Prince William

by Penny Junor

  ‘At the end of it, I fought my way through to where he was sitting and he said, “I just want to go and commiserate with the Australian governor general.” They were the bidder for 2022 and they’d lost as well, and then I said, “Let’s go. Are you willing to give a media interview on the way out?” and he said, “Yes, that’s fine.”

  ‘We’d arranged that if we’d won everyone would stay together but if we’d lost, FIFA had arranged an escape route, but there was a media pool [a small number of reporters and photographers given access, who pool their stories and photographs with their colleagues]. He gave a very dignified interview. Very disappointed for the team, worked very hard, the team did their best, I’m very proud of them, congratulations to Russia, etc. etc. And off he went. I saw him into the car. I shook his hand but knew my duties with him had come to an end because my contract was finishing with the FA. He shook hands and said, “Keep in touch. I’m really very disappointed for you, I feel very bad for you.” I said, “Sir, I’m really sorry I got you involved in all of this. But I’d like to thank you.” He said, “Please, I’ve enjoyed it, you guys have done brilliantly,” and off he went.

  ‘I understand he was very grumpy for the rest of the weekend about the result. He really wanted us to win; he’d been to every meeting we’d asked him to go to and I think a number of people had said to him they were going to vote for England and then didn’t. I’m not sure any of us can understand what sort of a person would do that, particularly as he is such a commanding figure: he’s pleasant, he’s funny, he’s a leader, he’s tough, he knows his stuff and he’s scrupulously honest. The role that he played with us, and a lot of what he did behind the scenes for us, was tremendous. He’s been fantastic for football: he likes the game, likes football players, likes talking about it. He’s been an inspiring person to spend time with.’

  England’s failure to get beyond the first vote was a crushing blow but in the previous few weeks, the whole voting system and the propriety of some FIFA members had been questioned by the British media. The Sunday Times ran an exposé of alleged bribery and corruption and the BBC’s Panorama did likewise.

  Asked by the media if he felt members had lied to the bid about their support, Andy Anson said, ‘I do feel people let us down, I’d be lying if I said they didn’t. People who promised us their vote obviously went the other way. I honestly felt that we had enough comfort, enough people, enough room to hope that things would go all right and we would go through the first round.’

  Geoff Thompson said the same, ‘I cannot believe what has happened … The votes that were promised clearly didn’t materialise.’

  Speaking at a dinner a few days later, David Cameron, who had spent three days pressing England’s case in Zurich, said, ‘According to FIFA we had the best technical bid and the strongest commercial bid and the country is passionate about football. But it turns out that is not enough.’

  Cameron also revealed the lengths that Prince William had gone to, to convince FIFA members to vote for England. ‘I met Prince William coming out of one of these meetings and said, “How did it go?” He said it had gone really, really well. I said, “Gosh, how did you do it, what did you offer him? An invitation to the wedding?” He said, “Prime Minister, I went so far I think I offered to marry him.”’

  FOUNDATION FOR THE FUTURE

  Nick Booth, who for ten years ran the NSPCC’s high-profile Full Stop campaign against child abuse, was settling into a new life in America. He had gone there to be vice president of external affairs for Big Brothers Big Sisters, the world’s largest mentoring organisation. As he says, he was applying for his green card and living in a Philadelphia suburb with his white picket fence and the yellow school bus picking up the kids every day, when he was approached by the Princes’ office. Would he like to help them both set up a brand-new charitable foundation?

  After three interviews, the last of which was with Prince William, he announced to the family that they were packing up and going home. There was a mixture of sadness at leaving friends in America and excitement at being back in the UK. They moved house, schools and job all at once, and he arrived at St James’s Palace in October 2010. In the next twelve weeks he made eighteen transatlantic flights.

  ‘The Foundation had been registered but this was building it from scratch and the chance to put something together from the beginning doesn’t come along very often,’ he says. ‘And when that is the first Royal foundation of its type in living memory, and possibly ever in the way it’s now operating, it’s very exciting. Also the two Princes are remarkable in the sense of their commitment to do the right thing and to use their position to change things that they are passionate about, and the Foundation was a really interesting vehicle to do that with.’

  The Princes and their team were doing some serious thinking about the future. Charity work is now one of the monarchy’s main and most important functions. And as the historian Frank Prochaska wrote in Royal Bounty: The Making of a Welfare Monarchy, ‘Barring cataclysm or self-destruction, the monarchy is only likely to be in real danger when the begging letters cease to arrive at Buckingham Palace.’ As its constitutional importance declined, it forged a new role for itself as patron, promoter and fund-raiser for the underprivileged and deserving.

  The tradition of a charitable monarchy goes back to George III at the end of the eighteenth century, but it was during the present Queen’s reign that it became an integral part of her family’s daily work. There are currently more than 160,000 registered charities and other charitable organisations in the UK, and about three thousand of them have a Royal patron or president. The Queen has over six hundred patronages; the Duke of Edinburgh, over seven hundred; the Prince of Wales, over six hundred; the Princess Royal nearly three hundred. The Duke of York and the Earl and Countess of Wessex have fewer but still significant numbers, as do the Queen’s cousins, the Gloucesters and the Kents. William and Harry’s generation of Royals have chosen to lead normal lives, and aside from Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, the Duke of York’s daughters, they have no Royal titles. As the older generation starts falling by the wayside, the number of Royal patrons left to go round will be drastically diminished. Essentially, there will only be William, Harry and their two wives, assuming Harry will also marry in the not too distant future. Even if they were to have four children each in double-quick time, there would still be a gap of twenty-five years or so while those children were growing up, with no more than four working members of the Family Firm in the interim. There are currently eighteen. The existing model of charitable patronage couldn’t possibly work.

  The whole issue of the future was raised, quite unintentionally, by a question from the Duke of Edinburgh’s office three or four years ago. His ninetieth birthday was looming and there was an assumption – erroneous as it turned out – that he might want to slow down. Were any other members of the Family interested in taking on some of his patronages?

  There were lengthy discussions about how the Royal landscape might look in twenty or thirty years’ time, which led to two conclusions. One was that it wasn’t necessary to become patron of a charity in order to help it – as their support for Help for Heroes had convincingly demonstrated. ‘They wore the wristbands and it just kind of went whoosh. That wasn’t down to them,’ says one of the team, ‘but they were a catalyst. So they recognise that backing a particular project can have massive strategic consequences.’

  They wanted to find a means of bringing about change and making an impact on the issues they care about, but without getting locked into long-term commitments with particular charities and organisations – and thus spreading themselves too thinly between the many that want their patronage. Their ideal would be to remain at one remove and simply give a kick-start to specific projects. Once a project was up and running or had achieved its aims, they could wish it well and move on to other deserving causes. Harry did this very successfully with Walking for the Wounded, a charity that helps veterans reintegrate and retra
in for civilian life. He became patron of one of their fundraising initiatives, the North Pole 2011 Expedition, and in April of that year he trained with the team in Norway and then for four days walked alongside four wounded soldiers, two of them amputees, on their record-breaking trek to the North Pole. The aim was to raise £2 million, and Harry’s presence ensured that the cameras followed them; their feat was not only in the news but the subject of a two-part documentary.

  Dipping in and out was William’s preference anyway. He has always been more interested in the need or issue than in the charity per se. His support for injured servicemen and women is a good example. Both he and Harry care passionately about this, having had so many friends of their own come back from Iraq and Afghanistan with missing limbs and other injuries. They know that help is crucial, and although there are a whole range of charities endeavouring to help, rather than directly supporting one or two of them, and risk offending the others, they have nailed their colours to the issue itself and are backing whichever project launched by whichever charity they think is doing the most to meet this particular need. As one of the Household says, ‘They’ve done it incredibly effectively without ever being patron of those organisations, and yet I don’t think there’s a single person out there who doesn’t think the two of them have a real passion for the issue of wounded servicemen. But they haven’t had to go down the traditional route to do that.’

  The second conclusion they reached was that they needed some funds of their own to distribute from time to time. Initially it was a very human response – witnessing human tragedy and wanting to do something about it. The Queen and the Prince of Wales have their own funds which they occasionally dip into when they visit an earthquake zone or other catastrophe. However, because of the way their finances are set up, the two Princes have never been able to do this. They wanted to be able to put their hands in their pockets, as seed corn, and encourage others to give.

  The Foundation was the solution to both conclusions. ‘After all those years of royal patronage, for them to say, “Let’s try something different, let’s build a Foundation that finds really exciting projects, put some money, some leverage and awareness into them, but not necessarily stay with them for ever,” is very interesting,’ says Nick Booth.

  Speaking of its creation, William said, ‘We are incredibly excited about our new Foundation. We believe that it will provide a unique opportunity for us to use our privileged position to make a real difference in the future to many areas of charitable work. We feel passionately that, working closely together with those who contribute to our Foundation, we can help to make a long-lasting and tangible difference.’

  ‘The Princes were the first people to put money into it,’ Nick says, ‘which is good philanthropy – “I’ll give and I’d like others to support, and we’re busy fundraising.”’ The Foundation has no big endowment; it has to raise all the money it distributes, which in the first year was about £4 million. Within weeks of Nick arriving, three private donors paid all its administration and staff costs for the first three years. So every donation now goes straight into the projects being supported.

  ‘Before I arrived they chose three areas of interest. We are not constrained by those, but currently those are: disadvantaged children and young people, veterans and military families, and sustainable development conservation. They may change over time but these are first baby steps. We are working out within those broad areas what our first priorities are going to be. Also what the DNA that runs across them is – and that’s an interesting thought process because they feel quite disparate. I think they are linked by two things.

  ‘One, because the Princes are passionate about them, and that’s a perfectly valid reason to have three disparate areas. It’s a personal foundation with two living principals, as opposed to an endowed historic institution.

  ‘The second link is that in each of those areas you have a group of people who cannot fulfil their potential because of the circumstances they find themselves in. It may be because they are living in a disadvantaged community or haven’t got the education or the parental support that they need. Or it may be because they’ve returned from Afghanistan and Iraq with their legs blown off, or because their husband has not come back and the family has a different life, no longer in the military community. Or because you have girls, children, young adults struggling to survive in challenging parts of the world without education, without water.

  ‘So, in each of those areas, can we take a sensible approach with ourselves and with others? We are tiny but can we use our convening power and our leverage and our resources to either remove the blocks to those people fulfilling their potential or put in place accelerators that will help that process? What is it, in each of those areas, that will allow us to help those people really go on and be all they could be in their lives? For two young Princes, and now a young Duchess, that’s a very compelling alignment of values and vision.’

  Since their marriage, Kate – titled as the Duchess of Cambridge – is now an equal player in the Foundation, and the name may have to change, although as Nick says, ‘The Foundation of Prince William and Prince Harry and the Duchess of Cambridge is not a snappy one.’The patronages that William and Harry already had, and the ones that Kate has taken on since her marriage, have not been affected by the Foundation. They could still take on new ones – and indeed William did in January 2012, when he became patron of the 50th Anniversary Year of St Giles Trust. It’s a charity that works with prisoners and their families to break the cycle of reoffending. Prisoners, particularly young offenders, are some of the most excluded and disadvantaged people in society, and the majority are unable to realise their true potential.

  The first project the Foundation put money into, in April 2011, was the Queen Elizabeth II Fields Challenge, which was the perfect fit and with a finite commitment. It was a Fields in Trust project to locate and protect for the future 2,012 green fields and open spaces as a lasting memorial to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012. The Foundation paid to protect the first ten. This was one of the charities that the Duke of Edinburgh first took on, in 1949, from his father-in-law, King George VI, and for which he has worked tirelessly ever since. It’s had several name changes but its aim remains the same: to stop Britain’s open spaces and playing fields being sold and concreted over by developers. Six thousand have been lost since 1992.

  The idea appealed, not least as a personal tribute to his grandmother’s sixty years on the throne, and William became patron of the Challenge in 2010, saying, ‘Green spaces and playing fields are the beating heart of any community. Whether you live in a dense city or in the middle of the countryside, fields provide a safe place for team sports, for talent to be nurtured, for confidence to be built and for your children and teenagers to let off steam. For people of any age, fields provide spaces for sports days, fêtes and the kinds of events that hold communities together. Playing fields are not a luxury. They are a vital component of any healthy and happy community … As Fields in Trust is proud to say, please play on the grass!’

  A RING ON HER FINGER

  There are plenty of St Andrews graduates who marry one another – more so, as I said earlier, than from any other British university – but there are no statistics for how many of them take eight years or more to get round to it.

  The romance had grown slowly, out of friendship, laughter and trust – as was abundantly clear in the interview William and Kate gave ITN’s Tom Bradby on the day of their engagement. They also have a multitude of common interests; and, as anyone who has seen them together will say, they are very much in love and a pleasure to watch together.

  But the relationship had not been full-on throughout the eight years. Their break-up in 2007 was the most public evidence, but there were other times when things had cooled. William had very real worries about whether it was possible to love just one woman. His childhood experiences remain close to the surface, and he was, understandably, cautious about making a mistake or
committing to a relationship he couldn’t sustain for the rest of his life. His early years had been painful. He lost many people he was close to, starting with the sudden disappearance of his beloved nanny. He must have been afraid, albeit subconsciously, of allowing himself to become too attached to Kate, lest she turn out to be another woman who abandoned him.

  Before the break-up in 2007, there might have been an element of taking Kate for granted. It is a cliché that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, but no less true for that. Thanks to their time at St Andrews, they knew each other inside out, in good times and in bad. He adored her family and they him; their house was an oasis of normality in his very abnormal world.

  And if he had confided in Kate and shared his deepest, darkest thoughts and memories, and she had held them safely and helped to ease the buried grief that had never been fully expressed, and quieten some of the demons, he would have realised she was a very special human being and not to be cast lightly aside.

  But if those few weeks apart were also some sort of test of loyalty and discretion, she passed with flying colours. She did not waver in her love for him; and she said nothing to anyone. (Celebrity publicist Max Clifford said she could have sold her story at that time for £5 million.) Throughout the years of their friendship and romance, and the ups and downs, she had been utterly discreet. She had proved herself trustworthy. She had been hounded and harassed and followed and photographed; she had put up with jokes about her middle-class origins, about ‘doors to manual’, she had been called ‘Waity Katie’ and criticised for not having a proper job. And never had she risen to the bait, confided in anyone outside her family, or put a foot wrong.

  The Household was enraged by the ‘Waity Katie’ tag and is full of admiration for the way she coped. ‘It was so sexist and offensive and ill-informed. We couldn’t defend her – to do so would have been tantamount to an engagement announcement because we didn’t represent her, but all the rubbish about her, all the criticism for sitting around doing nothing, when, in fact, she was working for the family business all along. Not giving her, or them, credit as two young modern adults for working it out themselves and deciding on their own timetable. Why on earth should they be pressurised into it by the media?’