The real reason Harry’s quit the Army? To honour his mother’s memory

When William and Harry were small, Princess Diana insisted that if important photographs were being taken of the future king, his younger brother was also in the picture.

She even made a point of bringing Harry to William’s first day at Eton so they could be photographed together and he wouldn’t feel ‘left out’.

Diana was anxious for Prince Harry to be included in everything. She wanted him to avoid the traditional fate of the second-son ‘spare’ in the Royal Family, left without a significant role while both position and estate (income from the Duchy of Cornwall as Prince of Wales, and from the Crown Estates as sovereign) went to the first-born son.

Perhaps, had she lived, she would have succeeded. Now, after Harry’s decision to quit the Army and prepare to head off for a second ‘gap year’ at the age of 30, it looks as though Diana’s plan has failed. But has it?

In fact, Harry is leaving the Armed Forces — and abandoning the only environment where he could be himself — against almost everyone’s advice, including the entreaties of his father Prince Charles. He is doing it to pursue a dream that he has felt for a long time. ‘He wants to go where he is needed, just as his mother did,’ says one of his close circles. ‘He feels he can achieve something worthwhile rather than spend the next ten years sitting at a desk.’ Harry knew it would be spent mainly at a desk because, to his bitter dismay, further operational postings with his Army mates had been closed off to the Queen’s grandson after two tours in Afghanistan, one of them as an Apache helicopter co-pilot gunner which provided him with the excitement he has always craved. Harry did not see himself in the only other possible military role — instructor. In recent times, especially after the scrapes he has got himself into, Harry has listened closely to what his father has had to say. But when it came to his Army career, the time-honored safe harbour for royal princes, he would not listen.

For two years he has privately brooded about the incident in Las Vegas when he was unwittingly photographed romping naked with a girl while playing ‘strip billiards’ in his hotel suite. ‘I let myself down, I let my family down, I let other people down,’ he said at the time. That is understood to be the low-point episode that made him decide he had to do ‘something special’ to justify his royal birth and privilege.

It was entirely his decision to leave the career he’d dreamed about for as long as he could remember after being smeared with camouflage paint, putting on fatigues and clambering into a Scimitar armored vehicle in front of his beaming mother when he was eight.

Looking at him then, and in the years that followed, Diana always felt that Harry would be fine because she knew he wanted to be a soldier and that the Army would take care of him. ‘She’d be concerned that he was giving up what he loved,’ says one of her old friends. 

But to remain an officer would have meant going back to staff college in search of promotion, and Harry recognized, wryly, that although a good soldier, he wasn’t seen as potential senior officer material and was unlikely ever to reach a high operational rank. For him, the excitement of soldiering was being extinguished by protocol.