UK NEWS

LAUGHING PRINCE LEFT HOLDING THE BABY

JOKES: Prince Harry

Friday June 6,2008

By Richard Palmer, Royal Correspondent

PRINCE Harry had a pressing engagement with a baby yesterday which left him tickled to bits.

The meeting came as the royal walked through admiring crowds on his first full day of duties in Wales.

Outside the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff a smiling mother pressed her baby daughter into his arms.

Harry was at first reluctant. “You’re asking me to hold her?” he said with a gulp to Natasha Martin, 19. Then, as he took five-month-old Lexi Hailstone in his arms, he worried: “She’s going to cry.” Asked if he was feeling broody, Harry laughed, raising an arched eyebrow.

But he was soon enjoying himself as he held her for several minutes, joking to photographers: “It’s a girl.”

When Lexi’s mother, from Bridgend, went to take her back, Harry, 23, feigned refusal but relented, saying: “She’s very sweet.”

Lexi, who was due to leave hospital yesterday after treatment for a rare chromosome disorder and meningitis, slept through the encounter. At the hospital, Harry, a patron of the charity Dolen Cymru (Wales Lesotho Link) met doctors and nurses who’ve worked in Lesotho.

The prince, who visited the southern Africa nation in his gap year, has established a charity Sentebale in memory of his mother Princess Diana to work with Aids orphans and others in the kingdom.

The Army officer will return to Lesotho this summer with his regiment to help build care facilities.

Earlier, teenagers greeted him like a pop idol when he visited Cathays High School to hear about the links staff and pupils have forged with a school in Lesotho. He stopped to chat to Matthew Taylor, a red-haired 12-year-old, telling him: “I’m ginger – gingers love gingers.”