He feared Eton would throw him out for taking drugs
Duke claims he was cast as a ‘thicko’ and ‘playboy’ by media
PRINCE Harry admitted playing up to the stereotypes of being a ‘playboy prince’ and ‘irresponsible drug taker’, the High Court heard yesterday.
The Duke of Sussex claimed he was cast as a ‘failure’ and ‘thicko’ by the British press, which led to him feeling that he may as well ‘do the crime’ for which he was accused.
The 38-year-old royal also said he was ‘extremely worried’ that he would be thrown out of Eton after a Daily Mirror front page in January 2002 with the headline: ‘Harry’s cocaine, ecstasy and GHB parties.’
In his 55-page witness statement, the prince said each of the members of the
‘His father was worried sick’
Royal Family were often ‘cast into a specific role’ by the tabloids.
‘You’re then either the “playboy prince”, the “failure”, the “dropout” or, in my case, the “thicko”, the “cheat”, the “underage drinker”, the “irresponsible drug taker”, the list goes on,’ he wrote.
‘As a teenager and in my early 20s, I ended up feeling as though I was playing up to a lot of the headlines and stereotypes that they wanted to pin on me mainly because I thought that, if they are printing this rubbish about me and people were believing it, I may as well “do the crime”, so to speak.’
He said it resulted in a ‘ downward spiral’ and claimed that the Press tried to ‘coax’ him into ‘doing something stupid’ in order to sell newspapers.
Harry said in the statement: ‘Whilst they would, of course, report on my successes in life, it seemed to me that they took far greater pleasure in knocking me down, time and time again.
‘This extended to my relationships. I always felt as if the tabloids wanted me to be single, as I was much more interesting to them and sold more newspapers.
‘Whenever I got into a relationship, they were very keen to report the details but would then, very quickly, seek to try and break it up by putting as much strain on it and creating as much distrust as humanly possible.’ Discussing
the January 2002 Mirror article which claimed he was using drugs, the prince said he was fearful he was going to be expelled from Eton.
The headline was misleading, he said, because he ‘only smoked cannabis’, which he was quoted as telling his father, who was said to have been ‘worried sick’.
Harry said that the article was a follow-up to stories published by the now- defunct News of the World, but it went further by reporting that his friends or ‘those I mixed with’ were taking harder drugs including ecstasy, cocaine and GHB.
The duke said it was ‘not clear to me’ where the journalists had got their quotes from, so it made him ‘wonder with hindsight’ if
they had heard something that was not intended for them.
As there was ‘no explanation of how they learned the information’ he was ‘at a loss as to who would have said’ it. The duke added: ‘This article, along with the News
Of The World coverage, had a huge impact on my life.
‘Eton had a zero drugs policy in place, and I was extremely worried I was going to be expelled.
‘These articles were also written at a time when there had been an agreement between the Press and the Royal Family, fol
lowing the death of my mother, that my brother and I should be able to go through our education without constant scrutiny and interruption.
‘ It seemed to me there was never any let-up in the Press coverage of every detail of my childhood, by the defendant’s journalists and others.’
The duke’s statement was prepared in advance of his High Court appearance yesterday and then released to the public.
It is a wide-ranging attack on the Mirror group’s newspapers – the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and The People – which he has accused of intruding into his life via phone hacking. The newspapers’ publisher denies the claims.
‘Scrutiny and interruption’