Prince William (36 page)

He was mindful that he hadn't had any other serious relationship before he met Kate. Perhaps he felt there was something he was missing. He became laddish at Sandhurst, in such a physical environment. Now he was miles away in Dorset and Kate was in London. They scarcely saw each other, and there were days off when he chose to go clubbing with his friends in London without seeing her. Unsurprisingly, there had been arguments.

The break-up was brief – and it was clearly a very unhappy time for Kate, who fortunately had the support and closeness of her family to fall back on. It only lasted a few weeks but what brought William running back, according to someone who knows him well, was jealousy. Kate was unhappy but she was not sitting at home moping; she was putting a brave face on it, also a sexy dress, and hitting the town. He was doing the same (minus the dress) but what was sauce for the goose was definitely not sauce for the gander. He is quite old-fashioned in his outlook and he couldn't bear the thought of her with another man.

When asked about the break-up during their engagement interview, William said, ‘We were both very young, at university, we were both finding ourselves as such and being different characters and stuff, it was very much trying to find our own way and we were growing up, it was a bit of space and a bit of things like that and it worked out for the better.'

Kate was more articulate on the subject. ‘I think at the time I wasn't very happy about it, but actually it made me a stronger person. You find out things about yourself that maybe you hadn't realised, I think you can get quite consumed by a relationship when you are younger and I really valued that time for me as well, although I didn't think it at the time.'

They agreed that after such a long period, their relationship was based on friendship as well as love.

‘I think if you do go out with someone for quite a long time,' said Kate, ‘you do get to know each other very, very well, you go through the good times, you go through the bad times. Both personally and within a relationship as well. I think if you can come out of that stronger and learn things about yourself, it certainly helps, … it's been a good how many years?'

The answer, by the time they were giving that interview in November 2010, was eight years in all. Although the rift was healed in a matter of weeks, and their relationship appeared to be rocksteady thereafter, it was another four and a half years before William asked Kate to marry him.

PHONE HACKING

William's ambition in the Army, like Harry's, was to be deployed to the front line. To his frustration, while he was at Bovington playing with tanks, the rest of his squadron, who were already trained up for immediate deployment, left for Afghanistan without him. Winning one of the two top prizes on the course was no consolation. In reality he could never have gone into battle with his squadron at that particular moment. Harry was about to deploy to Iraq, and it would have been unacceptable to have both the second and third in line to the throne in a war zone at the same time. As it turned out, Harry didn't go to Iraq after all, but he did get to Afghanistan in December 2007.

Harry was there for ten weeks of a fourteen-week tour, serving as a battlefield air controller in Helmand Province – based only 500 yards from Taliban enemy bunkers – responsible for providing cover for troops on the front line, for scrutinising hours of surveillance footage beamed from aircraft flying over enemy positions to a laptop terminal, known as ‘Taliban TV', for setting co-ordinates for bomb drops and preventing deaths by friendly fire. In all the hours he spent each day talking on the radio to pilots, he was known only by his call sign Widow Six Seven. His base came under mortar and machine-gun attack five times every day and he was personally involved in a firefight with the Taliban, fighting alongside Gurkha troops.

On Christmas Day, while the rest of the Royal Family was gathered at Sandringham, he was sharing a goat curry with his colleagues. The Ministry of Defence and Clarence House had done a deal
with the UK and US media, which had agreed to a news blackout until Harry was safely back on British soil. In return, he agreed to give an interview every four weeks ‘in theatre' (which would not be used until he was home) and another when he arrived home. No one at the MoD expected his cover to last more than a couple of days. The British media were getting tips about him every day from soldiers, but they were not using them. It was an Australian magazine that first broke the news he was in Afghanistan. Plans were quickly put in place to bring him home but, on consideration, everyone involved decided to sit tight and keep their nerve. Miraculously, the story wasn't picked up for two weeks, but then a US blogger, with a big following, ran it on his gossipy website, the Drudge Report. Once the news was on the internet there was no containing it and Harry was pulled out and flown home the same day. It was a sad moment but tinged with pride for those who had managed to keep him there under wraps for as long as ten weeks.

His commanding officer in Helmand, Brigadier Andrew Mackay, was full of praise for Harry. ‘He has shared the same risks, endured the same austerity and undergone the same moments of fears and euphoria that are part of conducting operations in this most complex of environments. A Forward Air Controller provides essential cover to those soldiers deployed on the ground. He controls the airspace, the aircraft that enter it and the release of any ordnance. It requires an individual of cool nerve, mental agility and an ability to make critical decisions in the heat of battle … He has acquitted himself with distinction.'

William had been consulted at every point in Harry's deployment. He had wanted his brother to get out to the front line, no less than he wanted to go there himself, and was as much a part of the decision-making process as Harry.

Both Princes had always made it very clear that they wanted to see active service. I first met William over a pint of cider one evening in a pub in Gloucestershire. He was twenty-one and had
just finished his third year at St Andrews. The meeting was off the-record but it was clear he was thinking of joining the Army. His only hesitation was the fear that he might be prevented from going to the front line because of who he was. As he articulated it, on-the-record, a little later, ‘The last thing I want to do is be mollycoddled or wrapped up in cotton wool, because if I was to join the Army I'd want to go where my men went and I'd want to do what they did. I would not want to be kept back for being precious or whatever, that's the last thing I'd want. It's the most humiliating thing and it would be something I'd find very awkward to live with, being told I couldn't go out there when these guys have got to go out there and do a bad job.'

I had a call from Paddy Harverson, who had not long been in his job, earlier that evening. I was writing a book about the monarchy and had met and spoken to him several times about the Prince of Wales. I'd rung him earlier to ask if he could help with some background information about William. Knowing I lived nearby, he asked me to join him in the Hare and Hounds at Westonbirt, less than a mile from Highgrove. ‘I hope Prince William is going to join us in the pub,' he told me. He was, and is, firmly of the belief that it is good for the Princes to meet the press informally. His theory is that it's harder to be critical about someone you have looked in the eye. He has recently been organising private lunches with media groups to build relationships and understanding between the two sides. On foreign tours he also organises parties for the accredited media that follow. The Queen and Prince Philip used to do the same, but the Prince of Wales was so hurt by the media during the break-up of his marriage that he stopped the parties. Paddy admits that not everyone buys into his theory but thinks William does and says he's very good at being polite to someone ‘he knows writes cock and bull about him'.

When I arrived, the saloon bar was filled with journalists and photographers – about fifteen in all – some familiar to me, some not. They had all come down to Gloucestershire in preparation for an informal photo call the following morning – the latest in
the St Andrews Agreement. For a change, Paddy had decided to do it on the Home Farm, feeding pigs, driving a tractor – little thinking that it would lead one of the tabloids to announce that, according to ‘senior courtiers', William was planning to turn his back on the Army after university to pursue a career in farming. Paddy was there in jeans, as was his deputy, Patrick Harrison, and as I chatted to my media colleagues I realised that none of them knew who was about to walk through the door. Paddy had simply invited them to join him for a drink.

At about 9.25 the door opened and in walked William with Mark Dyer. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and, apart from the familiar face, could have been any tall, slim, tousle-headed twenty-one-year-old. Paddy immediately sprang up to greet him and introduced him to the people standing around, even the most hardened of whom were looking flushed – and I don't think it was the beer. Having shaken each and every hand and looked us all in the eye as he did so, he said he would like a pint of cider and sat down on a bench with his back against the wall. Those who could find chairs sat in a circle around him; others stood and, for nearly an hour, we all chatted. Seldom had I seen such a self-possessed and skilful operator – nor such a group of seasoned hacks (myself included) leaning forward so intently to catch and savour every word. Questions he didn't want to answer he simply bounced back or laughed knowingly at, as if to say he wasn't going to fall into that trap, but it was done with such charm that there was no offence. He asked the
News of the World
royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, whether he came here often, did he know the area? ‘Oh, yes,' said Clive, ‘I've been here quite a lot but I can't say I've ever been invited.'

Clive Goodman was one of three men arrested two years later and imprisoned for four months for intercepting the mobile phone messages of Clarence House staff. He had taken over from Mark Bolland in March 2005 and it was stories in that Blackadder column, under his own by-line, which first aroused suspicion.

William and Harry had been convinced for years – at least five
years before Clive Goodman was arrested – that someone had been leaking stories to the tabloids. It created a corrosive mistrust within the Household as well as outside. Everyone was looking suspiciously at everyone else; it was an uneasy time. The Princes suspected their friends. It was the only possible explanation for the constant trickle of stories; some of them trivial, some more substantial, but all of them private. ‘They were paranoid for years and years about various of their friends selling stories,' says a friend. ‘They used to get really wound up about it. There were various friends they doubted – of both of theirs – and they talked to each other about, “Did you tell him? Is he trustworthy?” These were not William's best friends, like James Meade or Thomas van Straubenzee or any of his inner “Masonic circle”, but people maybe one step removed.

‘As a result, trust is William's big thing. He is very slow to trust people and I should think the single biggest driver of his relationship with Kate is trust.'

‘A few things happened at once,' says one of the team, all of whose phones were being hacked. They had all been trying to work out how titbits were getting into the
News of the World
when a short piece appeared in November 2005 about Tom Bradby, who was by this time ITN's political editor. He had offered to edit William's gap year videos, as he had Harry's, and the two of them had been finding a time when they were both free to meet up.

‘If ITN do a stocktake on their portable editing suites this week,' said the piece in Clive Goodman's ‘Blackadder' column, ‘they might notice they're one down. That's because their pin-up political editor Tom Bradby has lent it to close pal Prince William so he can edit together all his gap year videos and DVDs into one very posh home movie.'

Tom and William had had a phone conversation on the Saturday – the very day before the piece appeared – and agreed to meet on the Monday; Tom would come to Clarence House with some equipment.

When he arrived on the Monday, he and William just looked
at each other and said, ‘How the hell did the
News of the World
get that?' William then said that he'd been equally puzzled by a story about a knee injury he'd had that had appeared in the same column the previous week.

‘William pulled a tendon in his knee after last week's kids' kickabout with Premiership club Charlton Athletic', wrote Goodman. ‘Now medics have put him on the sick list. He has seen Prince Charles's personal doc and is now having physiotherapy at Cirencester hospital, near his country home Highgrove.'

William had been thinking the surgeon must have spoken to the
News of the World
or his secretary, but he knew, and Tom agreed, it was unthinkable. Then they started going through all the alternatives. Tom knew from his years as a royal correspondent that during Diana's lifetime tabloid reporters had listened to one another's voicemail messages to get stories. If they were doing it then, why not now? Slowly it dawned. After they had spoken on the Saturday, William had phoned Helen and left a message on her voicemail asking her to leave Tom's name with security at the gate. After he had seen the doctor, he had left a message on Helen's voicemail asking her to fix physiotherapy in Circencester …

‘The other one' says one of the Household, ‘was William leaving a jokey message on Harry's voicemail pretending to be Chelsy [Harry's girlfriend] and giving him a bollocking in a South African accent – there'd been a story about him visiting a lap-dancing club. This story ran in the
News of the World
. How did they know William had left a message on Harry's voicemail?

‘At the same time three of us noticed in conversation that all of our voicemail was playing up. We were discovering messages that had been listened to but not by us. They were being saved as having been listened to, as in “You have four new messages and six saved messages”, and I would always listen to a message then delete it and I think the others did too. Initially we thought it was a fault with the phones but we had different phones and one was on a different network, so we thought how does that work? I remember sitting in Helen's room and it dawned on us that there
might be more to this, that the
News of the World
stories and the funny voicemail situation might be connected, so we called in Royalty Protection, who are always the first port of call.'