Prince Harry has claimed he “didn’t know P*** was a slur” when he famously used the racial slur to describe a fellow Pakistani soldier.
In an excerpt from his forthcoming autobiography Spare, the Duke of Sussex said he “heard a lot of people use the word” as a child and “hadn’t seen anyone flinch or get angry” and hadn’t considered them racist.
He added: ‘And I didn’t know anything about unconscious biases either. I was twenty-one years old, cut off from the real world and wrapped up in privilege, and I thought that word was the same as ‘Yankee.’ Harmless.’
In 2009, Harry apologized after footage surfaced of him using the slur to describe his Sandhurst colleague Ahmed Raza Khan. Harry said he had used the term without malice after the recording, taken in 2006, was released.
Recalling the video in his book, Harry said he had filmed it while killing time before boarding a plane for Cyprus with his fellow cadets.
He said he was filming each service member and making comments about them.
He recalls: “When I reached out to my partner and good friend Ahmed Raza Kahn, a Pakistani, I said, ‘Ah, our little friend P***’.”
Harry sent the video to another cadet who was making an ‘end of year video’, but the clip began to circulate and ended up being sold to the News of the World, sparking a firestorm of criticism.
The duke said people accused him of learning nothing from the Nazi debacle in 2005, saying he was “worse than stupid” or a “partier” and “was a racist”.
He said he was in Highgrove watching the scandal unfold as top politicians criticized him on national television and was unable to prosecute him.
Harry claimed that his father’s office issued an apology on his behalf and that he wanted to issue another, but the palace aides advised against it.
Harry said he contacted Ahmed directly and apologized. He said that his comrade told him that she knew he was not a racist and that “nothing happened.”
However, the duke writes that it “happened” and that his friend’s forgiveness only made him feel worse.
The excerpt is one of many to be published overnight after copies of his book Spare were accidentally sold in early Spain.
The subject of racism is addressed elsewhere in the autobiography when Prince Harry addresses his notorious Nazi uniform scandal.
