- No disrespect to weasels, but "Waleses" anagrammatizes to "Weasels." Archived Message
Posted by Morrissey
on January 10, 2023, 10:23 pm
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And "SPARE" anagrammatizes to "RAPES"... The wild nights of Harry and William that you won’t read about in Spare by Melissa Twigg 05:00, Jan 11 2023 https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/royals/300781682/the-wild-nights-of-harry-and-william-that-you-wont-read-about-in-spare Picture the scene: the music is pumping and you’re sipping a Treasure Chest – a large and lethal fruit punch filled with brandy, peach liqueur, lime and champagne and decorated with fruit ‘jewels’ – when a man in a blue shirt and baggy trousers sidles up to you. You protest when he takes a sip from one of your multiple coloured straws – until he removes his cap, that is, and you spot a distinctive ginger quiff. If you were female, pretty and in a short enough skirt, this was a scene that played out more than once in Mahiki, the glossy Mayfair nightclub that was – for a period in the 2000s – the ‘it’ hangout of London. Much of its appeal came from the fact it was regularly frequented by one or both of the young Waleses, but it was Prince Harry who became the undisputed king of west London nightlife. Oddly – given that partying is essentially what he was known for until Meghan came along – this is a period of time Prince Harry barely touches upon in his book. “Perhaps it’s convenient for his narrative that he seems to have forgotten those hedonistic days,” says Katie Nicholl, the author of The New Royals and a woman who herself got into royal commentary after meeting Prince Harry at the Kensington Roof Gardens nightclub in 2006. “On second thoughts,” Nicholl adds, “perhaps he hasn’t reminisced much because he had a lot of vodka Red Bulls and ‘Crack Baby’ shots and genuinely can’t remember it all”. Dangerously, he was also drinking for free. “William and Harry would always be taken to a table and have everything comped for the whole night. That was just a given,” she says. Mahiki was the most famous of the string of London nightclubs the princes frequented. Hedonistic, subterranean and Polynesian-themed, it typified a new, more extravagant version of nightlife that started to emerge as post-millennium London was flooded with international money. Across the road from the Ritz, Mahiki managed to be both laidback and exclusive – a table with a bottle of vodka cost upwards of £1000 and unless you were particularly attractive (or royal), you needed to wrangle your way onto the guest list. Opened in 2006 and the brainchild of entrepreneur Piers Adam, it prided itself on its lack of pretension. “It brings together these different worlds. It’s Tatler meets The Sun. It’s Kensington meets Essex,” said Adam in an interview. “Somehow, these tribes work well together. Because one thing all Brits have is a sense of fun.” The posh in particular love nothing more than a good tune they can bop around to (other central London nightclubs at the time were of the R&B variety rather than the Britney Spears one) and the sheer number of blond quiffs and suede shoes on the dancefloor suggests the clientele was more familiar with the Tatler bystander column than the Sun’s readers’ page. “A friend and I used to play a drinking game to see how long it would take someone to ask you where you went to school – on average I would say it was about two or three minutes,” says Sarah, who worked as a nightclub promoter at the time. Harry was the leader of the tribe and once Guy Pelly – then best friend to the princes – was hired to help run Mahiki, every girl with the dream of a Kensington Palace address (or simply a good story to tell at the next dinner party) followed suit. The princes felt safe there because they knew none of the managers would call the press. “There was always a bit of a buzz on the nights Harry or William turned up – although often you wouldn’t always realise, as they’d come and go via the staff entrance, or even arrive wearing balaclavas,” says Lucie, who worked on the door at Mahiki in the late 2000s. “They usually stuck to a private roped-off area of the club – although I do remember Harry coming on to the main dancefloor to have some fun.” For much of Harry’s party period he was in the military and in an on-off relationship with Zimbabwean Chelsy Davy. Often they went out together, but in their break-up periods there were plenty of distractions. Promoters were charged with bringing in attractive young women: one editor who was a fashion student at the time said that she and her friends were regularly invited to Mahiki to enjoy a free night with drinks on tap and platters of food. “The promoters’ job was to bring in stylish young girls,” she says. “We had no obligation other than to look good, have fun and take pictures on our digital cameras. For students it was a dream scenario.” However, they all learned not to point their cameras at the princes. “Do that and you realise that the nondescript person at another table is in fact a security officer,” says Nicholl. “For the most part though, the partygoers respected their privacy.” The bigger problem was outside. William and Harry had to deal with increasingly hungry groups of paparazzi who would crowd the club doors in the hopes of getting a picture. One person I speak to says it was once rumoured that William was snuck out the back door while Harry was left to deal with the press. Memorably, the younger prince had a scuffle with a photographer when leaving Pangea nightclub in 2004. Drugs were also ubiquitous – and the popularity of cocaine in particular meant that many of the clubs employed bouncers to man the bathrooms. “Of course, I had been taking cocaine at that time,” writes Harry in Spare. “At someone’s house, during a hunting weekend, I was offered a line, and since then I had consumed some more … It wasn’t very fun, and it didn’t make me feel especially happy as seemed to happen to others, but it did make me feel different, and that was my main objective. To feel. To be different.” Now closed, Boujis was another fixture on the party circuit. Opened in 2002 in South Kensington, it was fronted by Jake Parkinson-Smith, grandson of the fashion photographer Norman Parkinson, and quickly became the spot where the city’s privileged young things partied with the European rich, models, and, of course, the princes. “Boujis was the most fun of the lot,” says Tilly, who knew the princes well at the time. “I think it’s a burger joint now, and I feel sad every time I walk past. We used to have one Crack Baby shot after another – they were vodka, champagne and passionfruit, and you could have 10 in a row and still stand upright.” More than Mahiki, Boujis built a lot of its reputation around its royal connections. “Celebrities like Kate Moss would turn up, but it was ultimately all about the princes,” says Sarah. “People would get through the door and immediately start royal spotting – the jackpot was William and Harry, although they were happy to see Kate, Beatrice, Eugenie and Zara too.” “It was a real feature of that period,” adds Nicholl, “the boys on their nights out and the groups of glamorous long-limbed beauties on prince-watch.” There is something eternally British about all this – and much of this behaviour would be recognisable to Becky Sharpe or one of Jane Austen’s more upwardly mobile characters. And while Harry appears to have now rejected this period of his life, one hopes that he did at least enjoy some of it. “He was a young prince and he was having fun like many of his relatives had done before him,” says Nicholl. “Very few people were going to berate him for that.” Except, it seems, the new post-therapy version of Prince Harry. More on Prince Harry.... https://morrisseybreen.blogspot.com/2018/01/dont-mention-hookers-or-cocaine.html https://morrisseybreen.blogspot.com/2018/05/murdering-rich-bastard-condemned-around.html https://morrisseybreen.blogspot.com/2018/12/your-post-is-defamatory-it-has-in-past.html rightoverlabour #### off, ####. Your post is defamatory. It has in the past been reported to the Govenor General who is aware of your demation of Prince Harry. They have replied to my complaint and I intend to remind them again of your illegal behavior. DPF please take note. Thumb up 2 Thumb down 0 REPLY REPORT DECEMBER 15, 2018 10:13AM |
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