Royal biographer Penny Junor is back, and marking Prince Harry's 30th birthday with a series of splashy pieces profiling the young(ish) Prince for the Daily Mail.
It's a brilliant read, packed with all the detail and anecdote you would expect of Harry's 'reckless binges' and womanising, but one throwaway line stands out for the Royalist - in 2003, Junor claims, the News of The World obtained a sample of Prince Harry's hair and DNA tested it to see if he was really the son of Diana's former lover James Hewitt.
Rumors that the shuttered Murdoch tabloid had undertaken a DNA test on Harry's hair - and that the test proved negative - have abounded for many years on Fleet Street, but it's interesting to see that Junor and the Mail are now happy enough to publish the story openly.
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You can't libel the dead, and, presumably, the Mail has concluded that they are unlikely to be given any trouble by a dead newspaper either.
Junor writes, "The News of the World even had strands of Harry’s hair DNA-tested in February 2003 — and if Harry had been shown to be James Hewitt’s son, you can be sure we’d have known."
Harry does indeed bear a passing resemblance to the ginger-haired James Hewitt, the arch-cad who sold the story of his long-term relationship to Di to the papers, but Hewitt himself looks remarkably like Diana's Spencer relations.
The Royalist has always maintained that Harry's red hair is a Spencer, not a Hewitt trait.
