Britons shrug off nude photos of Prince Harry
LONDON — Britain’s Prince Harry has been caught on camera doing something embarrassing — again.
Celebrity gossip website TMZ on Tuesday posted photographs of the 27-year-old royal cavorting nude with an unidentified woman in a VIP suite in Las Vegas.
It’s hardly the first time the prince — who allegedly disrobed as part of a game of strip pool — has been filmed in a compromising situation. The third-in-line to the throne was famously photographed wearing a Nazi uniform for a costume party, and in another photo gaffe he was seen cupping the breast of a female TV presenter.
If the reaction of Britons to Harry’s Las Vegas adventure was anything to go by, the nude photos will do little to tarnish his generally positive, party-prince image.
Did Harry do anything wrong?
Jim Conlon, a 60-year-old construction worker, said, “The answer to that is categorically NO.” Conlon, who was unloading bags of material from a car, seemed genuinely offended by the very question. “I’d be proud of him if he were my son,” he said.
Conlon’s opinion was typical of a country where thousands of streets and pubs are named for the royal family.
Interviews with Londoners up and down the capital’s Prince of Wales Road yielded few critics of Harry’s antics.
Craig Martin, 38, another construction worker, said, “He’s the prince. He can have any bird he wants!”
Down the road, caregiver Shirley Ashard laughed at the news of Harry’s naked adventure, dismissing questions about the propriety of running around a plush hotel room in the buff with a boys-will-be-boys shrug.
“I’ve got kids. They do things like that,” the 59-year-old said. “He’s a lad, for God’s sake.”
Will his, or the royal family’s, image be tarnished?
Hanad Darwish, a 19-year-old student from Birmingham, worried about what Harry’s hijinks said about his judgment.
“It is a little immature and gives the royals a bad image,” he said.
But Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine, said it wasn’t likely that Harry’s reputation would suffer.
“Of course it’s stupid, but it doesn’t make people dislike him — quite the opposite,” she said.
“It shows that he is a guy who gets into trouble and he’s the one people love to love. It could only happen to Harry — but we love him for it.”
