Prince Harry has been left humiliated after being excluded from a prestigious book celebrating the Sandhurst’s top alumni in what has been branded a snub by a top army commander.
The Duke of Sussex failed to make the military academy’s top 200 people to train at the armed forces military college, despite his brother Prince William making the cut and even penning the foreword to the exclusive guide.
Even James Blunt made the pages of They Also Served for his stint serving for the military in Kosovo before becoming a multi-million-pound singer.
Instead the California-based royal joins other military outcasts, such as fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley and Benson Freeman who joined the Nazi party to become a Waffen-SS officer.
The humiliating blow comes almost a year to the day after the Duke’s explosive memoir Spare was released, where he boasted about killing 25 Taliban fighters, explaining he saw those he killed as ‘chess pieces’ rather than people.
It prompted fury from those within the military ranks, with former British Army colonel Richard Kemp calling the details split in his autobiography a ‘betrayal of the people he fought alongside’.
Reacting to the decision to remove the Prince from the book, Mr Kemp told The Sun: ‘I completely understand why he has not been included. I probably would have included him on balance, but it is not a disappointment to not see him in there.
‘I don’t think he did anything particularly notable in his service but he was certainly a significant person to go to Sandhurst. I suspect the recent disharmony between him and the Royal Family has led them to decide against having him in.
‘One thing he said in his book was the Army taught him to see the enemy as less than human — which is not what we were taught. That has overshadowed a lot of the great things that he has done.’
The author of the book Vaughan Kent-Payne reportedly notes in the book that ‘not everybody who trained [there] was a good egg’, adding that there ‘is a smattering of traitors and cads’ who trained at the prestigious base.
Prince Harry endured the 44-week training course at Sandhurst in Berkshire in 2005 before becoming an Officer in the Household Cavalry Blues and Royals in April 2006.
Throughout his decade-long career in the army, he served two tours in Afghanistan where he acted as a Forward Air Controller from 2007 to 2008 and an Apache Pilot from 2012 to 2013.
Prince William entered Sandhurst in 2006 before serving as attachments with the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy. He served in 150 operations before retiring in 2013.
Sandhurst have chosen 200 ‘exceptional individuals’ to feature in their book, including wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Nigerian president Murtala Mohammed and Oscar winning actor David Niven.
More recent alumni include astronaut Tim Peake and polar explorer Preet Chandi.
Under Prince William’s page, the book reportedly explains that because of the heir’s future duty as king, it meant he ‘could not be deployed on military duty like his younger brother, Harry’.
In his bombshell memoir Prince Harry – who was known as Captain Wales in the military – wrote that he did not think of those killed as people but instead ‘chess pieces’ he had taken off the board.
The Duke, speaking for the first time about the number of insurgents he personally killed during his time in the army, said it was ‘not a fact that filled me with satisfaction but I was not ashamed either’.
It led to a backlash from the military community. Former Royal Marine Ben McBean, who Prince Harry previously hailed as a ‘hero’ after he lost an arm and a leg in a bomb blast during the war, urged the duke to ‘shut up’.
He tweeted after the memoir was published: ‘Love you #PrinceHarry but you need to shut up! Makes you wonder the people he’s hanging around with. If it was good people somebody by now would have told him to stop.’
Meanwhile Bob Stewart – a serving Independent MP who used to be a member of the Conservative Party – slammed the comments as ‘distasteful’.
He said at the time: ‘I wonder why he is doing such things. Real soldiers tend to shy away… People I know don’t boast about such things. They rather regret that they have had to do it.’
Following the public outcry the Duke insisted he had not been boasting about the killings, telling American chat show host Stephen Colbert that his critics were ‘spinning’ his words.
‘I think one of… the most dangerous lies that they have told is that I somehow boasted about the number of people I have killed in Afghanistan,’ he told Colbert.
‘I would say that if I heard anybody else, anyone, boasting about that kind of thing, I would be angry. But it’s a lie.
He added: ‘My words are not dangerous, but the spin of my words are very dangerous to my family.’
James Parker is a UK-based entertainment aficionado who delves into the glitz and glamour of the entertainment industry. From Hollywood to the West End, he offers readers an insider’s perspective on the world of movies, music, and pop culture.
