King Charles once had to issue an unprecedented statement apologising for the behaviour of his youngest son Prince Harry after he caused a furore with an on-camera comment.
The controversy took place in 2009, when a three-year-old video of Harry went viral. It had been filmed in an airport by the Prince when he was 21 and serving as a cadet in the British Army. It quickly led to “heated condemnations”.
Writing about the incident in his memoir Spare, Harry detailed: “Killing time before our flight, messing around, I panned the group, gave a running commentary on each lad, and when I came to my fellow cadet and good friend Ahmed Raza Khan, a Pakistani, I said: ‘Ah, our little P*** friend…’
“I didn’t know that p*** was a slur. Growing up, I’d heard many people use that word and never saw anyone flinch or cringe, never suspected them of being racist. Neither did I know anything about unconscious bias. I was twenty-one, awash in isolation and privilege, and if I thought anything about this word at all, I thought it was like Aussie. Harmless.”
After the footage was sold to the News of the World, Harry said: “Heated condemnations began rolling in.
“‘Prince Harry is worse than a thicko’, they said, ‘Worse than a party boy – he’s a racist.’
“The Tory leader denounced me. A cabinet minister went on TV to flog me. Ahmed’s uncle condemned me to the BBC. I was sitting in Highgrove, watching this furor rain down, barely able to process it.
“My father’s office issued an apology on my behalf. I wanted to issue one as well, but courtiers advised against it. ‘Not the best strategy, sir.’ To hell with strategy. I didn’t care about strategy. I cared about people not thinking I was a racist. I cared about not being a racist.”
Harry revealed that he reached out to Ahmed to personally apologise, which was accepted – but added “his forgiveness, his easy grace, only made me feel worse”.
It wasn’t the first time that Charles had been forced to apologise for one of Harry’s mistakes. In January 2005, a particularly shocking photo of the Prince dominated newspapers around the world. Harry was snapped wearing a Nazi soldier’s uniform with a red-and-black swastika armband and an army shirt while clutching a drink at a friend’s costume party.
Clarence House quickly issued a statement in response to a photograph published on the front page of the Sun newspaper under the headline, “Harry the Nazi”.
It read: “Prince Harry has apologised for any offence or embarrassment he has caused. He realises it was a poor choice of costume.”
Harry also apologised in a statement of his own, saying, “I am very sorry if I caused any offence or embarrassment to anyone. It was a poor choice of costume and I apologise.”
He later spoke about the incident in the third episode of Harry and Meghan’s tell-all docuseries, Harry & Meghan. “It was probably one of the biggest mistakes of my life,” he said. “I felt so ashamed afterwards.”
