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Slumped in a chair with a gin and tonic in his hand, Prince Harry was speaking from the heart. 'The trouble is,' he said, 'I'm not like any other young man. It's difficult to be normal.'

Harry was having a drink with General Sir Richard Dannatt and his wife Pippa in their Kensington Palace apartment.

'One's heart really went out to him,' says the former head of the Army, now Lord Dannatt, who has four children of his own, including a son who followed him into the Army.

'I felt really sympathetic because if you are a young prince you are not like everybody else. However much you want to be yourself, people don't allow you to be.'

Ten years after that fireside conversation, who would say Prince Harry isn't being himself now? Even when he was going through the wildest periods of his younger life, nobody expected him to marry an outspoken American divorcee three years his senior.

Even when he was going through the wildest periods of his younger life, nobody expected Prince Harry (pictured in Las Vegas) to marry an outspoken American divorcee three years his senior

But then, even when he was eight years old, there may have been signs that his life would not follow conventional royal lines.

Quarrelling with his brother while they rode together in the back of a palace limousine, he said: 'It's all right for you, William, you're going to be king. But I can do anything I want.'

If those words suggested envy, they also, surely, hinted at relish.

Driving the car that day, Princess Diana heard what he said with some alarm and a mother's instinct. The last thing she wanted was her younger son to grow up feeling second best.

She always went out of her way to make sure the boys were treated equally, as did Prince Charles — ensuring, for example, that when William was pictured by the world's media on his first day at Eton, Harry was in the photographs too.

One day, Harry complained to her that whenever they went to see their great-granny, the Queen Mother, at Clarence House, it was always William she made a fuss over and who sat next to her. 'It's not fair,' Harry told his mother.

Diana immediately phoned the Queen Mother and, as diplomatically as possible, rebuked her for showing favouritism to the son who was the future king because of how it was affecting the son who wasn't. After that, things are said to have changed, a little.

Could this be why Harry grew into a young man who goes out of his way to stand up for outsiders?

Prince Harry at the world premiere of 'Dunkirk' at Odeon Leicester Square in London 

James Wharton, 31, a former Household Cavalry guardsman who served with Harry, recalls how the prince defended him when it emerged that he was gay.

'We were loading a Scimitar (light armoured reconnaissance vehicle) when these soldiers came up and started poking me and asking me rude questions,' says Wharton, who left the Army in 2013 and now works for a Midlands charity.

'The more they pursued it, the worse it was getting. I climbed inside and told Harry: 'I've got a bit of a problem . . .' and he took it upon himself to sort it out.

'He listened, he took it all in and said he would go and deal with it — and he did. He went off, and I remember looking out of the window of the vehicle and seeing him having a go at people. There was Prince Harry — the Colonel-in-Chief's grandson — fighting my battle.

'So I talked to Harry about coming out and what it was like, and he was definitely interested to learn about it, joking later on: 'I'm a gay icon'.'

A gay icon, perhaps, but one with an eye for the opposite sex.

Just as his mother, after her break with Charles, was looking in her romances for something deeper and more permanent, so was he.

That public testimony last year about his own mental issues confirmed the long shadow cast over Harry by the catastrophe of losing his mother so young.

He disclosed how, as an adult, he came close to a mental breakdown while still struggling to come to terms with her death, and sought psychiatric help.

How well he had hidden it from the public.

Who could have imagined that the clown prince joshing with sprinter Usain Bolt in Jamaica, laughingly drinking rum and dancing with the locals in Belize, was privately carrying such deep emotional scars.

Known for having a fiery temper — he has lashed out at paparazzi photographers at least once — he revealed that he took up boxing to help control his aggression, having recalled that his mother tried kickboxing as an emotional outlet after the break-up of her marriage.

The Harry who left the Army in June 2015 was very different from the uncertain young man who joined it ten years earlier. Just a year later he met Meghan

Diana always saw herself as a strong woman, ever vigilant about both her sons, but especially Harry, whom she knew was vulnerable.

'She was very protective of him,' says Sarah Goodall, a former aide on Charles's personal staff at St James's Palace. 'Harry always trod a fine line — loveable, roguish but a good boy at heart.'

She remembers a staff barbecue at Highgrove in the mid-Nineties, when Harry was about ten. 'The boys had an amazing treehouse almost invisible from the ground, and Harry and William had taken up their toy bows and were firing arrows down on the guests — the Prince of Wales, myself, everybody.

'It was naughty but they were so high up, nobody could see them. Nobody was hurt and it was all good fun.'

At Diana's formal drinks parties at Kensington Palace, the boys would help out by handing round drinks on trays. 'Harry was very respectful, very good to his mum,' recalls Sarah, now a full-time mother of one and living in Wicklow, Ireland. 'The boys were as protective of her as she was of them.'

She recalls Prince Charles grabbing his small sons for rough-and-tumbles, and believes Harry got his sense of fun from his father rather than his mother.

Diana's fun with the boys was typified by the birthday cake she had made for William's 13th birthday, saucily fashioned as a large pair of boobs with huge nipples. When William saw it he went bright pink, while Harry's reaction was to demand that he, too, should have one for his 13th birthday.

He never got it. He was 16 days short of that milestone when his mother died in the crash in Paris.

When Diana asked feng shui expert Jan Cisek to work on her Kensington Palace apartment, he advised her to change the position of the beds in the boys' rooms. He said the rooms also had to be redecorated. William chose blue. Harry surprised Diana by asking for his walls to be painted bright yellow. The reason? He told his mother he wanted to be able to wake up 'in sunshine'.

Diana (pictured with Harry in 1995) always saw herself as a strong woman, ever vigilant about both her sons, but especially Harry, whom she knew was vulnerable

Harry was nagging their mother to do something the boys had never done before — ride on the London Underground and on a red double-decker bus. Diana, along with her personal bodyguard Ken Wharfe and two other officers, took them on the Tube from South Kensington to Piccadilly. Incredibly, nobody recognised them.

At Piccadilly they caught a No 38 bus on which a jovial Sikh bus conductor called out each stop, adding 'parp, parp, ring, ring'.

As the party got off at Green Park, Harry looked back at the turbaned conductor with a big grin and, imitating his voice, cried out 'parp, parp, ring, ring'.

Recalls Wharfe: 'Diana was furious with him and apologised profusely to the conductor, but he wasn't offended. He loved it.'

The following day, Wharfe found a letter waiting for him at Kensington Palace. It was from Harry — the kind of thank-you note that Diana always wrote and made sure her children did, too.

Harry signed off the note with, 'parp, parp, ring, ring'.

Diana would have been aghast at the thought of Harry as a 17-year-old boozing after hours at the Rattlebone Inn in Sherston, a few miles from Highgrove, and smoking cannabis in the shed round the back — these days it's a gastro pub with roaring fires and a spotless reputation.

Few doubt that had she still been alive, he wouldn't have done it.

Princess Diana with her sons, Prince William, right, and Prince Harry outside St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle

His problem at that time was that he felt very alone. Prince Charles was largely absorbed in his own problems, trying to win acceptance for Camilla, and William was away at university.

Only recently did we learn, and perhaps understand, the impact that the loss of his mother was having on him throughout those teenage years. Here was a man of 32, blessed with every possible privilege, admitting he still suffered so much from being without her that he'd had to seek psychiatric counselling.

Back in those teenage years, Harry was certainly a worry to his father as well as palace courtiers. It was not so much his pursuit of women but the way the absence of a mother's guiding hand and moderating presence had let loose his wilder side. During his geography and art A-levels revision, he was partying in Kensington until 2am and puffing his way through a packet of cigarettes in an evening (he has now quit smoking for Meghan).

People who met the young Harry usually described him as likeable, although, as one senior courtier recalls: 'He always seemed to be trying just a bit too hard to fit in, and had an absurd desire to show off — still basically a child, with nothing like the maturity of his brother at the same age.'

In one area, however, he surpassed his brother: the Army. It was Harry's alternative family, the place where he finally grew up and discovered he could feel as 'normal' among fellow soldiers as he is ever likely to be.

Former Household Cavalry guardsman James Wharton remembers introducing 'Captain Wales' to the tinned meat Spam. 'As awful as Spam is, I told him 'if you just fry it and add a bit of Tabasco and some noodles, you've actually got a nice meal',' he says.

'Harry later turned up with a shed-load of Spam for us. He didn't use the word 'Spam', though. I think he called it luncheon meat.'

Wharton also remembers a night when they were on manoeuvres in a heavy tank in Canada and, as he recalls: 'I think I said: 'Can we just put some lights on or slow down and be a bit more careful?', and Harry turned round and told me to 'stop being a fanny'.'

On they went, then — crash! They had hit another vehicle.

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry attend the UK Team Trials for the Invictus Games Sydney 2018 at the University of Bath on April 6, 2018 in Bath

'I looked over at Harry and he was a little bit blurred, having banged his head. It wasn't just a case of him being brave, it was a case of 'man up, we'll be fine, get on with it'. He became completely absorbed, he naturally led.'

Harry was instinctively at home in the camaraderie of army life; so comfortable with his fellow soldiers that one night he joined in a general confessional of when they had each lost their virginity.

'He told us the tale, all the details,' says Wharton. 'It's not especially interesting. But I'm keeping it to myself.'

Were it not for the Army's understandable reluctance to send the Queen's grandson into harm's way on active duty with his mates, he would almost certainly still be serving today. He did two tours of Afghanistan, one of them as a young officer in Helmand Province, the first member of the Royal Family to serve in a war zone since Prince Andrew flew helicopters in the Falklands in 1982.

There, with a first deployment on the ground and the second operating the complex weapons systems on an Apache helicopter, he was able finally to throw off the empty perception of himself as 'not important'.

Imagine his embarrassment if he had been aware of a discussion at Buckingham Palace in which the Queen anxiously led the questioning about his safety on his proposed second tour of 20 weeks in 2012 with the Army Air Corps.

'It was already crushingly humiliating for him to know that blokes he had served with were routinely being sent to face danger while his involvement was always under scrutiny and being limited,' says one fellow officer.

The Queen and Charles were much concerned about potential sensitivity to his deployment by the Muslim Council of Great Britain, with whom the Prince of Wales has a very good relationship.

But on the issue of Harry's security, we have learnt from a high-ranking military source that it was the Queen, then aged 85, who raised the awkward but troubling issue of whether local contractors coming onto the army base where Harry would be stationed might pose a risk.

'She very clearly knew that local civilians were employed for catering and cleaning,' says the source, 'the point being that the Taliban had only to threaten the family of one of these workers for something to be attempted.'

In effect, the Queen was asking if sending Harry back to Afghanistan was a responsible thing to do. Did the benefits to him outweigh the risks? She was told they did.

So secret was Harry's deployment that, says Lord Dannatt, then Chief of Staff, 'we didn't even tell our ambassador in Kabul (Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles).

As for Prince Charles, says Lord Dannatt: 'We had to try to persuade him not to talk about it at dinner parties, saying something like 'oh, I'm worried about Harry'.

'It was important that Harry's presence in Afghanistan was kept very quiet. It was difficult [for Charles], of course, because others whose sons were deployed could talk about it with friends, but he had to keep it under wraps.'

Harry's second deployment to Afghanistan was in September 2012, just before his 28th birthday. He wasn't meant to go quite so soon. His departure was brought forward, we understand, at the request of Buckingham Palace in the wake of that Las Vegas episode, when Harry and his civvy pals were playing strip billiards.

Photographs emerged of a naked prince, surreptitiously taken on a mobile phone by one of the girls in attendance in their hotel room.

Much fun for the wider world but gloom in the Palace and especially for Prince William, by then a search-and-rescue helicopter pilot living with Kate in Anglesey, who has always looked out for his younger brother.

Was this the real Harry, returning to familiar ways, or just a relapse by a young man about to go to a war zone?

Lord Dannatt insists that 'all those incidents of him falling out of nightclubs had pretty much dried up after he joined the Army'.

He added: 'Las Vegas was very disappointing for everyone — and for him. The people I was really angry with were those around him. They ought to have protected him and not let him get in that situation. They let him down.'

When the film Dunkirk was premiered at the Odeon in London's Leicester Square in July last year, with Prince Harry the royal guest of honour, Lord Dannatt, as Deputy Lieutenant for London, was asked to accompany him. Dannatt had been in Derbyshire earlier that day at the Buxton Literary Festival and had trouble with the trains.

'When I got off the Tube and fought my way through the crowds, I heard everyone going 'Harry, Harry . . .'. I thought, 'flip, he's already there'. But he wasn't there yet. It was Harry Styles and all the young girls were going mad. Luckily I got to the red carpet five minutes before the prince arrived.'

Britain's Prince Harry drinks a hibiscus rum punch at a street party in Belmopan, Belize in 2012

When Lord Dannatt heard that 'Captain Wales' was leaving the Army, he admits he was 'a little disappointed' because he thought the Army could 'provide him with a framework, a foundation from which he could keep operating  as a young prince.' 

Yet in fact, while no longer in uniform, that is exactly how Harry has continued. Championing the cause of wounded soldiers has given him an unprecedented emotional satisfaction, empathising with them as one who fought alongside them.

When he flew back from his first Afghanistan tour, the body of a Danish soldier killed in Helmand province was on the plane.

'That had a profound effect on him — on the rest of his life, really,' says former paratrooper Jaco van Gass, whose own second tour of Afghanistan ended when he was blown up by a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade and he lost his left arm.

South African-born Jaco was among those in Headley Court military hospital when Harry visited. 'That visit kind of set up everything else that he has put in motion,' he says.

Almost certainly, the prince was already making embryonic plans for what turned out to be the magnificent Invictus Games when, in 2011 and still in the Army, he set off with a group of wounded servicemen to walk — unsupported — to the North Pole.

At roughly the same moment, a young, unknown actress was auditioning for a role in a new U.S. TV legal drama called Suits. Her name was Meghan Markle.

Jaco, now 31, who has represented Great Britain in Para-cycling, recalls Harry meeting the group and telling them: 'Hey guys, I'm in the team — no formalities, no 'Sir', just call me Harry or Spike (his long-time nickname among his civilian friends) or make up a nickname for me.' Jaco says: 'We stuck to either 'H' or 'Spike'.'

One night on the polar expedition, Harry poked his head into their tent and announced: 'I've got you dessert.'

Says Jaco: 'We didn't know what he was on about but it turned out he'd brought an ice-cream cake for us — all the time he'd been carrying it in his backpack, knowing it would be so cold it wouldn't melt. We all had a slice.'

Sir William Heseltine, the Queen's former private secretary, now retired, is struck by the prince's transformation.

'Before he began his time in the Services, he earned something of a playboy reputation,' he says, 'so it has been good to see how he has settled down and won for himself a rather better name.'

The Harry who left the Army in June 2015 was very different from the uncertain young man who joined it ten years earlier.

Just a year later he met Meghan. So was it chance that the bold, articulate Meghan he fell in love with was already responding to her own campaigning drive to help others?

His drive was, surely, based on privilege; hers, understandably enough, on being the great-great-great-granddaughter of a slave.

So far so good, but in Palace circles they still worry about Harry's long-term future. What next, they wonder, as the couple prepare to marry at Windsor Castle on May 19?

With Harry and Meghan, one thing it won't be is dull.

Additional reporting: Emily Kent Smith