Prince William (35 page)

‘We took William out to one or two venues and to be honest we were then locked in because he loved seeing the youngsters work, he joins in, then he starts to take some of the sessions and deliberately makes mistakes and the youngsters laugh.

‘They honestly don't realise who he is, they know he's something important because mum and dad tell them he is, but once they start talking he could be anyone, which is what I think he likes.'

SOLDIERING

In 2011 the BBC made an observational documentary about the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, filmed over the course of a year. It was an eye-opener to anyone who still thinks that officers are the rather dim second sons of the aristocracy who have it easy while the foot soldiers do all the work. In his welcoming address to recruits, the Commandant said, ‘The basic aim is to develop leadership, and using Field Marshal Montgomery's definition, that leadership “is the capacity and the will to rally men and women to a common purpose and the character which inspires confidence. That leadership must be based on a moral authority and it must be based on the truth.”'

If William didn't get that exact address, he will have had something close to it when he began his officer training at Camberley in Surrey in January 2006, just days after returning from a skiing holiday with Kate in Klosters. In October he passed the Regular Commissions Board, the four days of selection tests and tasks to assess mental, physical and emotional aptitude – the first hurdle at which most of the applicants fail. Sandhurst has been training leaders of the British Army – and some foreigners too – for two hundred years, and it is no holiday camp. The sophistication and precision of modern warfare has seen to that. It is forty-four weeks of getting up at dawn, polishing boots, ironing uniform, intensive drill sessions and punishing physical exercise. It is tough, brutal, relentless, intolerant of mistakes, failure or weakness; and there are no concessions for Princes. It is not for the faint-hearted or the sensitive; it's not for people who might have qualms about killing
the enemy, or who don't like being shouted at, sworn at and told what to do, and when and how to do it without question.

‘They need to know what it's like to be tired and to be hungry to lead their soldiers in demanding situations around the world,' said Commandant Major-General Ritchie, when William arrived. The Prince, he insisted, would have no special privileges. ‘He will be up early tomorrow morning and will then get stuck into military training. The fitness regime and tactic will begin in earnest. Everyone is judged on merit. There are no exceptions made.' The flipside to it all, however, is that when they have breaks and time off they party with a vengeance – but not, according to the rules, within a three-mile radius of the place.

William was delivered to the academy by his father, but once inside the building he was no different from any of the other 270 recruits who arrived that day. Everyone came with a bag of belongings and their own ironing board, and they were all in it together. The belongings had to be arranged in a set pattern in their rooms – toothbrush and toothpaste with exact spaces in between. Every morning, beds had to be made uniformly and flawlessly, boots polished like mirrors, uniforms ironed to perfection, and everything ready for inspection at 5.30 a.m. Mistakes, creases, rumples were met with a terrifying barrage of abuse, and press-ups by way of punishment followed, often for the whole group.

This was one place where William got his wish to be treated like everyone else, and where, behind the heavily fortified gates, he had no fear of any kind of media intrusion. It is an environment in which strong bonds are forged, second only to the bond forged in combat, where the enemy is not simply exhaustion and the Colour Sergeant yelling at you, but very real. Those that come through the forty-four weeks – and a high percentage don't – know that effective teamwork is essential to survival, both at Sandhurst and in places like Afghanistan. Active service is what these young people are training for. Many choose which regiment they want to join at the end of it, according to which will give them the best chance of front-line service.

Like every recruit, Officer Cadet Wales was confined to barracks for the first five weeks with no visitors, no alcohol, and not even his trademark floppy fair hair; like everyone, his head was shaved. For those weeks, Kate became a fond but distant memory. The infamous first five weeks are renowned for being one of the toughest experiences most people will ever go through. Many of them are begging to leave after the second day and 15 per cent drop out by the end of the five weeks. William, like Harry before him, found it very tough going, but he was better prepared than most, knowing what Harry, now beginning his third term, had gone through. Harry had found it physically very tough going at the start, but had done predictably well. Being a little older, at twenty-three, William was that bit stronger, which gave him a slight advantage.

‘I don't think William liked living in a ditch quite as much as Harry,' says someone who knows them both well. ‘Harry would roll out his sleeping bag and sleep in the rain. William can do that but very sensibly prefers not to. So choosing to join an armoured regiment [such as the Household Cavalry at the end of it], where you're in a tank, was easier for William than it was for Harry.' They nevertheless both chose the Household Cavalry, made up of the Lifeguards and the Blues and Royals, who are the personal bodyguards of the Monarch.

For a while it was touch and go, however. Halfway through the training, the various regiments visit and over two days attempt to lure cadets their way. William was very tempted by the Irish Guards. ‘The Household Cavalry had a very tough SAS commander who sent William off on a twenty-four-hour, night navigation exercise with a paratrooper. The Irish Guards got them all absolutely howling drunk and then gave them five thousand rounds of tracer ammunition and told them to try to shoot sheep on a range in Yorkshire. [Sheep-lovers: not serious.] So he went whoomph across to the Irish Guards but then sense got the better of him and, like Harry, he went for the Household Cavalry. It was lovely for him to join Harry; that was a huge factor.'

Their commanding officer was Lieutenant Colonel Edward
Smyth-Osbourne, a Life Guards officer and former member of the SAS; a man unfazed by anyone and an important figure in both their lives. Early in 2007 there was an announcement that Harry would deploy to Iraq commanding a troop of four Scimitar light tanks. He was thrilled, as only soldiers who are trained for combat can be, but after three months of intensive training and preparation with his men, the decision was reversed. The Chief of General Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, said it was the result of ‘specific' threats from insurgents. ‘These threats expose not only him but also those around him to a degree of risk that I now deem unacceptable.'

Harry had to watch his men go off to war without him. He contemplated leaving the Army. ‘It was a case of, I very much feel like if I'm going to cause this much chaos to a lot of people then maybe I should bow out and not just for my own sake, for everyone else's sake.' Always the Prince with the wild child image, he made a good effort at drowning his sorrows. ‘The man who picked Harry up out of the gutter and said, “Don't worry, I'll get you to Afghanistan,” and did it, was Ed Smyth-Osbourne. His contribution was phenomenal and they absolutely adore him, they worship him and always will,' says a member of their Household. ‘When Harry did go to Afghanistan, he said, “He's going right up to the front because that's the safest place for him. A lot of lesser men would have wrapped him in cotton wool and wouldn't have allowed him to do that. He's a great guy and they were very lucky to have him.'

William was commissioned as an Army officer in December 2006, in a ceremony known as Passing Out, in which he and his fellow newly commissioned officers marched past the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in the historic Sovereign's Parade at the Old College. They stood to attention for the National Anthem, then the Queen inspected those on parade, chatting to some as she walked through the lines. She stopped in front of her grandson, demonstrably a proud grandmother, and exchanged a word and a big grin, before continuing down the line. Back in Sovereign mode, she told them all that a ‘great deal' was expected of them. ‘You
must be courageous, yet selfless, leaders yet carers, confident yet considerate and you must be all these things in some of the most challenging environments around the world.'

His father was there watching proudly alongside Camilla, but also in the party were Kate Middleton and her parents, Michael and Carole. It was the first time Kate had been William's guest at a high-profile public event with senior members of the Royal Family and it was immediately seen as an indication that an engagement was on the way. Kate and her family might have been forgiven for thinking much the same. She had become a regular sight at Highgrove and at all the pubs and parties around Gloucestershire, as well as at Clarence House and the London clubs William and Harry frequented. She'd been enthusiastically embraced by the Prince of Wales and Camilla; she had been to family birthday parties, and to Cheltenham Races with them, and for several years she'd been part of the annual skiing trip.

And William was no stranger to the Middletons by then. Kate had taken him home on many occasions and in April that year they had all been on holiday together to Mustique, the Middletons' favourite island in the Caribbean. He and Kate had been to friends' weddings together, including Laura Parker Bowles's, and in the summer they'd been to Ibiza.

William and the Middletons took to one another from the start, and it was already a relaxed and warm relationship. It was unsurprising he wanted them there that day – they had heard so much about the gruelling training. William delighted in the closeness of Kate's family, the relaxed atmosphere in the house and the humdrum nature of their daily lives. Everything that so many of us take for granted was precious to him; so different to everything he had grown up with. They were uncomplicated and normal, and that very normality created a kind of security that he relished. With them, he could do everyday things and feel like any normal person; he could disappear into their happy, safe, anonymous world.

As Kate said of the close-knit nature of her family at their engagement interview, ‘It's very important to me, and I hope we
will be able to have a happy family ourselves because they've been great over the years – helping me with difficult times. We see a lot of each other and they are very, very dear to me.'

Michael's family were middle-class professionals but Carole's family on her mother's side were from a coal-mining region in the north of England. She came from a line of strong women who were determined to improve their family's lot in life. The media was not slow to see Kate's attachment to the second in line to the throne as the ultimate in social climbing. Carole Middleton was said to have looked like the cat that got the cream on the day the engagement was announced, but such snide and snobbish comments spoke more about the commentators than about the Middletons. And credit William with a little awareness: if he had thought there was even the slightest element of Kate or her family liking him for his Royal status, he would have been long gone.

He also talked about them in the engagement interview: ‘Kate's got a very, very close family. I get on really well with them and I'm very lucky that they've been so supportive. Mike and Carole have been really loving and caring and really fun and have been really welcoming towards me so I've felt really a part of the family and I hope that Kate's felt the same with my family.'

Their fondness of William – like that of everyone I have spoken to – is and was because of
what
he was, not
who
he was. In his early twenties when they first met he wore his HRH so lightly that within moments of meeting him people forgot that he was anything special. When someone remarked that Kate was very lucky to be going out with Prince William, she didn't hesitate before replying, ‘He is very lucky to be going out with me.'

BREAK-UP

In April 2007, just four months after including the Middletons in such a high-profile and public event, which seemed to confirm that one day the two families would be joined, the
Sun
shocked the world with the news that the relationship was over. The golden couple were said to have gone their separate ways – which was a blow to the manufacturers of wedding memorabilia who had slightly jumped the gun. It was by ‘amicable agreement', and no one else was thought to be involved. Clarence House, as always, refused to comment on a private matter.

William was by this time a fully-fledged member of the Blues and Royals, which are based at Combermere Barracks in Windsor, but no sooner had he joined them than he was sent off for four months of specialist tank training at Bovington Camp in Dorset. Kate was working part-time as an accessories buyer for the fashion chain Jigsaw, owned by family friends.

The break was initiated by William, who could be forgiven for feeling some of the pressure his father had felt nearly thirty years earlier. On Kate's twenty-fifth birthday in January, the scenes outside her house in London had taken everyone back to the bad old days of Diana's harassment before her engagement to Charles. The media seemed to have made up their collective minds about who William would marry, even if he hadn't yet. And no one makes up William's mind for him.

He was perhaps feeling a bit claustrophobic. They had been together since the age of twenty and Kate had always wanted rather more commitment than he was prepared to give. His friends had not been
universally enamoured, resentful perhaps of the time he spent with her where once they had had him to themselves. Some of them thought she was a bit too sensible and serious, disapproving of some of their wilder antics. It's the complaint of single young men up and down the country when one of their number gets a steady girlfriend who stops them drinking quite so much or staying out all night.