Prince Harry resorted to a little finger wagging tonight to persuade one cheeky little boy not to bring up the subject of his naked romp in a Las Vegas hotel.
Alex Logan appeared poised to broach the topic of the royal's embarrassing pictures when the two met at an awards ceremony celebrating seriously ill youngsters and the doctors and nurses who care for them.
When the six-year-old was interviewed by ITV News at lunchtime he was asked what he would say to the royal and replied: "I'm glad you've got your clothes on Prince Harry".
But the Prince left the little boy in no doubt the incident was off limits, crouching down to his level and telling him not to talk about it as he shook his finger at him and smiled.
Debbie Logan, 39, the youngster's mother from Lincoln, describing the encounter said: "Harry said to Alex 'you keep looking up at your mum, looks like your dying to say something but you know she will tell you off.
"'I heard you were on ITV earlier, you said something cheeky, let's not talk about that here'."
Headlines were generated around the world when pictures of the Prince frolicking in the nude with an unnamed naked woman during a Las Vegas holiday emerged on a celebrity gossip website a few weeks ago.
Only the Sun defied a request to UK newspapers by St James's Palace, via the Press Complaints Commission, to respect the prince's privacy and not publish the pictures of the naked royal.
The tabloid's front-page image of Harry holding his genitals, and another inside of him with his bottom exposed, generated 3,600 complaints from the public to the press watchdog.
David Dinsmore, The Sun's managing editor, has said the paper "thought long and hard" about whether to use the pictures and that it was an issue of freedom of the press rather than it moralising about the prince's actions.
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Harry's appearance at the WellChild awards ceremony, staged at the InterContinental Park Lane hotel in central London, was his first since the images first appeared on the web.
But he looked relaxed, joking and laughing with the seriously ill award-winning youngsters including Alex, in remission from acute leukaemia, who at one point put his soft-toy penguin on the Prince's forehead.
Harry is patron of WellChild, a UK-based charity dedicated to the needs of sick children and their families, whose children's nurses provide specialist medical care and direct support in the home for chronically ill youngsters.
