Photos of nude Harry get shrugs in Britain

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RYAN REMIORZ / THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES At Canada House in London, Prince Harry watches the Canadian women�s eights rowers win silver at the Olympics on Aug. 2. (CP)

LONDON -- Britain's Prince Harry has been caught on camera doing something embarrassing -- again.

Celebrity gossip website TMZ posted photos Tuesday of the 27-year-old royal cavorting nude with an unidentified woman in a VIP suite in Las Vegas.

It's hardly the first time the prince -- who allegedly disrobed as part of a game of strip pool -- has been filmed in a compromising situation.

The third in line to the throne was famously photographed wearing a Nazi uniform for a costume party.

In another photo gaffe, he was seen cupping the breast of a female TV presenter.

Some would argue footage in which he was heard to utter a racial slur while teasing a fellow army cadet from Pakistan was more serious.

If the reaction of Britons to Harry's Las Vegas adventure was anything to go by, the nude photos will do little to tarnish his generally positive, party-prince image. The Associated Press asked an assortment of royal watchers and British subjects what they thought about the prince's naked romp.

Did Harry do anything wrong?

Jim Conlon, a 60-year-old construction worker: "The answer to that is categorically NO." Conlon, who was unloading bags of material from a car, seemed genuinely offended by the very question. "I'd be proud of him if he were my son," he said.

Caregiver Shirley Ashard laughed at the news of Harry's naked adventure, dismissing questions about the propriety of running around a plush hotel room in the buff with a boys-will-be-boys shrug. "I've got kids. They do things like that," the 59-year-old said. "He's a lad, for God's sake."

Will Harry's romp harm the image of the prince or the Royal Family?

Hanad Darwish, a 19-year-old student from Birmingham, worried about what Harry's hijinks said about his judgment.

"It is a little immature and gives the royals a bad image," he said.

But Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine, said it wasn't likely Harry's reputation would suffer. Seward said his party-boy image was part of his approachable,, normal persona.

"Of course it's stupid, but it doesn't make people dislike him -- quite the opposite," she said. "It shows that he is a guy who gets into trouble and he's the one people love to love. It could only happen to Harry -- but we love him for it."

She did think, though, that Harry might get a talking-to from Prince Charles. "I would think his father would speak to him," she said.

Doesn't the Royal Family have a history of bad-boy behaviour?

Yes, said Anne Sebba, biographer of Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee whose affair with King Edward VIII, Harry's great-great-uncle, led to his abdication in 1936.

That king's grandfather, Edward VII, who reigned from 1901 to 1910, had many affairs, parking his carriage outside the houses of his mistresses while he visited.

Edward VIII and Simpson were well known in upper-crust circles for their hedonistic parties, and some visitors wrote their shocked reactions in diaries.

"It didn't reach the papers," Sebba said. "It is just in the private diaries. Nobody was taking photographs. Nobody was posting it on the Internet.

"The old system depended on incredible discretion, loyalty and deference, and all that has gone.

"The Royal Family has had to make themselves so open and available, and this is the downside of the coin."

Both of Prince Harry's parents had affairs. His mother, the late Princess Diana, acknowledged she strayed, and his father Prince Charles's reputation initially took a hit when details of his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, now his second wife, went public.

What about the prince's privacy?

The blurry, low-resolution photographs appear to have been snapped from inside a hotel suite, and it isn't clear that the prince was aware they were being taken.

That could be a violation of the royal's privacy. It might also explain why Britain's scandal-hungry tabloids, normally avid consumers of titillating photos, were steering clear of the images.

Isn't someone supposed to be watching him?

Royal protection officers watch over the Queen and her family 24 hours a day, seven days a week, though they remain firmly outside the bedroom door. So shouldn't someone have been around to make sure this didn't happen? Dai Davies, a former head of royal protection, said it did seem as if someone had let their guard down.

-- The Associated Press

Royal redhead's

public missteps

The posting of nude photos of Prince Harry isn't the first time he's been caught in an embarrassing position. Some others:

-- At age 17, Harry reaped negative publicity when he was involved in underage drinking and taking cannabis.

-- In 2004, he was photographed scuffling with a photographer outside a nightclub in London.

-- In 2005, Harry caused international outrage when he attended a costume party wearing a Nazi swastika armband.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 23, 2012 A9