Prince Harry was high on laughing gas and ate Nando’s chicken at the birth of his son Archie

Prince Harry ate Nando’s chicken and got high on laughing gas to calm his nerves as son Archie was born.

Meghan ‘bounced on a giant purple ball’ as she went into labour and then climbed into a bath and listed to ‘soulful hymns’ as Harry illumintaed the room with electric candles and placed a photograph of his late mother Princess Diana on a table in the delivery room.

Harry described the extraordinary scene at London’s Portland Hospital in May 2019 as he admitted ‘enhancing’ his mood with nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, a common pain reliever.

‘Meg was so calm. I was calm too,’ he writes in his memoir.

Prince Harry ate Nando’s chicken and got high on laughing gas to calm his nerves as son with Meghan Markle, Archie, was born

‘But I saw two ways of enhancing my calm. One: Nando’s chicken (brought by our bodyguards). Two: A canister of laughing gas beside Meg’s bed. I took several slow, penetrating hits.

‘Meg was so calm. I was calm too,’ Harry wrote in his memoir Spare

‘Meg, bouncing on a giant purple ball, a proven way of giving Nature a push, laughed and rolled her eyes. I took several more hits and now I was bouncing too.’

He says when a nurse tried to give laughing gas to Meghan for the pain there was none left. He describes how the nurse looked at the empty tank and then looked back at him:

‘I could see the thought slowly dawning. Gracious, the husband’s had it all. “Sorry,” I said meekly.’

Harry writes that the mood changed when doctors decided to give his wife an epidural to ease her pain: ‘The anaesthetist hurried in. Off went the music, on went the lights. Whoa. Vibe change.’

After a last-minute worry that the baby may be tangled in his umbilical cord, Archie emerged unscathed and both parents wept with joy.

Later, when describing daughter Lilibet’s birth in June 2021 he jokes: ‘This time I didn’t touch the laughing gas (because there was none).’