As any speculator will tell you, stocks in royal princes can go down as well as up — and in the space of 24 hours, Prince Harry has gone from scapegrace to frontline hero.

The rise in Prince Harry’s stock has occurred since his emergence as battlefield air controller “Widow Six Seven”, military poster boy and scourge, in his own words, of “Terry Taleban”.

Only a few weeks ago, the 23-year-old Prince was still regarded by many as a lost cause, a lad-about-town with a talent for generating bad headlines. Today he is the warrior prince.

With the Diana phenomenon hanging over her two sons, the issue for Harry and his handlers is how to control and manage his new-found “glamour boy” status without him crashing to earth again and embarrassing the Royal Family.

The secret of Widow Six Seven

American pilots, Afghan soldiers and Taleban fighters - all unaware that third in line to the throne was in their midst

Multimedia

• Pictures: Prince Harry in Helmand

• Video: Harry on the front line

• Video: Harry explains his job

BACKGROUND

• The day Grandma told me I'd be going to war

• Full text of Prince Harry interview in Afghanistan

• Full text of Prince Harry interview given pre-departure

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Harry’s world has changed utterly: he left Britain able to do little right but he will return to a presumption that he is able to do no wrong after one of the most successful royal excursions so far mounted.

Harry has been close to open war with the media. On his return he will find himself enveloped in a crushing media embrace. He found press intrusion and the resulting unpopularity hard to handle; he may find his new popularity and more intense scrutiny overwhelming. The Prince’s next mission is to handle his own sudden stardom.

No one will be more aware of that transformation than Prince William. The two brothers are close friends but also, like most siblings, rivals. Harry revealed that his brother had sent him a letter in Afghanistan saying how proud their mother would have been but he also joked that William was envious of his battlefield role: “He’s jealous because I’ve got one of the best jobs in the Army.”

Asked whether his elder brother would like to be out in Afghanistan, Harry was adamant: “I know he’d love to, whether it’s on the ground or at 15,000ft with bombs strapped to his wings.”

Only last month it was William, not Harry, who was being hailed as the military prince after it was revealed that William had taken to the skies solo for the first time as part of his intensive training course at RAF Cranwell. That achievement seems pale compared with what we now know Harry was doing at the time: directing airstrikes, exchanging gunfire with the Taleban, and going into war in one of the most dangerous places on Earth wearing a baseball cap with the slogan: “We Do Bad Things To Bad People”.

As part of his preparation for taking on the role of leader of the Armed Forces, Prince William is gaining experience with all three branches of the military — though it is highly unlikely that he would ever be risked in frontline action. This may madden him, but it has always been the lot of the eldest child to follow the steadier path while the younger siblings take risks, and make mistakes. This is certainly true of the past three generations of royals.

During the Second World War, the RAF deliberately recruited elder sons as bomber pilots on the ground that they were likely to be more reliable, while younger sons were considered ideal fighter pilots, being more reckless and tactically wily.

William has always been aware of his position at the front of the Royal Family’s rigid primogeniture. On one occasion, Harry is said to have jumped the queue to speak to the Queen, before being hauled back by his sibling and told to “remember who comes first”.

Hitherto, William has enjoyed most of the accolades and the attention, while Harry played second fiddle, usually out of tune — “the heir and the spare”.

Now, thanks to some canny royal news management, the limelight has shifted, though perhaps temporarily.

Harry’s formal role in Helmand was as Forward Air Controller (FAC), but the young Household Cavalry officer is now also, suddenly, an unofficial recruiting sergeant for the Armed Forces.

The Army’s tactics could have backfired horribly. The danger was less that Prince Harry might have been killed, which would have been tragic enough, but that he might have been kidnapped, with a potentially catastrophic impact on world events.

Instead, the gamble of deploying Harry in the battlefield has brought the conflict in Afghanistan to Britain’s attention in a way that no amount of news reporting ever could. For the Prince, it has provided a set of indelible images that eclipse the photographs of him emerging, red-faced, from Boujis nightclub.

Harry was plainly aware of the personal rehabilitation under way in Afghanistan. “I honestly don’t know what I miss at all,” he was quoted as saying. “Music, we’ve got music, we’ve got light, we’ve got food, we’ve got [non-alcoholic] drink,” he said.

He then added: “No, I don’t miss the booze, if that’s your next question.”

The photographs of Harry in Afghanistan show an inspired appreciation of modern iconography: the young Prince, helmetless in combats, sucking on a juice bottle, his iPod dock and dusty water bottle at his feet, his gun on the wall. Some of the shots have the unmistakable look of pin-up material, for Prince Harry has inherited more of his mother’s photogenic qualities than his brother.

The Prince’s foray into battle has also galvanised a new following worldwide.

The comments by Sergeant First Class Chuck Grist on the website AmericanRanger.blogspot.com, are representative: “He is a real man, a warrior prince who will surely serve in battle with dignity and distinction. The people of Great Britain should be proud of their brave prince.”

When Harry comes marching home, it will mark a fascinating shift in the relative balance of popularity within the Royal Family.

Harry’s War represents a major public relations coup for the Army, and a political victory of sorts for supporters of the Afghan mission. It may also represent a turning point for Prince Harry.

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