by Penny Junor
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 su
spected 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.’
Because of the security implications, in that their messages were often about the Princes’ flights and movements, the police brought in the anti-terrorism squad, who very quickly confirmed that their messages were being hacked and discovered who was doing it. Although, as one of them says, ‘It wasn’t rocket science.
‘We decided very quickly to prosecute – William and Harry were very angry and very keen to get something done about it. We told the police, and off we went. There was quite a long period when we carried on as normal while they gathered the evidence, knowing that they were listening to our voicemails. It was evil stuff. I never believed it was just us – as it all subsequently unravelled.’ In that unravelling, in November 2011, it transpired that while the News of the World was being investigated for hacking into William’s voicemail, it had hired a private investigator, ex-police detective Derek Webb, to follow him. It was no surprise; both boys had known for years that they were being followed.
Diana had talked about telephone tapping, the Squidgy and Camillagate tapes had been the result of some sort of interception; from an early age William and Harry had lived with the fear of leaks and betrayals. William particularly was wary of people, questioning motives, wondering whether they could be trusted. Their reaction to the hacking was anger, not disbelief. The News of the World had been prying into their lives for as long as they could remember, and to discover that they had found some new way was not entirely surprising.
‘The phone-hacking thing was a complete liberation to them,’ says a friend, ‘because all those stories just stopped; they don’t appear any more. If you look five years before the hacking arrests and five years after, it’s like night and day in terms of what appears and what doesn’t. It’s unbelievable. Every week there would be something in the news: an argument William was supposed to have had with his commanding officer at Sandhurst … masses and masses of stuff, some of it trivial, some a bit damaging when presented the wrong way. With those arrests, they realised that their friends weren’t talking and don’t talk and that has helped them relax about things.’
GOING SOLO
For the next eighteen months after his graduation from Sandhurst, William was a part of regimental life but he had signed up for a short-term commission and it became clear that, because of the way the squadrons within the regiment were rotating, he was not going to get out to Afghanistan within that time. Rather than doing more of the same, he decided to spend the remaining eighteen months experiencing life in the other services. One day in the future he would be Commander-in-Chief of all three, the highest rank he could hold, and he wanted to know more about how they worked at the other end of the scale. It would make him unique among monarchs but also among high-ranking servicemen, and put him in a position to contradict anybody from the Chief of Defence Staff down, none of whom would have had his breadth of experience.
So at the beginning of January 2008, as Flying Officer William Wales, he arrived at RAF Cranwell in Lincolnshire, where he was stationed with 1 Squadron of 1 Elementary Flying Training School. It was the start of four months of specially tailored, intensive training with the Royal Air Force, where he spent just enough time with each aspect of the service – from logistics to flying – to soak up the ethos and traditions of the RAF as well as its military role. Flying was where his passion lay. It was very much in the blood. His father had started his military career in the RAF, and already had a private pilot’s licence when he’d arrived at Cranwell in 1971 to train as a jet pilot. Charles loved flying, as did his father, but both men were ultimately persuaded to follow the family tradition and join the Navy. Charles finally got his wish to join the Fleet Air Arm and did a helicopter conversion course to become a pilot on the commando carrier HMS Hermes. He described those as ‘the happiest and most rewarding’ days of his naval career, but he was perpetually frustrated by restrictions forced on him because of fears for his safety. He would wonder why an aircraft deemed too dangerous for him to fly was safe enough for his friends. The Duke of Edinburgh took up flying when he
gave up his naval career. He gained his RAF wings in 1953, then his helicopter wings, then his private pilot’s licence, and when he finally gave up flying in 1997 at the age of seventy-six, he had flown 5,986 hours in fifty-nine types of aircraft. And Prince Andrew had been a naval pilot in the Falklands War.
So it was not surprising that after eight days, and just eight and a half hours’ flying time, William made his first solo flight in a Grob 115E light aircraft, known as a Tutor. ‘God knows how somebody trusted me with an aircraft and my own life,’ he said afterwards. ‘It was an amazing feeling, I couldn’t believe it. I was doing a few circuits going round and round, then Roger my instructor basically turned round and said, “Right, I’m going to jump out now,” and I said, “What, where are you going?” He said, “You’re going on your own,” and I said, “There’s no way I’m going to do that,” but he said I was ready for it and jumped out. The next thing I knew I was taxiing down the runway and I was sitting there saying, “Oh my God, this is a bit odd, there’s no one in here.” Going solo is one of those things – if you had a list of the top fifty things to do before you die, it would be in there.’
From the Grob he graduated to the faster Tucano T1 based at RAF Linton-on-Ouse in North Yorkshire, and from there he moved to RAF Shawbury in Shropshire and helicopters, starting with the Squirrel.
After the four months, he had flown most of the aircraft in the service including a Typhoon jet fighter and, as one of his Household describes it, ‘had had the most amazing panoply of experiences’. He even made it to the front line. He was on a thirty-hour mission to Afghanistan to repatriate the body of Robert Pearson, a twenty-two-year-old trooper killed in action. He wasn’t qualified to fly the massive four-engine C-17 Globemaster military transport plane, but did take the controls of it under supervision during the flight. During the three hours on the ground at Kandahar, he met fellow servicemen, and surprised them all. Only a handful of people knew he was on his way, because of a news blackout, but his visit was a huge morale boost. The news only broke when he was safely back on British soil when he said how ‘deeply honoured’ he felt being part of the crew that brought the body home. After they landed at RAF Lyneham, he asked for a private meeting with the parents of the dead soldier. He had gone to Afghanistan as a regular serving officer, but he was always a member of the Royal Family first and has a real understanding of the impact that a sympathetic word could have on people in times of distress.
