the first, this was the most enduring of her love affairs and she made no attempt to keep him secret from her children.

By all accounts she positively encouraged a relationship between them, yet she nevertheless was having an affair at the same time with James Gilbey, whom she had known from her teens. Then in 1991, when Hewitt was deployed to Iraq during the first Gulf War, and despite the risk, she sent him more than 100 loving, hand-written letters.

Every day she anxiously watched the news, terrified that he was going to be killed — while Harry, not quite seven years old, snuggled on the sofa beside her, trying to comfort her but no doubt confused by her anguish.

When Hewitt, still besotted with her, returned home the following year, Diana abruptly ended the affair, as she ended so many of her relationships with both men and women, friends and family.

She simply stopped taking his calls. He retired confused and hurt.

Diana didn’t attempt to hide her dalliances — or her emotions — from her children. By the late Eighties and early Nineties, when Harry was still very young and impressionable, Charles and Diana could barely tolerate being in the same room together. There were blistering rows, tears and hysterics, rage and fury, all heard to some degree by everyone in the house.

What is surprising is that Diana confided in her boys and sought comfort from them even though they were still so young.

Given the distress she suffered as a nine-year-old when her own parents divorced, she of all people would have known just how painful it is for a young child to see a parent in distress. Yet she seemed unconcerned that William and Harry should see the full range of her emotions.

Nor did she hesitate to use them as pawns in her war with their father. In 1991, she quietly booked a holiday for herself and the boys with a few other friends in the Austrian resort of Lech and alerted the Press.

Diana had an affair with James Hewitt (left), whom she had adored, and she had been devastated when he co-operated with a kiss-and-tell book. Squidgygate, a 30-minute tape recording of the Princess having a flirtatious conversation with her lover James Gilbey (right), had been followed just a few months later by Camillagate

The date she chose was half-term, when she knew Charles would be unable to come. He was hosting a shooting weekend for 18 friends at Sandringham which she knew he would never be able to call off.

It was not the first time, nor the last, that the boys were used as pawns in their on-going war.

The years of separation were not happy ones for the Princess. She developed a passion for Oliver Hoare, an art dealer friend of the Prince of Wales, whom she had met through her husband. He was often seen arriving at Kensington Palace and there was much gossip.

The marriage did not fail because of Camilla Parker Bowles, the woman Diana famously called the third person in her marriage. It failed principally because it was a tragic mismatch

Hoare was married and not inclined to leave his wife. He tried to cool the relationship, at which Diana started making silent telephone calls to his wife at home. Eventually Mrs Hoare contacted the police and the calls were traced to Kensington Palace.

The story found its way into the Press, much to the fury of the Princess, who blamed her husband and one of his staff for leaking it, convinced that they were out to smear her name. It had actually been leaked by a boy who was at school with one of the Hoare children.

In September 1995, at the age of 13, William arrived for his first term at Eton College, one of the best — and certainly the most famous — public schools in the world, having successfully passed his common entrance exam.

The whole family turned out to take him, Charles, Diana, and Harry, putting on a display of unity and smiles for the inevitable Press and the curious public. That very day the Princess had been on the front pages again with yet more revelations about her love life.

After Oliver Hoare, she had fallen for the England rugby captain, Will Carling. Diana had taken the boys to watch him play, he was a regular visitor to Kensington Palace and he had given them each rugby shirts that were no doubt their pride and joy.

Who knows whether they had known the true nature of their mother’s friendship with him. But on that first day of the Michaelmas term, every man and woman in the country was left in little doubt.

Julia Carling was convinced Diana and her husband were more than just good friends and ended her marriage to Will in a bitter, protracted and very high-profile manner that ensured the tabloids had plenty of material to keep their readers titillated and Diana’s name in the news.

On the evening of November 20, 1995 Panorama viewers watched transfixed as one of the most explosive and deadly 58 minutes of television unfolded in front of their eyes. Diana, Princess of Wales, sitting forlornly in Kensington Palace, wiped away the occasional tear as she talked to journalist Martin Bashir about her bulimia, her self-harming, her cries for help

A few days after saying goodbye to his brother, Harry went back to Ludgrove for the start of the new term, no doubt relieved to be back with his friends and the safe cocoon that the routine of school provided.

What neither he nor William knew (nor anyone at Buckingham Palace or St James’s Palace, nor even the Chairman of the BBC, which screened the programme) was that their mother had plans actively under way for one final bombshell that would hit right at the heart of the institution that was her children’s future.

On the evening of November 20, Panorama viewers watched transfixed as one of the most explosive and deadly 58 minutes of television unfolded in front of their eyes.

HRH Diana, Princess of Wales, sitting forlornly in Kensington Palace, wiped away the occasional tear as she talked to journalist Martin Bashir about her bulimia, her self-harming, her cries for help. She talked about the Prince’s obsession with Camilla — ‘There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded’ — and ‘the enemy’, her ‘husband’s department’ that tried to undermine her.

She admitted she had held those telephone conversations with James Gilbey, and said that she had made calls to Oliver Hoare, but not 300.

She’d had an affair with James Hewitt, whom she had adored, and she had been devastated when he co-operated with a kiss-and-tell book: ‘The first thing I did was rush down to talk to my children. And William produced a box of chocolates and said: “Mummy, I think you’ve been hurt. These are to make you smile again.” ’

For someone whose first instinct had been to rush down and make sure her children were all right when Hewitt’s innocuous book hit the shelves, this was an inexplicable interview to have given.

A few hundred people might have seen Hewitt’s book. This interview was seen by over 20 million viewers; it was picked up by just about every newspaper and news magazine in the world, and by every radio and television news bulletin.

She developed a passion for Oliver Hoare (left), an art dealer friend of the Prince of Wales, whom she had met through her husband, after she fell for the England rugby captain, Will Carling (right). Diana had taken the boys to watch him play

This was dynamite, and she knew it. It was pure, unadulterated theatre, as those who knew her recognised, but the wider audience saw her as a victim; a sinner perhaps, but a sinner whose only sin was to love, and certainly more sinned against than guilty of any crime herself. She knew the media would go crazy; she knew it would strike the man who had spurned her where it hurt most. But was she forgetting that man was also her children’s father?

In those 58 minutes she had taken a swipe at all the people William and Harry loved best.

And she had talked about things that neither ten-year-olds, nor even 12-year-olds, want to hear, and certainly don’t want their friends to hear either.

But at times like this, Diana wasn’t thinking like a mother. She was the child still nursing those feelings of abandonment and emptiness that she had carried for so much of her life; hell-bent on self-aggrandisement and self-justification — and ultimately, self-destruction.

Expensive rehab clinics are filled with the children of broken homes and bitter divorces, some of whose experiences pale beside Harry’s. What almost certainly saved him and his brother was the army of people employed to look after them.

But while their nannies could keep them occupied and the protection officers could keep them safe, no one could protect them from the emotional extremes of their mother.

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