Prince Harry's Book Omits Crucial Detail About Tabloid Drugs Sting

Prince Harry said he was thrown "under the bus" when King Charles III's aide did a deal with a tabloid editor for "one shiny consolation prize for Pa"—but he failed to mention a significant detail.

One major allegation against the media in the book relates to the newspaper editor referred to through the nickname Rehabber Kooks. This is a thinly veiled, anagrammatic reference to then-News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks, an executive in Rupert Murdoch's media empire.

Harry describes how Brooks approached his father's office with "evidence" he had been taking drugs, while the prince wanted to dismiss the story as lies.

However, to Harry's dismay, Charles' adviser entered negotiations with the newspaper to agree to terms under which they would not oppose publication of the story.

What Harry does not reveal, however, is that the newspaper had indicated it would accuse him of taking cocaine. Buckingham Palace consented to the less-serious allegation that the prince was using cannabis, court documents show.

In fact, a palace spokesman said in 2002 there were "innumerable, almost violent arguments" with the tabloid before striking a deal only when the journalists "finally came up with the proof."

Spare reads: "Pa's office had decided on a... different approach. Rather than telling the editor [Brooks] to call off the dogs, the Palace was opting to play ball with her. They were going full Neville Chamberlain.

"Did Marko [an aide] tell me why? Or did I learn only later that the guiding force behind this putrid strategy was the same spin doctor Pa and Camilla had recently hired, the same spin doctor who'd leaked the details of our private summits with Camilla?" Harry wrote.

"This spin doctor, Marko said, had decided that the best approach in this case would be to spin me—right under the bus. In one swoop this would appease the editor and also bolster the sagging reputation of Pa.

"Amid all this unpleasantness, all this extortion and gamesmanship, the spin doctor had discovered one silver lining, one shiny consolation prize for Pa," the prince added.

"No more the unfaithful husband, Pa would now be presented to the world as the harried single dad coping with a drug-addled child."

Harry's book describes the newspaper's account as false, but he does say in earlier passages that he had been smoking cannabis at Eton. He discusses taking cocaine "around this time" in a passage five months later, just before the Golden Jubilee.

Court filings from Harry's lawsuit against the News of the World, submitted in October 2020 and seen by Newsweek, reveal a different consideration facing the royals before publication of the front page, titled "Harry's Drug Shame."

Harry's lawyer wrote: "The MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] also disclosed an untitled email from [News of the World journalist Clive] Goodman to [then-editor] Rebekah Wade [now Brooks] and Andy Coulson sent at 19:41 on 9 January 2002, which described how they were going to blag Prince Charles into believing that [Prince Harry] was an habitual heavy drinker and user of cocaine and cannabis in order to get an exclusive but softer story on [Prince Harry's] alleged drug use." "To blag" is British slang for the use of deception or trickery to obtain something.

The newspaper's lawyers returned fire, arguing in their own court filing that: "The email makes no reference at all to 'blag[ging] Prince Charles,' whether for the purpose stated or for any other purpose."

In the February 2021, filing, the newspaper's legal team added that "the full content" of the email "will if necessary be relied on at trial."

In the eyes of a palace press officer, negotiating the story down from cocaine to cannabis would have had significant reputational benefits for Prince Harry. This is not least of all because cocaine is deemed Class A under British law, while cannabis is a Class B drug.

There was also a debate in Britain at the time about further lowering cannabis to Class C, after a review was ordered by the Home Secretary in October 2001.

In 2002, an unnamed palace spokesperson also gave a very different account of dealings with the newspaper to respected U.K. industry publication Press Gazette: "There have been stories of a similar nature going around Fleet Street for quite some time.

"The NoW [News of the World] has been trying to write a story either about drinking or about cannabis for probably about nine months and we have had innumerable, almost violent arguments with them about it from which, I think, they came to the view that if they were going to write anything, it had to be accurate.

"They finally came to us last week with information that we could not avoid answering and which was not inaccurate," said the spokesperson.

"The issue for us was not an issue of privacy but of accuracy. We kept this story out of the public domain for quite a long time because nobody's been able to prove anything. But the NoW finally came up with the proof."

The spokesperson added: "The Prince of Wales himself takes a very close personal interest in how these things are handled.

"Few things matter more to him than his children's privacy and how his children are portrayed in the media, and I have always been impressed by how sophisticated his understanding of all this is," the spokesperson said.

"It's based, I suspect, principally on 30 years of observation and getting it wrong himself. He was presented with options last week and the option we went with was the one that he chose."

Harry wrote in his book: "[Brooks] was hunting the Spare, straight out, and making no apologies for it. She wouldn't stop until my balls were nailed to her office wall.
I was lost.

"'For doing basic teenage stuff, Marko?' 'No, boy, no.' In this editor's estimation, Marko said, I was a drug addict," the prince added.

Harry may have had his reasons for objecting to the nature and tone of the coverage, but it is difficult to argue that the only benefit to the palace deal was making Charles look like a better father.

Jack Royston is chief royal correspondent for Newsweek, based in London. You can find him on Twitter at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek's The Royals Facebook page.

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