THOSE ROYAL PARTIES

Questions For Both Princes And Their Protectors

The problems of under-age drinking and drug abuse are ones with which many
parents of teenagers have had to wrestle. There will be some sympathy,
therefore, for the Prince of Wales this morning. Prince Harry has admitted
that he smoked cannabis and drank regularly last summer when he was 16.
Prince Charles secured his son's attendance at a rehabilitation clinic for
drug abusers in order to confront him with the potential impact of drugs on
people's lives. According to family friends, Prince Harry learnt a sharp
lesson and has forsworn both drink and drugs since.

Tony Blair, who won public understanding when his son Euan, then aged 16,
was found drunk in Leicester Square, yesterday praised Prince Charles's
sensitive handling of the situation. The Prince of Wales is said to have
acted calmly and with speed, avoiding angry confrontation in an attempt to
persuade as well as reproach his son. Family friends have been at pains to
portray this simply as aberrant behaviour from a teenager who fell in with
a "bad lot" at a pub they consider to be disreputable.

The Royal Family will recognise, however, that this is not quite the end of
the story. It was a gamble to allow a 16-year-old the run of Highgrove
while his brother was abroad and his father in London. Gambles can be lost.
With hindsight, while the trust Prince Charles places in his sons is
admirable, it was foolhardy to allow Prince Harry to invite friends round
so freely. Some of those friends brought drugs with them; there was grass
amidst the roses in the Highgrove garden. Hindsight, of course, is a much
more distorting drug than cannabis. But, even without its backwards view,
many parents might balk at giving their own teenagers the freedom the young
Prince enjoyed and abused.

There are questions too for Prince Harry's royal protection officers to
answer. Delicate distinctions between protection and intrusion have to be
made in guarding royal youngsters. How long have these personal police been
allowing the Prince to drink in a pub while under the legal drinking age?
Was it their policy simply to turn a blind eye to evidence of drug-taking?
These are attractive posts for a certain sort of police officer, jobs in
which there is a great tempation to see the royal teenager as the
commanding factor, as the one who keeps them in comfortable employ, not his
absent father or the public interest.

The Prince of Wales has been wise to deal with these revelations as
candidly as he has. It is said that Prince Harry himself decided, when
confronted by his father, that there is no point in hiding the truth. That
much is for the good. But the future issues are stark. The Press has no
duty to protect the privacy of those who break the law, least of all those
who think that they can breach the law, with no risk of legal recourse at
all, under cover of their rank.

The current compact through the Press Complaints Commission is a delicate
agreement. While sympathy is due to royal teenagers growing up with the
public spotlight trained upon them, a high degree of responsibility is
demanded too. While Prince Harry should be allowed, as far as possible, to
grow up without his name in weekly headlines, the extent of that
possibility depends much less on the press than on the Prince's
professional and familial protectors and, notwithstanding his youth, upon
the Prince himself