King Charles Brings Back PR and Diversity Tsar From Harry Drug Sting Era

King Charles III has brought back a "PR and diversity consultant" who previously acted as a spokesperson for Prince Harry and Prince William amid arguments with the media over drugs, privacy and the sanctity of education.

Colleen Harris first joined Charles' team as a spokesperson in 1998, the year after Princess Diana died, and she quit in 2003 as arguments raged with the press over Prince William's right to study at university without suffering the intrusion of unsolicited photographs.

And she was there when the now defunct News of the World ran a front page exposé on Prince Harry doing drugs, which the Duke of Sussex complained about bitterly in his recent book, Spare.

Now the king has brought her back as a director of his charity The Prince of Wales' Charitable Foundation, with her occupation listed as "PR and diversity consultant" at the U.K. register in Companies House.

That dual role may prove to be significant, after Meghan Markle accused an unnamed royal of having "concerns and conversations" about how dark her unborn child's skin might be before he was born, during her March 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview. Harry later suggested any remark indicated "unconscious bias," rather than racism.

The palace has also been dealing—both in Britain and on royal tours to the Caribbean—with growing calls for an apology for slavery and reparations.

Harris is on record as saying she believes Charles was already keen on improving diversity in the 1990s, before the recent royal bombshells.

In an April 2023 interview, she told Vogue: "He already felt passionate about topics considered niche in 1998 and essential in 2023, including sustainability and diversity, and set about addressing them—whether that meant raising organic crops on his Highgrove estate or conducting youth outreach through The Prince's Trust."

The Colleen Harris Era

Among the royal family's biggest scandals during her five-year palace career was a front page exposé in Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid the News of the World about Prince Harry doing drugs.

Harry's memoir suggests he was furious about the palace response, though his ire was targeted at another of Charles' PR consultants, Mark Bolland, rather than at Harris.

The newspaper was preparing a story accusing Harry of smoking cannabis and the prince wanted to fight back, but Charles and the palace opted to cooperate, "going full Neville Chamberlain."

He wrote: "The guiding force behind this putrid strategy was the same spin doctor Pa and Camilla had recently hired, the same spin doctor who'd leaked the details of our private summits with Camilla?

"This spin doctor, Marko said, had decided that the best approach in this case would be to spin me—right under the bus."

"In one swoop this would appease the editor and also bolster the sagging reputation of Pa.

"Amid all this unpleasantness, all this extortion and gamesmanship, the spin doctor had discovered one silver lining, one shiny consolation prize for Pa.

"No more the unfaithful husband, Pa would now be presented to the world as the harried single dad coping with a drug-addled child."

While the spin doctor was not named in the book, Harry later told his Mirror Group phone hacking trial that it was Bolland.

At the time of the News of the World scoop, a palace spokesperson gave a somewhat different account to the Press Gazette: "We kept this story out of the public domain for quite a long time because nobody's been able to prove anything. But the NoW finally came up with the proof."

Prince William and Intrusion Into His University Education

Ultimately Harris resigned from the palace in 2003, six months after Bolland, and quoted in The Guardian, she said she had "loved every second" of the job.

At the time, she told the Daily Mail: "[Charles] is a good, honourable chap who only wants to do the best, but maybe we have not extolled the virtues of the prince as well as they could have been.

"One of my boys is 15, coming up to GCSEs [U.K. school exams] and the other 13 and I simply want to be there for them more. It has been a fantastic job, but it is a very hard job too."

At the time she resigned, The Guardian reported there had been tensions over the previous year with the media over an agreement that William would be given space to pursue his university education in peace at St Andrews in exchange for occasional agreed photo ops.

However, the media reportedly felt the Palace hadn't been fulfilling its end of the bargain and "snatched" photos, taken by photographers usually from a distance on long lenses, had begun appearing in the tabloids.

Jack Royston is chief royal correspondent for Newsweek, based in London. You can find him on Twitter at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek's The Royals Facebook page.

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