'I'm the older woman who took Harry's virginity': Digger driver Sasha Walpole, 40, comes forward

It was a passionate, tipsy – and very probably ill-advised – encounter between two friends who snuck out of a pub for a crafty Marlboro Light and ended up clambering over a fence to make love in a field, shielded from sight by a dense summer hedgerow.

This is how Prince Harry lost his virginity in July 2001 – an escapade the world would have remained ignorant about had he not revealed some of the intimate details in his explosive memoir, Spare.

Now, that woman has come forward to share her version of what the Duke of Sussex, 38, memorably called an ‘inglorious episode’. She is Sasha Walpole, 40, who had known the Prince since her days as a groom at the future King Charles’ Gloucestershire estate, Highgrove. 

At just over two years the Prince’s senior, she is much younger than most of the women whose names were suggested in the frenzy of speculation about her identity.

Today Sasha reveals it was Harry who made the first move, leading to their ‘spontaneous and sparky’ sex in a field behind The Vine Tree pub in the Wiltshire village of Norton. And, in a touch of farce, that his bodyguard was out hunting for him in a borrowed Ford Fiesta at the time.

Sasha, now a mother of two who drives diggers for a living, had invited Harry, then a 16-year-old Eton schoolboy – not 17 as suggested in Spare – to the pub to celebrate her 19th birthday.

The pair were such close friends that Harry had brought her a stuffed Miss Piggy and a comedy birthday card with a joke about a flatulent whale on the front. He added to that with a tray of ten shots – five each – which saw the pair very drunk by closing time.

As last orders were called, the young prince asked her: ‘Should we go for a smoke?’ and they crept into an adjacent field to have a cigarette out of sight of his security detail.

Source of data and images: dailymail