by Penny Junor
‘I phoned Jamie for some advice, “Here’s the scenario, I’m in a bit of a bind. How do I go about approaching somebody from within the Royal Family? I know Prince William can’t do it.” At the end Jamie said, “You said William can’t come. Does that mean you don’t want Prince William?” “No, Jamie, I’m assuming that he isn’t available.” “Where are you going to be for the next hour?” “In traffic driving down to Dorset.” “I’ll call you back.” He called back and said, “If I was to tell you Prince William was available would you like him to go?” “I would swim the Channel if he were able to go.” “Well, it so happens he would quite like to go to the game and he’s free and if it would be useful for him to be there, we’ll see what we can do.” “It would definitely be useful.” “Okay,” said Jamie, “but we need some help getting him there and you’re going to have to come with us because he doesn’t know anyone, doesn’t know the protocol and he’s beginning to rely on you to take him through that.” So we organised everything, the Embassy in Rome was detailed with preparing the protocol and he was going to fly in, watch the game, and fly back again because he had to be on duty the next morning in Anglesey.
‘Jamie warned me I should expect some questioning from him as to why this wasn’t in his diary in the first place and why he wasn’t notified of the possibility of it. So I said, “Do I just have to take this on the chin, Jamie?” and he said, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to.” So I was really nervous about this and, of course, William was politeness personified and we had a good chat and then he said, “I was very surprised that I was asked at such short notice.” So I said, “Sir, I take full responsibility for that. Early on I think we knew that this wasn’t a period that was available in your diary and we factored it out of our plans.”And he said, “Well, that’s not good planning and I hope that in future you will at least give us early warning of potential events so that we can be aware of them and if circumstances change, we know how we can react to those changes.” And I thought, that’s the best way I’ve been bollocked in my life, and it was very, very effective because he was absolutely right; even though I knew that he wasn’t going to be there I ought to have notified the Household that there was a possibility of a set of circumstances arising. He said to me, “You’ve got to plan everything in advance, you’ve got to forward plan.” Then he said, “But don’t worry, I’m coming”, and it was fine.
‘At that moment, I thought, that is leadership, real leadership because, firstly, he’s turned up and done something, he’s weighed up whether he should or not but he’s let it be known that if we’re going to manage a relationship in the future, where he’s our President and we might need him, then we need to work in a particular way. During that conversation – all the way to Rome and to the stadium and back – we also had a long, long discussion about discipline in football. What could he do, as President, to help to put across a message that players are role models; that what they do on the pitch is seen on TV and has an impact upon young people who copy and emulate their heroes? “What can we do, what can I do as President to bring people together to try and make things happen?”
‘We had a long and interesting brainstorm about how he could have an effective role. He said, “I can’t chair meetings, it’s not my business, but if I can get involved in something in the right way at the right point and start something off then perhaps it can have an impact; use my presidency to make a difference.” It was clear to me he saw that he could be the catalyst for change and this was an area he cared very deeply about.’ He never got the initiative they envisaged off the ground but the FA was running a programme at grass-roots level called Respect and Fair Play – respect the game, respect the referee, etc. – and he became involved in that and presented the first awards at the 2010 FA Cup Final at Wembley.
‘Unfashionable as the word may sound,’William said, ‘sportsmanship underpins everything good and worthwhile about our national game. What is so important about these Respect and Fair Play Awards is that they acknowledge and reward those who play fair and encourage fair play – true sportsmen and women. Everything about why I wanted to become President of the Football Association is encapsulated by what the winners this afternoon represent. Whilst I remain President of the FA, promoting sportsmanship, and stamping out the deplorable scenes that have blighted our game in the past, will be my goal.’
GETTING IT RIGHT
Notwithstanding his determination to get William out to Afghanistan, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton had thought that William’s last attachment would be the finale to his military service and was working on a post-military five-year plan. But William took everyone by surprise when he came into the office one day and announced that he was not yet ready to leave the Forces.
His eighteen months in the Household Cavalry had felt like a proper job, which indeed it was – if frustrating for not being operational – but for the nine months since then he had been on the road, doing different kinds of work each week. Fascinating though it was and at times challenging, it left him feeling as though he was viewing life through a kaleidoscope. He was longing to get stuck into something and to do a proper job again – and what he wanted to do above all else, he said, was search and rescue.
‘Absolutely brilliant,’ says one of the team, knocked out that William had come up with such a perfect solution to the problem they had all been wrestling with. He was being prevented from doing what he really wanted to do, which was to serve on the front line, because he would be endangering not just himself but those around him. With search and rescue, flying in all weathers and visibilities, day and night, manoeuvring in treacherous conditions and into difficult locations, he would be endangering himself but he would be getting other people out of danger. ‘We were agonising about how he could fulfil this bit in here,’ says that same spokesman, thumping his chest, ‘with his deployment and military career, without going down the route of Afghanistan, which at that time was pretty difficult, and he came up with this. It’s the complete flip side of the coin because it’s operational and highly dangerous; before [the wars in] Afghanistan and Iraq, search and rescue were among the most decorated people in the forces, and they continue to be. As the pilot, everybody relies on you for their safety. It’s absolutely perfect and he hit on the idea himself. I just sat down and I thought, Bloody hell, on the button. Really good.’
The Chief of Air Staff, Sir Glenn Torpy, was delighted when he heard that Prince William was wondering whether there might be a chance of him transferring into the Royal Air Force to train as a search and rescue pilot. His immediate response was,‘Yup, no problem, it will happen and it will happen properly.’
During that year when he’d jumped from one service to another, it had been agreed by the MoD and the Queen that William would be commissioned in each one, which makes him the only person who has a non-ceremonial commission in the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force and the Army. To his delight, it also makes him the only person who can mix his dress, which he frequently threatens to do.
His training began back at RAF Cranwell and Barkston Heath, on light fixed-wing aircraft. From there he moved to the prestigious Defence Helicopter Flying School at RAF Shawbury – Britain’s own Top Gun – on the Welsh borders. This is where all the services’ helicopter pilots do their basic training. ‘It is really the top two or three per cent of the UK that we are looking at employing,’ says the school’s Commandant. ‘Five per cent of the intake don’t make it to graduation.’
Prince Harry also happened to be at Shawbury, having volunteered for the Army Air Corps to be an Army pilot. He was desperate to get back to the front line and knew that his best chance would be in a helicopter, and made no secret that his dream was to fly £37-million Apache attack helicopters. They are designed to hunt and destroy tanks and to operate in all weathers, day and night. Their pilots have to be the best of the best, but Harry admitted he struggled with the academic side of the course and feared he didn’t have the brain capacity to be allowed to fly Apache
s. He thought a future flying the utilitarian Lynx (carrying troops and gathering intelligence) was more realistic.
For about six months the brothers overlapped and shared a tiny cottage off the base – living together properly for the first time since childhood. ‘The first time and the last time, I can assure you of that,’ said Harry in a joint interview to the media, in June 2009, which was peppered with jokey banter. Both were studying hard and putting in a lot of flying hours but they clearly had good fun together, as was apparent when they answered questions from journalists. William claimed he did all the cooking and clearing up after his messy brother (who also snored a lot) and said, tongue-in-cheek, that living together had been ‘an emotional experience. Harry does do the washing up,’ William added, ‘but then he leaves it in the sink and then it comes back in the morning and I have to wash it up.’ ‘Oh the lies, the lies,’ said Harry. He said William definitely had more brains than he did but pointed out that William was losing his hair. ‘That’s pretty rich coming from a ginger.’ William said he’d been helping his brother quite a bit. ‘It’s the RAF way,’ he joked, ‘you have to help the Army out.’
William was three months ahead of Harry at Shawbury and just having gone through the same module, he was very helpful to his younger brother when they were doing their prep in the evenings. There was a lot of prep. The first four to five weeks were spent on the ground taking exams, which had never been Harry’s forte, as he was the first to admit. But between the flying and cooking and tutoring, William also tried to keep abreast of his charities. Charlie Mayhew, CEO of Tusk, was pleasantly surprised to receive a call from Jamie. ‘He said William wondered whether I’d like to go up there for an evening to brief him on what Tusk’s doing. We had a really good evening in his cottage; there was no one else around, just me and him. It was a sweet little cottage, you could hardly swing a cat in there. He was working so it wasn’t a late night; he showed me some of the technical books he was studying and they looked horrific. But it was a good example of him wanting to spend quality time with one of his charities and understand the issues, and how we were dealing with the economic downturn; what we were doing, where we were going, what our strategy was. It was fantastic because one wonders, as he gets older and takes on a more public role, how much time will he be able to give to his charities, whether he wants to or not.’
A couple of years before, when William was based at Bovington Camp in Dorset, he had a similar briefing at Tusk’s office in the small town of Gillingham nearby, where he met the team. They have since taken over what used to be a hairdresser’s in the High Street, but at that time they were tucked away in a converted abattoir. He arrived with Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton late one afternoon and Charlie offered to give them both supper at his house afterwards, ‘which sent my wife into a bit of a spin,’ he says. ‘Caroline said, “Oh my God, what am I going to cook?” and I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll find out from Jamie what the form is.” He said, “He’d love something really normal; shepherd’s pie would be great,” so that’s what he got.
‘It was very relaxed. Our chairman and his wife came too so there were about eight or ten of us. It’s not every day you have royalty to supper and our house is a bit of a tip most of the time, with four young children and a dog. We’d been trying to clean it for days beforehand and our eldest daughter, who’s quite perceptive, said, “What’s going on? You’ve been cleaning everything.” It was spring so I said, “You’ve heard of spring cleaning.” We’d had the carpets cleaned and the upholstery cleaned and the funny thing was the smell; carpets are bad but upholstery is even worse and I came back from work about two days before they were due and the whole house was smelling of chemicals. “Oh my God, this is awful,” and I opened all the windows. My brother-in-law said, “Well they probably all think that other people’s houses smell like that.” I worked my butt off in the garden too. Yes, I probably did tell him – he’s the sort of person you can have a good laugh with about things like that.’
‘We had drinks outside in the garden, it was a lovely evening and my son got very confused as to which one was Prince William, because there was Jamie and the protection team. Jamie has children of the same age and was chatting to him, and my son got very excited thinking it was Prince William and said to him, “Can I show you my den?” And they trotted off down the garden. But William was good with the children too, and with the dog. At one point he was sitting in the dog basket.
‘Just as we were about to sit down for dinner, Caroline said to the kids, “Off to bed, we don’t want to see you again and just remember there are police outside, armed, so behave yourselves.” She said to William, “I don’t know if that’s going to work. I bet those little faces are going to be poking their heads round the corner in no time.” We sat down and there was a pitter-patter of feet coming down the stairs and at that very moment two protection officers came in through the front door to have their supper in the kitchen and met the children coming down the stairs. They were two quite heavy-looking chaps. The children saw them and shot back and we never saw them again for the rest of the night.’
After six months of domestic bliss, the brothers went their separate ways. Harry left Shawbury in October 2009 to complete his training with the Army Air Corps at Middle Wallop in Hampshire, graduating the following April. William stayed on at Shawbury until January 2010, when he graduated, according to the MoD, ‘with flying colours’. His father once again presented him with his certificate and Kate was again in the audience to applaud his triumph. The final nine months of his training as a search and rescue pilot were followed almost immediately with a transfer to RAF Valley on the island of Anglesey. But while the military was his day job – and a very full-time job – it was not his only job. The next day he flew to New Zealand to represent the Queen at the opening of the new Supreme Court in Wellington and deliver his first major speech as a senior member of the Royal Family.
A HOUSEHOLD OF THEIR OWN
The day Prince Harry arrived back from Afghanistan, in March 2008, the media were waiting at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire for the promised interview. The man tasked with overseeing it was Miguel Head, Chief Press Officer at the MoD. As such, he had liaised with Clarence House to organise the media blackout before Harry’s deployment.
It was a Saturday morning and, to his surprise, Prince Charles and Prince William appeared at the airfield to welcome Harry home. It was very sweet.
Harry spoke movingly about who the real heroes were, dismissing suggestions that he was one of them. On his incoming flight there were two such heroes, both men comatose for the entire trip, one with an arm and a leg missing, the other having taken shrapnel in the neck. Miguel had never met Harry before so he didn’t know his comfort levels, but twenty minutes into the interview, when Harry was asked what was next for him and he started to answer, William, who was sitting to one side during the press conference, turned to Miguel and ran his finger across his throat, to say it was time to end the interview.
Aware that he was supposed to be the one supervising the interview – and there was still a good ten minutes to run – but loath to ignore the heir to the throne, Miguel got to his feet and stood in front of the camera and said, ‘Thank you, the interview’s over.’ Everyone was very surprised, not least William and Harry. They went off to Clarence House and sent a message later saying how impressed they’d been that they had asked a press officer to end an interview and he’d actually done it.
A few months later, Miguel received a call from Clarence House, which culminated in an interview with the Princes. They had decided they wanted their own spokesperson and had talked to their father, who had agreed. He doesn’t think they remembered him from that day but Paddy and Patrick [Harrison, number two in the press office] did and they tapped him on the shoulder. Their principal focus was inevitably on Charles and Camilla and, because of William and Harry’s historically rocky relationship with the media, they wanted someone whose focus would be on them alone.
As one of them says, ‘Harry had gone through a period when he’d been spotted falling in and out of nightclubs a lot and one of the things that both of them got fed up with was that, compared to most other lads of his age, he was almost monk-like. What was happening again and again was, he would go out on a Friday night and admittedly he would have a big night and be up until six in the morning and, of course, he would be drunk – all those pictures speak for themselves – but those pictures taken that night would be repeated for about three weeks, often as different stories, so you were left with the impression, as a reader, that he was out every night. He wasn’t at all and he got very fed up with it. They felt they needed someone to put the record straight on things like that and they wanted someone to help them take them through their career, help ensure that the coverage about them was balanced, nothing more than that. I remember them saying this in the interview. They said it didn’t have to be positive, they just wanted it to be fair and balanced.’
Miguel joined the team as Assistant Press Secretary in September 2008; four years later, he says the only instruction he has ever had from them is, ‘Please, please, always, always tell the truth.’
He was absolutely astounded that someone not much younger than him should say, “What is the right thing to do here? Let’s do it.” Not right as in what’s the clever thing, what’s going to get us a good headline; right in the moral sense. There have been a couple of occasions when William has taken the hit for something and won the admiration of everyone in his office. His instincts have always been absolutely spot on’.
