by Penny Junor
Yet William was never supposed to have been there that night, for what turned out to have been such a seminal moment in the history of the monarchy. Colleen had assured Niall Scott that he would not be going to the event, so Niall had allowed the media in to take photos of the catwalk show. ‘Five minutes after I’d opened the Union doors to the press,’ he says, ‘William walked round the corner with his mates and into the hall and sat down at the table right at the end of the runway. The press thought they’d died and gone to heaven. I thought I might be destined for a slow death with no chance of heaven. I called Colleen, who was mildly displeased, but she is about the calmest woman I’ve ever met. That was when I learned that William, on occasion, would lead even his most trusted minders a merry dance.’
Kate’s female contemporaries describe her as ‘a sweet girl with no airs or graces, who was quiet and not outrageously flirty, but someone who always enjoyed attention from guys.’ She struck those who shared lectures and tutorials with her as seeming rather vulnerable. She would sit quietly with one male friend (apart from those where she overlapped with William) and didn’t hang around with the girls in her year. She didn’t seem to like the ones that hung around William. They say she was diligent, in that she went to lectures and seemed to put in more work than most. ‘I felt slightly sorry for her,’ says one. ‘I think she was more of a guy girl than a girly girl, but she was good fun and she laughed a lot. She was very chatty, very sporty, didn’t normally wear make-up and always looked good.’
Having been educated at Marlborough College, a prestigious co-educational public school in Wiltshire, Kate was very comfortable in mixed company – unlike so many students who arrive at university from single-sex schools. She had done well at Marlborough and excelled at sport, egged on by her parents, Michael and Carole. They were fiercely ambitious for their eldest child. They were always there at the courtside or on the touchline or at the swimming baths to cheer their daughter on in matches and competitions.
Michael and Carole had both made their fortune in life through sheer hard work. One profile writer once said rather sniffily that Kate’s lineage ‘can’t be traced much further back than the suburbanisation of Berkshire’. They were not members of the landed gentry, they had not been handed their fortune on a plate. They had come from modest origins and worked for every penny they owned. And after years of hard graft in the airline business – he as a member of ground staff, she, until she had children, as an air hostess – they had hit on a brilliant business plan. It grew out of Carole’s experience as a stay-at-home mother with her young children. They created a company called Party Pieces in 1987, providing inspiration and supplies for parties for every age group, and shipping them out by mail order. Nearly twenty-five years later it is the UK’s leading party company, and they have made enough money to have put their three children through public school and university and been able to pay a sizeable share of Kate’s wedding costs.
They live in a comfortable five-bedroom detached house overlooking farmland in the village of Bucklebury in Berkshire, where they support all the local independent shops and are regulars at the local pub, the Bull Inn, in neighbouring Stanford Dingley. Michael, one of life’s natural gentlemen, is loved by everyone in the village; Carole is a go-getter, a tough businesswoman who has been the force behind Party Pieces and the family’s social ascent. Opinion about them is divided (there’s nothing like fame on top of social climbing for dividing opinion), but it is universally agreed in the village that they are a happy family and have lovely, unassuming, friendly children.
HOPE STREET
By the time William returned in September 2002 the ‘wobble’ was well and truly behind him and he was much more confident, as so many students are in their second year. The sun was shining and he had decided that he rather enjoyed life in the ‘auld grey toun’. Most students move out of halls in their second year, and along with three friends, one of whom was Kate, he had rented a smart flat in Hope Street, which belonged to friends of friends. It was another central and attractive part of the town and a conventional move for wealthier students. His other flatmates were Fergus Boyd and Olivia Bleasdale, a friend of a friend and formerly at Westonbirt (a girls’ boarding school half a mile from Highgrove, many of whose pupils he’d met at local pubs and parties).
The four friends had decided it would be fun to share a house several months before, and the combination worked well. William and Kate were still nothing more than good mates when they moved in, but as the year progressed their relationship shifted a gear. As William said in their engagement interview, ‘It just sort of blossomed from there really. We just saw more of each other, hung out a bit more and did stuff.’
Hope Street had innumerable student flats and there was no shortage of parties that went on noisily into the night. But not all the flats in Hope Street belonged to students and one was taken by a part-time lecturer called Dana. ‘The poor girl was plagued with students partying three times a week,’ says Brendan Cassidy. ‘She was really suffering, on the verge of tears because she couldn’t sleep. One night she got up and went and knocked on the door of one to ask them to keep the music down. The door was opened and who was in the hallway but William! It didn’t make a blind bit of difference. I tried to get the people in College Gate [the university’s administrative offices] to do something about it and I don’t know whether it was because they couldn’t do anything or whether they were aware that William was involved, but either way they did nothing.’
Anyone who invited William to a house party had a visit beforehand from his PPOs to give the flat or the building a quick security check and they would then get a call to say that William was on his way. Once he was there, he was no different from any other student. He dressed in jeans or chinos and shirt, with a collection of bracelets around his wrist, accumulated on his travels; he danced (he would say badly), he drank too much, he laughed and joked – memorably, on one occasion, over a rabbit vibrator that one of his hostesses had been given for her birthday. The only times in four years he dressed up were for ceilidhs and reeling balls, where he showed off his Scottish dancing enthusiasm but, despite being entitled to don a kilt, he firmly stuck to black tie. As he said in an interview at the end of his second year, he had only ever worn a kilt in private. ‘It’s a bit draughty,’ he laughed. ‘But I love Scottish dancing – it’s great. I’m hopeless at it but I do enjoy it. I usually make a complete muck-up of the Dashing White Sergeant, I do throw my arms dangerously about and girls fly across the dance floor.’
Of course university wasn’t just a round of parties. Some nights he and his housemates stayed in and cooked, taking it in turns. He revelled in the novelty of everyday life that most people take for granted. ‘I do a lot of shopping – I enjoy the shopping, actually. I get very carried away. I cook quite regularly for them and they cook for me.’
Household chores were also shared between them. ‘We all get on very well and start off having rotas, but, of course, it just broke down into complete chaos. Everyone helps out when they can. I try to help out when I can and they do the same for me, but usually you just fend for yourself.’
In my day as a student, apart from hotels, there was not much more than a dodgy Chinese and a fish-and-chip shop – and breakfast was a bacon roll at Pete’s greasy spoon café on Market Street. The pubs served beers and spirits and maybe the odd salted peanut; wine was only served in restaurants and the word gastro had not attached itself to anything north of Hadrian’s Wall. The town virtually closed down after 10 o’clock at night. By the time William was an undergraduate, the town had been revolutionised. There is still only one small, old-fashioned cinema, weirdly called The New Picture House, but in addition to the pubs, which have smartened up almost out of recognition, there are wine bars, like the pubs, all selling food, there are restaurants of every persuasion, Starbucks and Costa coffee bars, all manner of civilisation that had been absent in my day. As the university has grown in size and become more fashionable, and
the student population more cosmopolitan and sophisticated, and in some cases wealthy, the town has grown to meet the market.
A favourite haunt of William and his friends was Ma Belles, a cosy bar and restaurant in the basement of the Golf Hotel in the Scores, one of the oldest and most traditional hotels in the town. Upstairs there are tartan carpets and cockaleekie soup, while downstairs an array of exotic cocktails are on offer, as well as coffee, afternoon teas and bar meals. Afternoon teas sell at £8.50, mojitos at £6.50 and champagne at £56 a bottle or £11 a glass. It is a cross between the bar in the American sitcom Cheers, and the Central Perk coffee house in Friends. It is big and spacious with bare, wooden floorboards and comfortable deep leather sofas, banquettes in the window seats, and giant television sets tuned to rolling sports channels. Whenever Aston Villa was playing, Ma Belles was where William was to be found glued to the TV, sitting at the bar on a high stool with a pint of cider by his side, loudly cheering the team on.
COMING OF AGE
In the summer of 2003 William turned twenty-one and Mario Testino, the photographer who had taken such haunting pictures of his mother, was invited to take the official photographs. It was Colleen’s idea and the natural choice.
‘I think he was a little bit uncomfortable about that photo shoot but I pushed it a bit because I thought it would be lovely. It was about the similarity, and some of the pictures he caught were very like Diana, particularly the one of her in the black polo neck. It was not such a clever move but that was the power of Diana blinding us all, we weren’t thinking straight. But he didn’t say no. He could have really kicked off and he didn’t. Again, that is him.’
He touched on the photographs in a characteristically self-deprecating way in an accompanying interview with Peter Archer from the Press Association. ‘I chose Mario,’ he said, ‘because he’s the only person who could make a moose look good!’ It was the most revealing interview he had ever given and for someone who doesn’t like to talk about himself, it was surprisingly expansive.
But in the midst of it was a heartfelt public defence of his father, who, he said, had been a ‘huge influence’ on him, and an appeal for his critics to give him a break.
His father had had a particularly nightmarish year with a series of shocking revelations and accusations directed at him and his Household. They began with the collapse of the notorious Burrell trial. Paul Burrell, the butler whom Diana referred to as her ‘rock’, had been accused of stealing several million pounds’ worth of items belonging to the Princess of Wales’s estate, most of which had been found squirrelled away at his home. What had not been found, however, was a mahogany box containing a tape Diana had recorded which her sister, Sarah, told police contained ‘sensitive’ material. Spurred on by the Spencers, who were Diana’s executors, the Crown Prosecution Service prosecuted and the case came to court, only to stop a month later.
The Queen mentioned in passing to the Prince of Wales that Burrell had been to see her privately soon after Diana’s death five years earlier, and told her that he was taking a number of papers from Kensington Palace for safekeeping. Burrell had started off in life as the Queen’s footman and she had been fond of him, as had Charles and William and Harry, who used to play with his two sons when they were little. This connection was why she had agreed to see him. Charles mentioned it to Sir Michael Peat, his new Private Secretary, the police were alerted and the £1.5 million trial came to a shuddering halt. It was never quite explained why Burrell telling the Queen he had taken a few papers should have undermined a trial for theft of more than three hundred items found in his house and under his floorboards. Nevertheless, he walked away a free if rather broken man.
No fewer than four hundred media organisations approached him, offering vast sums for his story. He was persuaded to go with the Mirror. Piers Morgan, announcing the deal, said, ‘He will protect the memory of Princess Diana and will honour his pledge to always protect the Queen. But I think there will be many others in the Royal Family and close to the Royal Family who will be quaking in their boots tonight.’ His story ran day after day and opened a very unpalatable can of worms. It seemed that taking home unwanted gifts that had been given to the Prince and/or Princess of Wales was seen as a perk of the job within the Household. More valuable gifts were either sold for charity or exchanged for something more useful. The Prince’s valet, Michael Fawcett, handled these sales, and he became known as ‘Fawcett the Fence’.
Worse was to come. A headline in the Mail on Sunday read, ‘I WAS RAPED BY CHARLES’S SERVANT’. It was an unreliable story from an unreliable witness, George Smith, a former valet, and it was common knowledge that his allegations were on the tape in the missing mahogany box. But it prompted the Prince to set up an inquiry into the probity of his Household, which threw up plenty of room for improvement in creating systems but found no fundamental dishonesty.
‘He’s been given quite a hard time recently,’ said William, ‘and I just wish that people would give him a break. He does so many amazing things. I only wish people would see that more because he’s had a very hard time and yet he’s stuck it out and he’s still very positive.’
William’s father and grandmother were jointly organising a birthday party for him at Windsor Castle for three hundred family and friends – one of whom, camouflaged among a group from St Andrews, was Kate. He had chosen the theme ‘Out of Africa’ because he ‘thought it would be quite fun to see the family out of black tie and get everyone to dress up.’ A curious collection of costumes made their way into the Castle that Saturday night, including furry lions, legionaries, tribal chieftains, Tarzan and a banana. Someone who also made their way in, but not past security at the King Henry VIII Gate, was a thirty-six-year-old self-styled comedy terrorist, Aaron Barschak, dressed as Osama bin Laden. He made his way not only into the grounds, but into the very heart of the party and onto the stage where Prince William was making a speech. For a moment, everyone thought he was part of the entertainment, but when he grabbed the microphone it became clear he was an intruder, and he was very quickly seized by security and taken in handcuffs to the local police station. The following day, the Home Secretary ordered an inquiry.
On a more personal note in the birthday interview, William said, ‘My guiding principles in life are to be honest, genuine, thoughtful and caring. I’m not an over-dominant person. I don’t go around and expect everyone to listen to me the whole time; but I like to be in control of my life because I have so many people around me, I can get pulled in one direction and then the other. If I don’t have any say in it, then I end up just losing complete control and I don’t like the idea of that. I could actually lose my identity.
‘A lot of people think I’m hugely stubborn about the whole thing, but you have to be slightly stubborn because everybody wants you for one reason or another. If you don’t stick to your guns and stick to your decision, then you lose control.’
He insisted, however, that he did listen to advice. ‘I do listen, of course I listen. I listen to what people have to say to me and I make my own judgements from there. I think it’s very important that you make your own decision about what you are. Therefore you’re responsible for your actions, so you don’t blame other people.’
Asked whether he wanted to be King, he said, ‘All these questions about do you want to be King? It’s not a question of wanting to be, it’s something I was born into and it’s my duty. Wanting is not the right word. But those stories about me not wanting to be King [which had been circulating] are all wrong. It’s a very important role and it’s one that I don’t take lightly. It’s all about helping people and dedication and loyalty, which I hope I have – I know I have. Sometimes I do get anxious about it but I don’t really worry a lot. I want to get through university and then maybe start thinking seriously about that in the future. I don’t really ever talk about it publicly. It’s not something you talk about with whoever. I think about it a lot but they are my own personal thoughts. I’ll take each step as
it comes and deal with it as best I can.’
He also mentioned his love of speed and motorbikes. He had a Yamaha 600 trials bike that he rode on and off road, mostly around Highgrove. ‘My father is concerned about the fact that I’m into motorbikes but he doesn’t want to keep me all wrapped up in cotton wool,’ he said. ‘So you might as well live if you’re going to live. It’s just something I’m passionate about. I’ve always had a passion for motorbikes ever since I was very small. I used to do a lot of go-karting when I was younger and then after that I went on to quad bikes and eventually motorbikes. It does help being anonymous with my motorcycle helmet on because it does enable me to relax; but I just enjoy everything about motorbikes and the camaraderie that comes with it.’
Cars, on the other hand, he could take or leave – and drove a second-hand Volkswagen Golf. ‘Everyone, I’m sure, hopes some day they’ll get a new car but I’m very lucky with the car I’ve got at the moment. It’s fast enough and it’s very comfortable. I’ve got a good stereo in it. I’m sure my father would go absolutely bananas if he saw me driving, blaring music out of the windows.’
Not long afterwards, someone did go bananas when they saw him driving but it wasn’t his father; it was the septuagenarian and rather grumpy 8th Earl Bathurst, owner of Cirencester Park where William had been playing polo.
The Earl was driving through the Park on his way home from the same polo match, when his Land Rover was overtaken on the grass verge by a Volkswagen Golf travelling at 40 to 50 mph. Roused to heights of fury by this flagrant breach of the estate’s 20 mph speed limit, Bathurst gave chase, flashing his lights, sounding his horn and engaging in off-road manoeuvres to try to get the offender to stop. But it was the Earl himself who was forced to stop – by the security team protecting Prince William, as he sped home.
