Prince William (7 page)

By the early 1980s, he was straying into ever more dangerous waters. He was invited to convene a conference at Windsor for leaders in the business community to meet leaders of the black community. It was one of the most significant advances in race relations ever made, but it could have gone terribly wrong. At the same time, he was sending shock waves through the hallowed corridors of the Royal Institute of British Architecture and the British Medical Association with speeches that were sharply critical and in turn brought an avalanche of criticism on the Prince's head.

Edward Adeane did not approve and thought the Prince should curb his words and confine his activities to safer, more traditional areas. Colborne supported Charles every inch of the way, telling him to forget what previous Princes of Wales had done: these were the 1980s. There was a social revolution going on outside the Palace gates, a whole generation of young people who needed his leadership and he should stop feeling sorry for himself and go out and do it.

It was a fractured and unhappy Household and that July, Colborne, who had been a Chief Petty Officer with Charles in the Navy and who was one of the few people who dared tell him what he
thought, handed in his notice. He had been with the Prince for ten years and would have walked over red-hot coals for him. He had also grown very fond of Diana and felt sorry for her, but he'd had enough of being caught in the crossfire between the two of them and being the one on whom his boss took out his anger and frustration.

The Prince of Wales has many strengths, but he has never happily put up with people around him who disagree with him; Colborne was an exception, and because their relationship went back to the Navy, he could get away with it. His relationship with his Private Secretary was another matter, and with such divergent ideas on what he should be doing with his life, it was only a matter of time before the Prince and Edward Adeane came to grief. The day after Colborne left, the two men had a blazing row and Adeane resigned.

It was an opportunity for Charles to look for a successor beyond the military and the diplomatic service, whence most royal courtiers came. He instructed a head-hunter, and the man chosen to take Adeane's place was a 13th Baronet from the City, who was as surprised as he was flattered to have been selected. Sir John Riddell, from an old Northumberland family, had no experience of the Royal Family and therefore no preconceptions about how things should be done. A successful investment banker of fifty-one, he was delightfully gentle, humorous and unassuming. He was married with a young family, of much the same age as William and Harry – therefore deeply sympathetic to the draw of the nursery.

HIS ROYAL NAUGHTINESS

When the time came to choose a first school for William, Charles and Diana opted for Mrs Mynor's in Chepstow Villas, Notting Hill, where Sir John Riddell's youngest son was a pupil.

Dressed in clothes he had chosen himself (essential for a good mood) – a checked shirt, red shorts and a striped jumper – and accompanied by both parents, William arrived for his first day in September 1985. He was three years and three months old and went into the lowest year group, which was called Cygnets. No heir to the throne had ever been to school at such a young age. Charles had a governess until shortly before his eighth birthday, and when he went to school he became the first heir ever to have done so. But Diana wanted William to mix with ordinary children from the earliest age and be treated like a normal child.

The only difference between him and his classmates that day was that a bank of photographers, reporters and TV cameras were waiting on the pavement outside the school to record this historic moment in the life of the nation's favourite three-year-old. It was to be their one and only chance. Charles and Diana had written to the editors of every national newspaper asking that William be allowed to come and go in peace thereafter. The exception was the Christmas play.

As a friend told Diana's biographer Sarah Bradford, ‘William was in the school play. He was very little, probably three and a half … all dressed up in a little nativity outfit. And there was this huge bank of photographers all on ladders. And everyone was shouting out “William, William, William!” It must have been terrifically difficult for a child that age to understand.

‘I asked her once, what do you do about that? And she said she had had to say to him: “You are going to go to school today and there's going to be all these people who want to take your picture and if you are a good boy and you let them … then I'll take you to Thorpe Park next week.”'

Charles and Diana had already done some groundwork with the media. They had held a series of lunches at Kensington Palace and invited the editors one by one. My father, Sir John Junor, then editor of the
Sunday Express
, was one of them and was duly flattered to have been asked to advise them on public relations. Over plums from the garden at Highgrove, the conversation turned to the catalogue of untrue and hurtful stories that had appeared in the press. As he later wrote in his memoirs, ‘Looking slightly tremulous … she poured out to me her resentment about the way in which it was suggested in newspapers that she was influencing her husband and turning him against shooting and hunting. Prince Charles broke in. “I'm angry about that too. Because my wife is doing nothing of the kind. My wife actually likes hunting and shooting. It is I who have turned against it.”'

My father left profoundly smitten by the Princess, who kept in touch over the years, recognising she had a powerful ally. He was not the only man to become putty in her hands.

By all accounts, William was quite a handful. Until Harry's arrival he had been the centre of his parents' universe, and like most first children who are indulged – as only first children can be – he was not best pleased to be supplanted by a demanding baby who was picked up and fussed over every time he cried. His mother nicknamed him ‘Your Royal Naughtiness' but was mostly amused by his cheekiness. At Mrs Mynor's he quickly became ‘Basher Wills' or ‘Billy the Basher'. His father had been rather cowed and insecure as a small boy and found it hard to make friends. William was the opposite. He was a confident and happy child, not to say irrepressible, and was more than capable of standing up for himself. Staff remembered him being very popular with the other children and for ‘his kindness, sense of fun and quality of thoughtfulness'.

On a snowy January day in 1987, at the age of four and a half, he moved on to Wetherby School, also in Notting Hill, where he spent the next three years in preparation for boarding. His first day – this time dressed in a grey and red uniform, with short trousers, long socks and a cap – was again marked by a melee of media in the street and dozens of clicking cameras. Although not a daily occurrence, they were becoming a familiar part of life and William, eager to race up the steps to be with his schoolfriends, was frequently tethered by his mother and made to wave or to smile.

She always tried to take him to school before her day's engagements, and often stopped off at her local Sainsbury's to buy him and his little brother Twiglets or some other treat on her way home afterwards – ‘I know they're not good for them,' she'd say, ‘but they do love them.'

However, most of the childcare fell to Barbara Barnes. She was the constant and consistent figure in their lives and inevitably a very close bond formed between them. Although the apartment at Kensington Palace was far less formal than any of the other royal residences, the children lived in the nursery and, according to the Princess's Private Secretary, Patrick Jephson, their domain under the eaves on the top floor was almost a court in its own right. There were bedrooms, bathrooms, playrooms, a kitchen and a dining room. In addition to Barbara, there were part-time nannies, policemen and a shared driver, all of whom operated a routine of school runs, parties, shopping and trips to the cinema. The children didn't always have the run of the house, but usually came downstairs before bedtime.

The house was an office as well as a home. Both the Prince and Princess had meetings and lunches with staff or advisers or charity executives, and it was not unusual for the Prince in particular to hold meetings in the evenings. Stephen O'Brien, then chief executive of Business in the Community, and his colleague Cathy Ashton were sitting in the Prince's study waiting for him to arrive one evening when Diana burst through the door. ‘I'm sorry,' she said, ‘I'm looking for William. It's bedtime so he's vanished. Will you
give me a shout if you see him?' They were left wondering how one might give the Princess of Wales a shout, when squeals of laughter from above solved the problem.

Roger Singleton, then director of Barnardo's, arrived for lunch one day, bearing a large green plaster frog. It was a gift from a group of physically handicapped children at a school in Taunton that Diana had visited the previous week in her capacity as president. As Singleton was ushered through the front door, William and Harry came bounding down the stairs and instantly began clamouring for the frog. It was too heavy for either of them to carry alone, so William went racing off up the stairs, excitedly yelling to his mother that a frog was coming, while Harry, who refused to be parted from it, staggered up the stairs with one small hand resolutely on the frog's bottom and the other tightly clutching Singleton's free hand.

Another visitor who unexpectedly encountered William was Bob Geldof, the habitually dishevelled musician and human rights activist. He was at Kensington Palace for a meeting with the Prince, when William appeared and, cross that his father was busy, said, ‘Why do you have to talk to that man?'

‘Because we have work to do,' said his father.

‘He's all dirty,' said William.

‘Shut up, you horrible boy,' said Geldof.

‘He's got scruffy hair and wet shoes,' said William, undeterred.

‘Don't be rude,' said Charles, mortified as only parents of tactless small children can be. ‘Run along and play.'

‘Your hair's scruffy too,' said Geldof as a parting shot.

‘No, it's not,' said William. ‘My mummy brushed it.'

Geldof doesn't relate whether Diana heard the exchange but if she did, the chances are she would have found it funny. She was good at providing the love and the hugs for her boys and she enjoyed playing games, but she was sometimes more like a big sister than a mother to them. William's antics made her giggle and she let him see that they did, which undermined any discipline he was getting from anyone else. Yet on other occasions, instead of
giggling, she would smack him, which must have sent a confusing message to the child. Barbara Barnes meanwhile was told she must never smack the children and never even raise her voice to them if they misbehaved. If things reached an impasse between the nanny and her charges and they ran to mummy to complain, as often as not, Diana would side with the boys, thus entirely undermining Barbara's authority.

In the absence of any real discipline from Diana – or the Prince of Wales, who was a similarly soft touch – William tended to get his way in most things and inevitably pushed the boundaries further and further. He became so noisy, cheeky and unruly that the Queen, who was a very loving grandmother and normally reticent about interfering in such matters, let it be known that William's behaviour was not acceptable. The final straw came when William was a pageboy at Prince Andrew's wedding to Sarah Ferguson in 1986. After dragging his cousin Laura Fellowes up the aisle, he fidgeted throughout the ceremony, rolled his order of service into a trumpet, scratched his head, covered his face with his fingers, poked his tongue out at Laura, and left the Abbey with his sailor hat wildly askew. He may have been doing what any four-year-old might, but not many other four-year-olds were of such public interest.

By contrast, Prince Harry was a timid, shy little boy, overshadowed and bossed about by his big brother. But all that soon changed. Harry became the extrovert, the risk taker, the naughty boy, and William became more circumspect and pensive, his early confidence perhaps less certain.

HIGHGROVE

The Prince of Wales's plan that the family should base themselves in Gloucestershire never worked. Diana wasn't an outdoor person at heart and the country, filled as it was with dogs, horses and mud – and her husband's unbridled enthusiasm for it all – bored her. For him, it was an oasis of peace after the endless merry-go-round and exhaustion of royal duties. He spent as much time as he could there, often on his own – in as much as the Prince of Wales, with a team of courtiers, round-the-clock PPOs (Personal Protection Officers) and domestic staff, is ever on his own. Diana and the boys, meanwhile, based themselves in London, and once William started school in Notting Hill, they stayed at Highgrove only at weekends and during the school holidays.

But the boys adored it, and after a week cooped up at Kensington Palace the weekends couldn't come fast enough. They sometimes drove with their mother but more often travelled with Barbara Barnes, their PPOs and the rest of the nursery team. There was so much more freedom for them there. It was the perfect environment for noisy, energetic and inquisitive small boys – plenty of space to roar around and lots of places to explore.

They had their father's Jack Russells, Tigga and Roo, to play with, there were ponies to ride, ducks on the pond, cows and sheep in the fields and chickens running about in the yard. There were woods and hay lofts and, when it was warm enough, a heated outdoor swimming pool. They had a climbing frame on the lawn and a swing, and they could grow their own vegetables from the little patch of garden their father had set aside for them.

Charles has often said that if he hadn't been a Prince he would be a farmer. His passion for the countryside and its conservation is legendary. He also firmly believes that it is only possible to lead by example – one of the many beliefs he has passed on to his sons, so when he first became interested in organic agriculture in 1982, he realised he had to do it himself. He would never be able to persuade farmers to give up chemicals unless he himself had tried it and proved it was viable. So when a farm with 710 acres near Tetbury came up for sale two years later, the Duchy bought it and employed David Wilson as manager. Gradually they converted the land to Soil Association standards and started not only experimenting in organic production, but using it as a showcase for all the Prince's ideas about the countryside, conservation and the environment. Over the years it has become an impressive example of best-practice farming and a thriving business.