Prince William (25 page)

Most of the town had turned out to see them arrive, and quite a number of the world's media too. ‘I think he was really nervous when he arrived,' says Colleen. ‘All the press were there and it suddenly hit him, and he was very unsteady for a little while after that. He'd had a fantastic gap year, really enjoyed himself, and there he was stuck. He didn't know anybody, just one or two guys from Eton who he didn't know that well, and he was very much alone.'

Niall Scott, the university press officer, had been briefed by Colleen Harris that if he spotted anyone in the town with anything larger than an instamatic, he was to get them removed. It was not only William's privacy that mattered but also the privacy of his fellow students. ‘William was very sensitive to that,' says Niall. ‘He knew the unsettling effect his presence could have and was keen that it should all be quietened down.'

Scarcely had the last media truck disappeared than Niall saw a camera crew blithely setting up to film outside his office window. ‘It was a red rag to a bull,' he said. ‘I walked out and asked them what they were doing. I was told, “We're Ardent, here's our card. We're making an A–Z of Royalty for an entertainment channel in the States and we're waiting to film William coming out of his lecture.”' Ardent, they explained, was owned by Prince Edward, William's uncle. ‘We had a full and frank exchange of views on the pavement,' says Niall, ‘and I said, “You shouldn't be here, a deal's a deal, I don't care who you are, everyone else has left.”

‘It was the start of a very interesting week. We then discovered that Ardent had taken a group of our students, bought them dinner and then asked them to pretend that a year had passed and they were looking back at William's first year, and this was to be presented as fact. All a bit underhand.'

Colleen had stayed on for a couple of days and she too spotted the Ardent crew. ‘They kept saying they had permission to be there and I said, “Well, I'm the person who would give you permission and I haven't, so you can't be here.” “No,” they said, “we've got permission from Prince Edward.” They wouldn't go, so I rang Mark [Bolland]. It became a massive story. Edward rang and said he was sorry about the confusion, they were going to go, it was a misunderstanding.'

The
Daily Mail
claimed the Prince of Wales was ‘incandescent' with rage: so angry that he had refused to take telephone calls from his youngest brother. The story escalated into a major attack on Prince Edward and his competence as a film-maker and ran in most of the newspapers for several days. Then Prince Philip
was said to have weighed into the argument. He thought William was being ‘overprotected' by his father and had ‘overreacted' to the film crew. In a very rare reaction from Buckingham Palace, Prince Philip issued a strongly worded public statement saying he thought nothing of the sort; the views attributed to him were ‘totally without foundation'.

‘Who knows how the conversation went between them all at Sandringham that Christmas,' says Colleen. ‘William and Harry would not have been happy about their uncle being made to look a fool.'

A NORMAL STUDENT

Knowing his father was engaged in a major family row would have been upsetting for any student trying to settle quietly into a new university in a new part of the country, surrounded by strangers. How much more devastating then to have it splashed all over the newspapers.

The first few weeks and months were tough but he gradually found his feet and began to make friends. Inevitably, perhaps, he gravitated to the familiar and the safe – the only two old Etonians in his hall of residence, Alasdair Coutts-Wood and Fergus Boyd. He had known them vaguely at Eton and Andrew Gailey had done a little engineering to ensure that there were at least a couple of familiar faces in hall with whom he thought William might become friends.

William was cautious about letting people into his confidence, perhaps rightly. At Ludgrove and Eton he had been protected by the system and he was among children who came from solid middle- and upper-class backgrounds – not known for their anarchic or Republican sympathies. At university there were no safety nets and he was amongst a student population of nearly seven thousand very diverse people from every background under the sun and almost as many countries. There was no presumption that they would be sympathetic to him and no reason to suppose they might be supporters of the monarchy. Many of them, some of the lecturers included, were not. Equally, there were people who threw themselves at him, particularly star-struck American girls, whom he steered clear of. As his father discovered at the same age, those
that came forward usually wanted to be friends for all the wrong reasons, while the more genuine people didn't want to be seen to be sucking up. There was also the very real fear of photographs or stories and snippets being sold to the media. He knew he could trust the sort of people he mixed with at school and at home. Sticking with them was a safer bet.

There was no shortage of people to choose from. The university struggles to shake off its public-school image and the student profile is mixed nationally – about one third are Scottish, one third European, including English, and one third from further overseas, mostly America – but in William's year there were dozens of boys from Eton. ‘They can appear to be terribly posh,' says David. ‘Most of them go home for the weekends, but put them all in a minibus together with the others for a week on a field trip and they all get on famously. St Andrews is an incredibly inclusive place.'

William did mix with the state school students in academic and sporting settings;‘It was almost a thing that William was determined to do,' says David. ‘His very close friends were all from public schools. Interestingly though, he started playing very early for the university water polo team. Water polo is not a particularly public school sport, it is one of the roughest games you can play – it can be brutal – and he was playing in the Scottish league and the Celtic Nations Tournament, so he was going to places like Motherwell [a relatively depressed former steel town south-east of Glasgow], which is an utterly no-nonsense place. In his bathing cap they didn't know who he was.'

The hall of residence he chose was called St Salvator's Hall, commonly known as Sally's, which is one of the smallest and most central, where Kate Middleton also happened to be living that first year, which is how they came to meet. Most early friendships are formed with the people you live with at university, quite simply because you bump into each other all the time, in the corridors and bathrooms, over breakfast and the coffee machine, and clutching armfuls of dirty socks in the laundry room. William had missed Freshers'Week, when there are parties and discos and time for the
new intake to work out the geography of the town and make a few friends before the work starts in earnest. In his absence, the public school element in Sally's had already sought each other out and Kate – with her Marlborough College credentials, her fashionable clothes and her well-kempt mane of dark brown hair – was one of them.

They met with friends, and then found themselves attending the same lectures, walking to and from Sally's, bumping into each other at the sports centre, in bars and around the town – it's not a big place, there are just three main streets – and people with anything in common tend to gravitate to one another.

Sally's was purpose-built in the 1930s – out of the ubiquitous grey stone that is so characteristic of the town – with spacious gardens at the back. William had made it very clear that he didn't want anything fancy, so he had a standard room to himself but shared a bathroom. He also shared laundry and kitchen facilities, although most meals during the week were provided. At weekends they had to fend for themselves in the evenings but there were plenty of bars, pubs and restaurants serving food, or there was the chippy. The only difference between him and every other student in Sally's was that his PPOs had a room nearby.

‘Some of the protection people came the year before William arrived and said, “We need to see the rooms,”' says David. ‘So, because I'm not supposed to be telling anybody anything I had to say to the manager of St Salvator's, “Look, when is the present student who occupies that room likely to be out?” “She's never in between 9 and 11 in the morning,” she says, so I took these burly policemen, about eleven of them, up to this room. It was empty, the manager unlocked it, we all stood in the room, they all chatted away. There was then a wonderful pitter-patter along the corridor of a naked student except for a bath towel coming back to her room to get dressed. She handled the police a lot better than the police handled her!

‘The protection people were a scream. They dressed like seventies middle-class students – in cords and jackets. They stood out a mile trying to blend in and look like students.'

The university wanted no guns on campus. ‘I don't know what they actually did,' says David. ‘But everyone in the town used to refer casually to a certain vehicle which regularly toured the streets neighbouring the campus as “the gun van.”'

David and William met every three or four weeks. ‘Our meetings were not really businesslike because he was incredibly jovial, it was very knockabout and that was the level at which he wanted it – and not, perhaps, the level he expected from a university. I think he had this notion he was in a different hierarchy and it went up to people like me and it would be as formal as some of his other hierarchies were, and he enjoyed the fact that it wasn't like that. The fact that someone would say, “Ah come off it.” So we got on extremely well, but it was not beyond the superficial in terms of personal things.'

David was much amused by a conversation with the Queen during her Golden Jubilee at Buckingham Palace. He was sent as a representative of one of the six ancient universities, ‘to swear allegiance and say we were loyal citizens', he says, ‘and I remember the Queen asking me, “How's William?” as if I saw him every day, as if St Andrews was one quad. I said, “As far as I know, he's absolutely fine.”'

HORSE-TRADING

At the beginning of William's second term he was upset by an even bigger family row hitting the news. The
News of the World
(with Rebekah Wade now at the helm) ran an exclusive story under the headline, ‘HARRY'S DRUG SHAME'. Harry, then sixteen, had confessed he'd been smoking cannabis and drinking under-age and after-hours in the Rattlebone. According to the story, Harry's behaviour had come to light in November 2001 and his father had taken him for a short sharp shock to Featherstone Lodge, a drug rehabilitation centre in south London, to spend a day talking to recovering drug addicts.

It was another of Mark Bolland's attempts to repair the Prince of Wales's reputation. What could have been a wholly negative story had a positive spin: Charles had masterfully handled the scenario that every parent dreads and can identify with. He was not a bad father, as the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was one of the first to proclaim: ‘The way Prince Charles and the Royal Family have handled it is absolutely right and they have done it in a very responsible and, as you would expect, a very sensitive way for their child.' Peter Martin, chief executive of Addaction, Britain's largest drug and alcohol treatment agency, said ‘The Prince of Wales has acted with deep sensitivity and very quickly, which is exactly what is needed.'To which the Department of Education added, ‘Parents play a very important role, as demonstrated by Prince Charles, who has set an extremely good example.'

The
News of the World
claimed that Harry had been smoking the cannabis in the shed at the back of the Rattlebone and on
one occasion, at the end of a lock-in, a very drunk Harry, when asked to leave, had called the French under-manager, ‘a f***ing frog'. Steve Hoare, from Nobodys Business, was there that night and was so disgusted by ‘the lies' he read in the papers over the whole incident that he has never bought a newspaper since. No one ever used the shed out at the back, the lock-ins happened in the back bar, there were never any drugs in the pub when William or Harry were around and if anyone had produced any, Skip and Casper, instructors from the polo club or their PPOs, who were always there, would have been on it like a flash. As for the incident with the Frenchman, François Ortet, known as ‘French Frank', it was playful banter; they were friends, and the Frenchman was giving as good as he got.

According to locals, the
News of the World
had sent a couple of young reporters to live in the village for a month and infiltrate the Rattlebone. They had been introduced by a regular as relatives and they got to know the locals. It's rumoured that it was not motivated by altruism. The figure of £35,000 has been mentioned.

What none of the media who flocked to the sleepy village of Sherston looking for locals to spill the beans on Harry knew was that Mark's release of the story to the
News of the World
was a skilful piece of damage limitation. During the summer, the
News of the World
had published a photograph of a very spaced-out Harry in a nightclub in Spain. They had kept a watch on him ever since, spoken to associates and compiled damning evidence of far more serious behaviour than that described in their story in January 2002. Some of it had been going on in the basement of Highgrove, which the Prince had done up for the boys as a den. They called it Club H and had wild parties there with their friends, playing loud techno music until the early hours.

Rebekah Wade had rung her friend Bolland to alert him to what they had, and he brokered a deal which saved the young Prince's bacon and left his father smelling of roses.

‘Worried Charles chose to “terrify” Harry away from drugs by sending him to therapy sessions with hard-core heroin addicts,'
announced the
News of the World
, but a ‘family friend' declared reassuringly that, ‘he has never done drugs since. William is such a steadying influence. The two of them have had detailed discussions and Harry has changed his ways. He now understands the very real perils of drug-taking and excessive drinking. He has a lot to be thankful for. If his brother and father did not care so much about him there might well have been a different end to this story.'