The Queen with her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in 2019.
(Picture: Getty Images)After months of feverish speculation and thousands of headlines around the world, the Duke of Sussex’s tell-all tome is finally here, and its 407 pages offer up a startling insight into the life of the King’s youngest son. The book also reveals more than ever before about the Duke’s inner circle and those who have remained closest to him throughout his life. From the surrogate mother figures and first loves to childhood friends and trusted members of staff, these are the key members of Harry’s gang.
The parent figures
Tiggy Legge-Bourke
Referred to by Harry in the book as “our favourite nanny”, Tiggy was hired by Prince Charles to look after William and Harry in 1993, shortly after Charles and Diana separated. Harry adored her and even refers to her as his “surrogate mum” – though admits that’s an epithet Diana would have been less than thrilled about. “Mummy saw Tiggy not as a nanny, but a rival,” he writes.
She was the woman who was there for all the key moments in the young prince’s life: Tiggy accompanied him on his trips abroad, where she’d let him have nips of sloe gin from her flask; she was present at his ‘passing out’ ceremony, when he joined the army; and, perhaps most startlingly, she was the person who held his ‘blooding’ initiation when he shot his first kill, dipping her fingers into the rabbit’s body, scooping out a dollop of blood and smearing it across his forehead, cheeks and nose. “‘Now,’ she said, in her throaty voice, ‘you are blooded.’” But she was also one of the first people to chastise him after he gave his controversial bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey, saying: “How could you reveal such things? About your family?”
Tania Jenkins and Mike Holding, aka Teej and Mike
Harry met documentary filmmakers Teej and Mike in 2004, when he stayed at their camp in Botswana after being introduced through mutual friends. The trio hit it off straight away, with Harry likening it to “love at first sight. On both sides.” So close was their bond, it wasn’t long before Harry slipped into calling Teej ‘Mom’. “I called her Mom all the time. It felt good. Though I made a point, always, to call her Mom, rather than Mum. There was only one Mum.”
It was Teej that Harry turned to when he wanted to unburden himself about the wars he had been fighting in – “Willy and Pa had asked. But they hadn’t asked the way Teej had asked” – and when he was questioning whether his relationship with his teenage sweetheart Chelsy Davy could last the course. Teej and Mike’s home in Botswana became Harry’s refuge, the place he would escape to when things all got too much back home – and it was, of course, where he famously took Meghan for their third date.
Mark ‘Marko’ Dyer
Mark ‘Marko’ Dyer was hired as a royal aide by Charles in the wake of Diana’s death to watch over William and Harry, and he quickly became like a second father figure to Harry, who recalls being enthralled to him as a child. “I was a ginger, self-conscious about it, but Marko was an extreme ginger and owned it. I gawped at him and thought: teach me to be like that.”
Marko was there for many of the most important moments in the Duke’s life. It was Marko who was sent in to find out whether Harry was taking drugs as a teen, and Marko who helped him plan all the adventures for his gap year. And it was Marko who explained to him why his father didn’t like him talking about Diana in interviews. “Pa was dead-set against me addressing that topic; he didn’t want either of his sons speaking about Mummy, for fear it would cause a stir, distract from his work, and perhaps shine an unflattering light on Camilla.” Harry and Marko remain close to this day – Marko’s son, Jasper, was a page boy at Harry and Meghan’s wedding and Harry is his godfather.
The mates
The van Straubenzees
The three van Straubenzee boys – Henry, Thomas and Charlie – were some of Harry’s closest childhood friends. All four were at Ludgrove School together, where Harry and Henry – or ‘Henners’, as Harry refers to him – were thick as thieves. They would roam the school grounds together getting up to no good – Harry reveals Henners could be “quite naughty” – and were once caught red-handed nicking strawberries from a neighbouring field. “Whenever I bite into a strawberry I’m there again, in those furrows, with lovely Henners.” Tragically, Henry died after being involved in a fatal car crash in 2002 – an incident that reminded Harry painfully of his own mother’s death. Henners, it turned out, had been “the only boy [at school] who mentioned Mummy to me after she disappeared.”
Harry remained close with Henners’ older brother, Thomas, as well as his younger one, Charlie. It was Thomas – whom Harry describes as “so funny and witty” with an “infectious laugh” – that the Duke jetted off to LA with in 2016, only to end up at a party at Courteney Cox’s house taking magic mushrooms (one of the weirder anecdotes in the book). Meanwhile, Charlie was the best man at Harry and Meghan’s wedding – not William, as was previously reported – and was named as Archie’s godfather. Undoubtedly, the whole clan were regulars at ‘Club H’, William and Harry’s infamous club in the basement at Highgrove, where they drank rum and coke and vodka Red Bulls and snogged girls. “When I wanted mischief, Club H was the safest place to act out,” writes Harry.
George Hill
In the book, Harry reveals one of the happiest periods of his life was when, as a 19-year-old fresh out of Eton, he spent two months as a jackaroo in the Australian outback. Harry arrived at Tooloombilla Station in southern central Queensland just after leaving school, where he stayed on a 16,000-hectare cattle property owned by Noel and Annie Hill, friends of Diana’s (Hill’s father also happened to be a millionaire polo star who had once coached Charles). There he became fast friends with their son, George. After a hard day of herding cattle, the two boys would sit on the porch together “rolling cigarettes [and] sipping cold beers.” Though there was one activity Harry refused to engage in: “snipping [the cattle’s] balls. Every time George brought out that long shiny blade, I’d raise my hands. ‘No mate, can’t do it.’ ‘Suit yourself.’”
After six weeks together – a period Harry goes on to refer to as “some of the best weeks of my life” - Harry started morphing into George. “I sounded nothing like Willy and Pa. I sounded more like George. And dressed a bit like him as well. I took to wearing a slouchy felt cowboy hat like his.” Along with this new persona, George also helped bestow upon Harry a new nickname: Spike, in honour of a brutal haircut he’d been given while at Eton. After the death of Henners, George filled the gap as Harry’s closest friend and became the person he took on his gap year to Lesotho. It was George who was with him when he flew to Cape Town in 2004 and met one of the most important women in his life: Chelsy Davy.
Eugenie York and Jack Brooksbank
Harry and his cousin Eugenie have been described as the “closest of friends”, and their bond seems to have been cemented further when Meghan Markle came along, as Eugenie and Meghan already knew each other. Harry reveals that ‘Euge’ and her then-boyfriend Jack were the first family members to meet Meghan, after they were invited over to dinner at Nottingham Cottage. “I remember Euge hugging Meg, as if they were sisters. I remember thinking: if meeting the rest of my family goes like this, we’re home free.”
Eugenie is thought to be the only royal to have visited the Duke and Duchess since they moved to California, and many hoped she could be the one to broker some sort of truce and bring Harry back into the family fold. But there are now fears that their bond could be tested by the publication of the book, in which Harry becomes the first senior royal to openly criticise her father, the Duke of York, over his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, writing that his uncle was embroiled in a “a shameful scandal, accused of sexually assaulting a young girl”.
The lads
Harry is tellingly tight-lipped about many of his other close friends in the book, never divulging their full names. A throwaway reference is made to Skippy as another Club H regular - Tom ‘Skippy’ Inskip was one of Harry’s closest childhood friends and a familiar fixture during his party years. He was on the guest list for Harry’s debauched 2012 trip to Las Vegas and it’s thought Harry was the best man at his wedding to Lara Hughes-Young in 2017, one of the first events Harry and Meghan attended as a couple. But after reportedly voicing his concerns about how fast things were moving with Meghan, Skippy was dramatically cut from the guest list for the royal wedding after-party and, if his glaring omission from Spare is anything to go by, it seems their friendship never recovered.
It’s said Harry has lost touch with many of his friends in the UK since relocating to California, but his unnamed coterie of pals are given a heartfelt dedication in the book’s epilogue. “To my mates in the UK, who have stuck by me, who may not have seen it all clearly as it was happening, but who always saw me, knew me, stood by me – in amongst the fog – thank you for everything. And thank you for the laughs. Next round’s on me.”
The girlfriends
Chelsy Davy
Harry and his first serious girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, became an item during Harry’s gap year in 2004, when they met up in Cape Town (they’d originally met at the Berkshire Polo Club a few years earlier). “I remembered her being… Different,” writes Harry. “Unlike so many girls I met, she wasn’t visibly fitting herself for a crown the moment she shook my hand.” The pair bonded over their shared love of Africa and Harry fell head over heels for this girl who “wore short skirts and high boots, danced with abandon [and] drank as much tequila as I did.”
But there were dark clouds looming. ‘Chels’ hated the relentless hounding by the paparazzi and, according to Harry, struggled at times with playing second fiddle to his army career. As the media attention increased, Chelsy called Harry and said she wasn’t sure she was up for a “lifetime of being stalked.” Harry understood. “If I had a choice, I wouldn’t want this life either.” After seven years of on-off dating they finally reached “an emotional cul-de-sac” and split for good in 2011.
Cressida Bonas
While there were the odd dalliances – a few dates with the presenter Caroline Flack, who Harry liked because “she didn’t have a big ego”, and a short-but-sweet few weeks with model Florence ‘Flea’ Brudenell-Bruce, a period Harry describes as “idyllic” – Harry’s only other girlfriend of note before Meghan was the “soft-spoken and shy” actress Cressida Bonas. The pair were introduced at a music festival by Princess Eugenie, a good friend of Cressida’s.
In the book, Harry reveals the couple managed to keep their relationship secret for two whole years before the press caught wind of it, but like Chelsy before her, she too was wary of life as a royal wife, and all that it entailed. Eventually, Harry realised it wasn’t “love everlasting” and called time on their relationship – but not before Cress performed a minor miracle and managed to get Harry to open up about his mother, something no family member or previous girlfriend had been able to do. “She was the first person to help me across that barrier, to help me unleash the tears. It was cathartic, it accelerated our bond and added an element rare in past relationships: immense gratitude.”
The staff
Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton
Harry wasn’t fond of many members of the Palace staff, but there were a few that he loved fiercely. At the top of that list was Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton – or JLP – who was appointed to be William and Harry’s private secretary in 2005. Dubbed “Marko 2.0” by Harry, JLP had come recommended by Marko himself, meaning he had that “all-important seal of approval”. “Deeply calm” and “slightly stiff”, he was brought on board to mind, guide and advise the boys, picking up where Marko had left off in a more official capacity.
The quality that Harry most admired in JLP was his “reverence for truth”. He knew that he could trust him with anything, and that included one particularly sensitive request: to see the secret police files on the crash that killed his mother. After warning him that they would be “very upsetting indeed”, JLP chose the ones that he felt Harry should see. Of the other photos, Harry writes: “If JLP didn’t think I could handle them, then I probably couldn’t.” JLP had a knack for gently guiding the Duke in the right direction – he was the one who organised Harry’s trip to Berlin, to smooth things over after his Nazi costume debacle, and he was the only person Harry tested lines out on before his nerve-wracking compere gig at William and Kate’s wedding.
Billy the Rock
Over the years, Harry employed a number of bodyguards, but his favourite of them all was Billy, who the Duke grew “particularly close to”. Due to his solid, dependable nature, Harry nicknamed him “Billy the Rock”. Spare is peppered with anecdotes about the scrapes that Billy helped Harry get out of, including hiding him in the boots of cars in an attempt to squirrel him out of nightclubs unseen and acting as his punching bag during one particularly drunken night in Paris, after Harry had insisted on driving multiple times through the tunnel where Diana died.
Billy was there in Vegas, talking him out of getting an ill-advised tattoo – little did he know, the tattoo was to be the least of their worries that night – and going to battle with the paps on his behalf on a near daily basis. He even, somewhat bizarrely, helped Harry pick out his clothes during shopping trips to TK Maxx. “If I was on the fence about it, I’d ask Billy the Rock. He delighted in moonlighting as my stylist.”
Ed Lane Fox
It would seem Harry can’t get enough of a three-letter nickname – after JLP came Ed Lane Fox, or Elf, taking over as the Duke’s private secretary in 2013. Described by Harry as “trim, smart [and] sleek”, Harry remarks that he often reminded people of William. “But that was down to his hairline more than his personality.” (William’s baldness is a recurring motif throughout the book.) Staunchly reliable and trustworthy, it was Elf who first introduced Harry to Sir Keith Mills, who was to be instrumental in launching the inaugural Invictus Games in 2014.
In the book, Harry reveals the key role that Elf played in his proposal to Meghan, delivering the news that before he could get down on one knee, he had to ask the Queen’s permission first. While Harry scoffed about this outdated rule, the ever-practical Elf was on hand to offer up a sobering reminder on the Royals’ stance on marrying divorcées. “Duke of Windsor? Ever heard of him?”
