Prince William (31 page)

By coincidence, the Vans, as they are known, were friends of the Spencers. In 1979, Alex had shared a flat with Diana's sister Sarah – and Diana had been the charlady – one of several domestic jobs she did when she first came to London.

Alex and Claire heard the news about Henry at 4.30 in the morning. They were asleep in bed when the headmaster of Ludgrove telephoned to tell them the news every parent dreads: their son was dead. Numb with shock and grief, they quickly organised what they imagined would be a small family funeral for him on 23 December in their local parish church. To their amazement, and comfort, people kept ringing and asking whether they could come. In the end, 350 of Henry's and his brothers' friends squeezed into the little church, including William, Harry, Tiggy and two of the Princes' PPOs who had regularly been with them in Cornwall and knew Henry well.

The following month, Harrow School held a service of thanksgiving for him in the school chapel, to which a thousand people
turned up, including William and Harry. The Vans say that both boys were hugely kind and supportive to the whole family, but particularly to Thomas and his younger brother Charlie, who was only fourteen when Henry died. With their own experience of loss still with them every day of their lives, they were able to understand better than most the pain their friends were going through. They are all still very close, still go to Cornwall and elsewhere together and are all determined to keep Henry's memory alive and make his death less senseless.

After the memorial service Harry went back to Eton, William to St Andrews and to Kate Middleton, who was instinctively empathetic. Where most of his male friends would hide in safe subjects like sport after a perfunctory acknowledgement when anything heavy was in the air, she was prepared to engage in conversations about feelings and delicately probe and allow him to unburden his soul a little. This was not the first time he'd had difficult emotions to cope with during his time at university, and it wasn't the first or the last time she would be there for him.

Their relationship was becoming the subject of gossip and speculation in St Andrews and there had been the odd photograph of them deep in conversation, but the first confirmation the wider world had about William's affection for Kate was when the
Sun
published a photograph of the two of them kissing on the ski slopes at Klosters during the Easter holidays in 2004, when they were in their third year. He went with his father and his father's friends, and, as usual, had taken a group of his own friends. He and his father posed for the customary photo call at the start of the holiday and the legitimate press put away their cameras, but not everyone did. Using the age-old excuse that any girl with a future King is of public interest because she may become Queen, the editor had published what was otherwise an intrusive and illegitimate photograph. William was furious and his father's office responded swiftly.

NEW REGIME

There had been big changes in the Prince of Wales's office, including its location. Following the death of the Queen Mother, Clarence House, where she had lived, was refurbished at a cost of nearly £5 million to provide a new home for the Prince of Wales and his family. Since the divorce, they had lived at York House, across the courtyard, and the office had been in St James's Palace next door. They are all part of the same complex but Clarence House has the advantage of having state rooms and a large, private garden at the back, where the Prince can entertain. They moved in in 2003, by which time the Household was looking very different.

Stephen Lamport had left in the summer of 2002 to join the Royal Bank of Scotland. He had been Deputy and then Private Secretary for nine years. His replacement was Sir Michael Peat, who came from Buckingham Palace. As Keeper of the Privy Purse, he had been the architect of a major modernisation programme there and his appointment was seen as a way of repairing the relationship between the two Palaces – a relationship that, to quote one member of the Household, ‘had been comprehensively bulldozed'. Mark Bolland, Deputy Private Secretary, widely thought to have been driving the bulldozer, left to set up his own public relations consultancy. He also began writing a gossipy column in the
News of the World
under the pseudonym Blackadder, in which he occasionally bit the hand that had once fed him. And Colleen Harris, the Prince's Press Secretary, left in the autumn of 2003, exhausted by the long hours and constant fire-fighting and wanting to see something of her teenage sons.

The man brought in to mastermind the relationship with the press was forty-year-old Paddy Harverson, a former
Financial Times
sports journalist, who had spent the previous three years at Manchester United, the world's biggest and most successful football club. There he had been dealing with giant egos, millionaires and megastars like David Beckham and Rio Ferdinand, and perpetually managing intense tabloid interest and scandal. He arrived in October 2003 with a brand-new broom, and no sense of awe towards his employer and his family. Michael Peat's remit was to get the Prince of Wales's private life out of the newspapers and his good works into them, and Paddy's was to rebuild trust and bridges with Buckingham Palace. He is an imposing figure at six feet four inches tall, and brought his height's worth of integrity into the mire of cunning spin and favouritism that had blighted the previous regime.

He made it clear from the beginning that there was to be no spin, no favours and that the Palace was no longer going to lie down and take whatever the tabloids threw at it.

He had scarcely had time to make his first cup of coffee in the office when an action that Clarence House had taken against the
Mail on Sunday
before he arrived came to fruition. The newspaper had run a story that Prince William had speared and killed a dwarf antelope (called a dik-dik) during a holiday in Kenya. It spawned national outrage, despite a statement from Clarence House that the story was untrue. The
Mail on Sunday
claimed it had a good source and refused to back down, so the Palace issued a formal complaint to the PCC and the newspaper folded its tents. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's
Today
programme, Paddy said, ‘Now, hopefully, they will understand that we do take things seriously and will hold them to account where we feel that they are wrong and have evidence to prove that they are wrong.'

Just a few months later he leaped to nineteen-year-old Harry's defence. When Carol Sarler, a
Daily Express
columnist, wrote a vicious comment piece calling Harry a ‘horrible young man' and ‘national disgrace' who ‘rarely lifted a finger unless it's to feel up a cheap tart in a nightclub', Paddy wrote a furious letter of complaint
to the newspaper, which was printed in full. Harry was on his gap year, which she called ‘a space between no work whatsoever at school and utter privilege at Sandhurst'; in Australia, he had spent it ‘slumped in front of the television waiting to behave badly at the next available rugby match', while in Lesotho in Africa, where he currently was, he was spending ‘eight lavish weeks … [during which] he has reluctantly agreed to spend a bit of the trip staring at poor people. His exploits have been making headlines for years: the drinking, the drugging, the yobbing, the waste of the costliest education in the land, the explicit disdain for the lower orders, the increasingly sexual public romps – we've seen it all, we've heard it all.'

Paddy took her points one by one. He wrote that, ‘These comments make it entirely clear that Ms Sarler has little or no understanding of Harry as a person and how he has spent his current gap year.' It was a ‘very unfair and unfounded attack' full of ‘ill-informed and insensitive criticism'. The next week, her column was an out-and-out attack on Paddy Harverson.

Two months later when the
Sun
ran the photograph of William and Kate kissing in the snow at Klosters, Paddy punished the newspaper. In an unprecedented move he banned Arthur Edwards, its veteran royal photographer, from future photo calls with both William and Harry. Arthur had been outside the Lindo Wing the day of William's birth, he'd been one of Diana's favourites, a real gentleman of the profession. The industry was as shocked as he was, but it sent out a powerful message.

During William's final year, with the first set of his exams looming, Harry was in the news again. During the Christmas vacation, the two of them had been to a fancy dress party in Wiltshire given by his great friend James Meade, son of Richard Meade, the Olympic show jumper. The theme had been ‘colonial and native'. William had dressed as a lion and Harry, in a local fancy dress shop, had found a German desert costume with a Nazi armband. With all the awareness of the average twenty-year-old, he had thought nothing beyond its colonial connotation; meanwhile the adults
around him, who perhaps ought to have been more conscious that a Nazi outfit was not such a good idea, did not think to point that out to him. Someone at the party took a photograph.

‘HARRY THE NAZI' screamed the
Sun
headline. As luck would have it, the party was shortly before Holocaust Memorial Day, in which the Royal Family were taking a leading role. The newspapers milked it for all it was worth, drawing attention also to the cigarette and the drink in his hand. Some of his critics, tall on their soap-boxes, suggested that Harry wasn't fit to attend Sandhurst, where he was due to go later in the year.

Clarence House immediately put out a statement. ‘Prince Harry has apologised for any offence or embarrassment he has caused. He realises it was a poor choice of costume.' But there were those, of course, who were not prepared to accept this apology.

William took the whole incident, removed as he was from Harry and home, very badly. ‘The university has an amazingly over-the-top system for dealing with students who have got personal or medical issues that impact upon their work,' says John Walden, ‘and the student can ask for special circumstances to be taken into account. William had obviously spent a lot of time talking to his brother and not revising for exams and so he came to me and said, “I'm having a bit of a crisis. What do I do about my exams?” He was really wound up about the way the press was treating his brother. It was obvious that he was very upset, so we had a conversation.'

In the end, William sat the first lot of his final exams that January with no special dispensation. Final exams are no longer as important as they used to be at St Andrews. An honours degree is now modular, a calculation of all the marks gained during the final two years at the university, so a proportion of the outcome had already been determined by module exams, class work, course work, essays, field trips and the dissertation.

He had thought long and hard about his dissertation, as do most students, and been to see Charles Warren the summer before about the subjects he was chewing over. He had thought he might do a
study on the impact of deer management on wild land in the Highlands. It was never mentioned by name, but Balmoral would have been the obvious location for any such study.

He decided, instead, to write about conservation in the tropical seas, or more accurately indigenous fishing practices on the island of Rodrigues and the effect these practices have on coral reefs. ‘It was one of these things where the locals take dynamite and blow the fish out of the water, which obviously doesn't do the coral reef any good,' says John Walden. ‘I suspect he must have had some involvement with a conservation group that were working on this island and may have had some previous contact with them, because he went out and did two or three weeks' field work out there with this group, which essentially involved a lot of scuba diving on the corals.'

He was absolutely right. Rodrigues was the island in the Indian Ocean William had visited during his gap year with Mark Dyer where they had dived. This time he could indulge his passion for scuba diving in the interests of academe.

Looking back on it all, John Walden says, ‘My real specialism is looking at long-term climate records. He was interested in climate change; everybody could be interested in that, but if I started to talk to him about the minutiae of how you interpret a pollen record, his eyes would be glazed over. I did nag him and say he should go off and support some major conservation works and become a figurehead for solving the climate change problem – your mum would have liked that, I said – but he wasn't having any of it, he was going to go off and do his military training.'

GRADUATION

William had already given an inkling of his ambition to join the Armed Forces in the autumn of his final year. He had come down from St Andrews specially to be at the Cenotaph on 11 November 2004, believing that by his presence he could speak for young people.

‘I just thought what with the Iraq War and troops being abroad and particularly the Black Watch going through a very tough time – I thought it was just the right time for me probably to make an entrance and be there for the youth and make a point that the young still haven't forgotten and still very much appreciate what's been done for everyone.

‘The Army is obviously a lot more in the spotlight at the moment … The Remembrance Service really does bring it home when you're there and there's actually a war going on somewhere at the time and the guys are fighting their hearts out.'

Before he could think of joining them, there was his graduation ceremony on 23 June 2005, and yet another concern that he was going to be given special treatment.

‘I took him and Kate over the graduation ceremony two days before,' says David Corner. ‘It was a slightly interesting time because Kate was not formally recognised, and the parents were coming up. I didn't want Kate's graduation to be messed up. So I said to the two of them, “Come on, we'll go into the Younger Hall and I'll show you what's going to happen.” William was ten times more nervous than Kate about it. All he could say was, “There's nothing special about this is there?” and I said,
“No, the only thing that's special is that your grandparents will probably get a better seat than my grandparents would, but there's nothing different whatsoever.”'