RICHARD KAY on Prince Harry and the Greta Thunberg pranksters

By some measure, the tricking of Harry by a fake Greta Thunberg, in which he allowed his loose tongue to talk recklessly as never before, will become as humiliating for the prince as his frolics in a Las Vegas hotel back in 2012.

The secretly recorded hoax tape — gleefully plastered over the internet on Tuesday night — reveals that the line between royal dignity and foolishness is very thin indeed.

Indeed, it is hard to conceive of another more embarrassing episode in which a member of the Royal Family has been so comprehensively duped as the Duke of Sussex has.

By assuming that the figure on the end of the mobile phone number he had called was the Swedish climate-change activist, he put aside caution and protocol in a series of quite extraordinary exchanges.

He was the victim of Russian pranksters who in the course of an hour — in two separate phone calls — charmed, cajoled but ultimately invited him to speak out about things a wiser Harry would never have been drawn on.

Not even basic security checks were done before the duke was telling the pranksters about his struggles over his exile from the Royal Family, his disdain for his uncle Prince Andrew and, in a potentially explosive intervention diplomatically, accusing President Trump of having ‘blood on his hands’.

It is hard to know who will be more appalled — Harry for making an idiot of himself or the wider royals aghast at how he tore up their reputation for even-handed neutrality and for keeping family secrets. 

In a series of astonishing admissions, he said he was ‘completely separate’ from the Royal Family and chose to withdraw from royal life to ‘protect my son’.

He was the unwitting subject of a series of jokes during the two calls. At one point he was tricked into offering to help a fictional island called ‘Chunga-Changa’, which the pranksters said was being exploited by mining companies close to the U.S. president. 

Chunga-Changa is the name of a Russian children’s song about a tropical island that doesn’t exist and where it is always summertime.

Harry was also offered a ride across the Atlantic on Greta’s catamaran with her ‘hippy’ friends, but warned that they would all be smoking cannabis. The pranksters even brought up Harry’s past drugs use.

In one toe-curling exchange, the duke failed to spot the jokers wanted to ship penguins — which are native to the South Pole — all the way to the North Pole.

And he failed to notice the absurdity of their request for him to sail from landlocked Belarus, a country with no coastline.

The comedians even told the duke they could help him claim the throne of Russia and suggested Greta could marry Prince George to help promote her climate change cause.

Po-faced Harry pointed out that ‘marrying a prince or princess isn’t all it’s made up to be’. How on earth could he have been so spectacularly duped?

Comedians Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexey Stolyarov — who call themselves Vovan and Lexus —obtained a telephone number for the sixth in line to the throne through an ‘intermediary’. Posing as Swedish climate activist Greta, 17, and her father Svante, they left a message for Harry to call them.

Remarkably, he rang back. Yesterday, the Royal Family and senior aides were clearly reeling with shock over the blunder after the calls were published on Facebook and YouTube. Insiders warned that the debacle was a direct result of Harry and Meghan’s refusal to take advice from their Buckingham Palace team.

For the past eight months or so the couple have been taking advice from a team of U.S.-based PR agents and business managers, many of whom worked with Meghan when she was an actress.

So how did this all come about? Here it should be said that two versions of Prince Harry have been on show this week. On Monday, he and Meghan took the curtain call on their royal life at the Commonwealth Day Service, alongside the Queen at Westminster Abbey. 

To some, their appearance was a reminder to the world of the star-power they brought to the Royal Family — and presumably what the family are about to lose.

But it also showed the awkward body language between Prince William and Harry and the sadness at the huge gulf that has opened up between two brothers who were once so close, but have chosen very different life paths — duty versus celebrity.

This, though, was merely a foretaste of what was to come. The tape recording was of the other Harry, the woke prince who now likes to see himself as the maverick outsider challenging conventional views and outspoken on climate change and other global issues.

To be fair, it must be said that the sixth in line to the throne never dreamed that the contents of the conversation would be made public. However, the extraordinary lack of judgment he displayed in unburdening himself — not once but twice — to complete strangers offers a remarkable insight into the prince’s mind.

In the recordings, the caution that would usually inform conversations by a member of the Royal Family was sadly absent.

What comes across is not just his ‘us against the world’ attitude, but a sense of entitlement and that he knows best.

Dismissive of Prince Andrew and patronising of the other royals, he has presented a window into his psyche that is not just fascinating but also troubling.

How often in recent weeks have we witnessed Harry selfishly trampling over his old life irrespective of the hurt and damage he has brought to his own family?

No wonder William and Kate looked nonplussed as they took their seats in the Abbey on Monday just a row ahead of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Their life has been made infinitely more demanding by the self-imposed absenteeism of Harry and Meghan.

Now, with the stage lights barely dimmed on their glamorous swansong, Harry has once again stuck a spanner in the royal works.

Harry is thought to have taken one of the calls on New Year’s Eve — before his deal to quit the Royal Family had been agreed — and the second on January 22, barely three days after agreement had been reached. On both occasions Harry was understood to have been at his hideaway mansion on Vancouver Island, Canada, with Meghan and their infant son Archie.

Was it the wintry weather that made him particularly vulnerable or the fact that it was the turn of the year and he was far from family and friends?

What the calls certainly reveal is not just his naivety but also the consequences of no longer having Buckingham Palace to support him. The ease with which the fake Greta got through to Harry shows just how exposed the prince in his new life now is to hustlers and fraudsters whose motives may be far more dangerous than mere comedians.

Just how the hoaxers, two Russian comics whose previous victims have included singer Elton John and U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, managed to reach the prince is already the subject of an urgent internal inquiry.

What’s more, Harry would never have ventured his opinion about Donald Trump as a full-time working royal.

But emboldened by his new status and, presumably, by his wife, the deregulated Harry thinks it is perfectly legitimate to attack Mr Trump for ramping up coal production in America.

Rather than earning respect for his views, he found himself being mocked. An extract from one of the recorded calls was published on YouTube along with an animated cartoon of the prince. In the accompanying audio, a voice which is reportedly the prince’s tells hoaxers the world is being led by ‘some very sick people’.

It continues: ‘The fossil fuel industry and certain presidents around the world are driving completely the wrong agenda. I think the mere fact that Donald Trump is pushing the coal industry so big in America, he has blood on his hands. Because the effect that that has on the climate and the island nations far, far away —again out of sight, out of mind.’

In fairness, he is not the only royal duped by telephone tricksters. In 1995, a Montreal radio host got through to the Queen after persuading Buckingham Palace officials he was the Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and later broadcast the conversation.

A year later, Princess Diana was hoaxed by writer Victor Lewis-Smith who posed as physicist Professor Stephen Hawking, but the interview was never aired.

But this is so far removed from the old Harry, the soldier prince who even at his most foolish — such as playing strip billiards on a trip to Las Vegas shortly before a deployment to Afghanistan — still endeared himself to royal fans.

Nothing in those days could dent his popularity which made him by some distance the second most admired royal after the Queen.

It is his conceit that is the most revealing. Asked by the prankster pretending to be Greta’s father if normal life was worse than royal life, Harry has an apparent dig at the royals. Chuckling, he replies: ‘Oh no. I think it’s much better.

‘You forget I was in the military for ten years so I’m more normal than my family would like to believe.’ But what should we make of his attitude towards Prince Andrew, not only his uncle but someone who has also had to bear the responsibility of being the ‘spare to the heir’?

Asked about the scandal surrounding the Duke of York’s friendship with billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Harry says: ‘I have very little to say on that.

‘But whatever he has done or hasn’t done is completely separate from me and my wife.’

Hardly a ringing endorsement as he loftily adds this view on his relationship with the Royal Family. ‘We (he and Meghan) operate in a way of inclusivity and we are focusing on community. And so we are completely separate from the majority of my family.’

As for their break with the royals he says: ‘Um, it’s, that’s probably a conversation for another time, there’s lots of layers to it and lots of pieces to the puzzle. But sometimes the right decision isn’t always the easy one.

‘I can assure you, marrying a prince or princess is not all it’s made out to be!

‘And this decision certainly wasn’t the easy one, but it was the right decision for our family, the right decision to be able to protect my son.

‘And I think there’s a hell of a lot of people around the world that can identify and respect us for putting our family first.

‘But, yeah, it’s a tricky one, but we will start a new life.’

He said he and Meghan were finding normality ‘much better’ than royal life.

During the calls, the pranksters ask about being ‘stripped’ of his royal titles by the Queen after he and Meghan decided to step back.

Harry replies: ‘No, no, again you mustn’t believe what you read, no one has stripped us of our titles.

‘Because of a technicality within the family, if we are earning money separately from within the family structure, then we obviously have been asked not to use our titles in order to make money, which we would never do.’

Naturally, there are plenty of references to the media and its criticism of him using private jets while lecturing the world on pollution. ‘It’s amazing we get accused by them for having to use a plane that was used simply to get away from them and not be followed for a family break. Unfortunately, there is very few alternatives.’

He speaks, too, of ‘boats with paparazzi’ taking photographs of their Canadian hideaway.

Many will be left puzzled by what possessed Harry to open up as he has done. Some doubtless will say he has lost his bearings, that ripping himself from the anchorage of his family has taken away the one reliable constant in his life.

Didn’t he smell a rat? It is hard to imagine any other member of the Royal Family falling quite so spectacularly for this deception.

But then he allows the conversation to meander further into the realms of fantasy when ‘Greta’ talks about being a member of the Swedish royal family and making a dynastic marriage to help climate change. Even when she suggests Harry’s nephew Prince George as a possible ‘candidate’, he appears not to terminate the conversation. ‘I am sure I can help,’ he says laughing.

No one will be laughing inside Buckingham Palace. This was the kind of shambolic episode royal aides have feared about Megxit.