TIME ON HIS HANDS

Prince Harry Turns 32 Today But Still Has No Wife, Girlfriend Or Colleagues To Mark It With

Prince Harry turns 32 today—but he’s still no closer to a wife or a job. What’s the young royal planning for the year ahead?

Prince Harry turns 32 today, and, amidst the celebrations at Kensington Palace today, where the tanned and bearded royal is once again based after an extended summer sojourn in Africa, the question of what Harry is actually planning to do with the rest of his life continues to trouble royal strategists.

Although Harry has made it very clear he would like a wife and children, he doesn’t seem to have been able to translate that wish into solid action.

The young royal feels that he faces almost impossible problems when it comes to meeting Mrs. Right—he has told friends and interviewers that “even if I talk to a girl, that person is then suddenly my wife, and people go knocking on her door.”

“If or when I do find a girlfriend,” he told an interviewer for the Sunday Times, “I will do my utmost... to ensure that me and her can get to the point where we’re actually comfortable with each other before the massive invasion that is inevitably going to happen into her privacy.”

There have been persistent rumors that Harry may be secretly hoping to one day get back together with his ex-girlfriend Chelsy Davy, whom he dated for almost seven years.

Harry spent several months this summer in Africa working on an elephant conservation project, and there has been much speculation that she might have met up with Harry.

Chelsy is still very much part of the young royal set—she is close friends with Princess Eugenie and another of Harry’s ex-girlfriends, Cressida Bonas, and she spent part of her summer in Africa, launching her new venture, an ethical jewellery company named Aya.

In the course of promoting the new range, Chelsy spoke frankly to The Times, telling the paper of her time with Harry, “It was so full-on: crazy and scary and uncomfortable. I found it very difficult when it was bad. I couldn’t cope.”

The reality is, however, that Chelsy has moved on, and as he turns 32, Harry still has no job or wife on the cards.

In the end, he may be better hooking up with someone with a high profile in their own right, who would be less freaked out by being plunged into the public eye.

Ellie Goulding, perhaps?

Professionally Harry seems happy enough to continue working on a more or less ad hoc basis with his conservation charities and the Invictus Games for wounded servicemen. But people who know and have worked with Harry have told The Daily Beast that Harry misses the structure of Army life.

He left the Army last year after 10 years as an officer.

Harry’s main focus for the year ahead will be his charities—one of his first actions on getting back to the U.K. last week was to pay a private visit to HIV hospital Mildmay in east London, which his mother famously toured; it was where she held hands with patients on camera.

Harry is now said to be ‘preparing” for a high-profile foreign tour the Caribbean in the “late autumn,” which will see him visiting Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Grenada, Guyana, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, and St Vincent and the Grenadines.

We are sure Harry has a busy inbox, at least, one hopes so; as six weeks seems like a long time to be getting ready for such a jaunt.

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Tom SykesEuropean Editor at Large

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