Prince William (19 page)

They weren't forced, but William did make one condition. He would go, he said, if Sandy would issue an announcement calling for an end to the mourning. He agreed a text with her and she read it out on his behalf during the photo call on the first day of the Michaelmas Half on 2 September, when Harry joined him as a pupil at Eton.

‘They have asked me to say that they believe their mother would want people now to move on – because she would have known that constant reminders of her death can create nothing but pain to those she left behind. They therefore hope very much that their mother and her memory will now finally be allowed to rest in peace.'

That June, William turned sixteen and the
Mail on Sunday
published a special supplement about him. It was friendly and intended as a celebration, but it was speculative. Among many thousands of words, it claimed that palace aides vetted William's friends before they were invited to tea, which was nonsense. William was incensed and immediately instructed the press office to make a formal complaint on his behalf to the Press Complaints Commission. The claim, they said, was ‘inaccurate and grossly intrusive'. The complaint was upheld.

His sixteenth birthday was an obvious landmark to be celebrated, and since the media had played ball with the palace, it was time
for payback. ‘You're
getting
at the moment,' explained Sandy, ‘but we've got to
give
them something.'William took a lot of persuading. Eventually he agreed that she should come up with a list of questions to give to Peter Archer, a reporter who worked for the Press Association, which distributes news to every other media outlet. So one safe interview and some photographs. ‘It was a bit anodyne,' she says, ‘but it filled their pages.'

Colleen Harris, who joined the press office as Sandy's deputy, two months earlier – the first black member of the Household – was part of the persuasion process. ‘I remember sitting with him, talking about the media plans for his sixteenth birthday, and I remember thinking, I wouldn't put up with this from my own children, I would just tell them, this is what you are doing. Why am I having to negotiate with a fifteen-year-old in this way?' She laughs at the memory, ‘But you did; that's William. You had to discuss it and justify why you were doing certain things and explain what was in it for him and what was in it for them, and then he would come to a decision.

‘He very much wanted to live his own life. Most children at that age don't want all the flummery and fuss; they just want to do what they want to do and I think it was the same for him. He couldn't quite understand why he had to put up with all this nonsense at that stage of his life – why he had to do so much at such a young age and I would argue he wasn't doing a lot of it, “You're only doing a little,” but to him it felt like a lot.

‘Our job at that point was to protect them, that was Sandy's strategy, she said let's just keep them out of the media, give them private time. It was only for landmark things and the skiing trips or when there was an incident or accident or something at school, then we would have to organise the media. It was always challenging because they never wanted to do things – and it was quite hard for us; we wanted to promote these fantastic kids and let the world see them and see how wonderfully they were growing up, and they didn't want to.'

After those early skiing holidays in Lech with their mother, Klosters became their regular haunt. Charles knew the runs like the back of his hand and had loved the place since he first went there in the 1970s. It had been the backdrop to some colourful and delightful photographs in the past, and the deal that evolved between the press office and the press was that the family would do one photo call at the beginning of the holiday and then be left alone.

When Colleen arrived with them all for her first skiing trip, there was no snow on the mountains so she postponed the photo call. But some of the media couldn't stay long enough for the weather to change and so all the Princes agreed to do an interim shot outside the hotel. Colleen made it clear that once there was some snow they would do the usual photo call for everyone else. ‘They didn't hear that bit,' she says, laughing, so when, after heavy snowfall that night she announced the next morning that they were going to do a lovely photo call up in the mountains, some Princes were more cooperative than others.

‘I asked the Prince of Wales and he said, “Yes, absolutely fine, go ahead. You talk to William.” So I had to go and chat to William. Harry was there as well – they were watching something on the telly. It was hysterical, a programme called
Bansai
which they would shout every so often; Harry kept bursting into laughter; the Prince of Wales was sitting in the corner reading, looking up at me. So I said, “We've got to do this photo call.” William said, “No, we've done a photo call.” “No, that was only for some of the media, the ones that had to leave. Now we need to do another one, otherwise you're going to have all the paparazzi following you around for the rest of the week. So let's just go and do a nice big one up the mountain.” “No, I'm not doing it.”

‘Now, I've got 150 media; it's my first trip, Sandy's sick so I can't ring her, and I'm sitting there with this belligerent young man. This carried on backwards and forwards for a bit and in the end, I just lost it, the Mummy in me came out and I said, “Look, you're doing it, otherwise you're all going to be in trouble and it will be a rotten week for everybody. It won't hurt you,
it'll be good for you, dah, dah, dah, dah” and went mad, and he just sat there.

‘Then Harry said, “Yeah, let's do it, William. Get out the way, Colleen, I'm watching something,” and that was it. So Harry got the deal signed for me. That was the photo shoot where the public first heard William speak. I asked an ITN guy to ask him a question. He said ‘How's it going?' and William responded. It was a great photo call. They laughed, they chatted, they did it brilliantly – the best one they'd ever done. It was a turning point and the media went crazy because they'd never heard him speak on camera before. It was a kind of two fingers up to me I think, it was like, “Yeah, I can do it if I want to, when the mood takes me. I can deliver.”'

THE MEETING WITH MRS P. B.

When his initial attempt to introduce William and Harry to Camilla met with reluctance, the Prince of Wales didn't push it. She was never at Highgrove when the boys were at home, nor at York House, where they now lived when in London, and although he was longing to bring her properly into his life, he felt that William and Harry's feelings were paramount.

As a preliminary move he invited her children, Tom, his godson, and Laura, to stay with them when they were up at Birkhall in Scotland during the Easter holidays in 1998; another guest in the house was the Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes. The meeting could not have been more successful, and thereafter the children met up from time to time, both in the country and in London, but still the Prince didn't push it. The initiative, he felt, had to come from the boys.

At much the same time, William and Harry began plotting a surprise party for their father's fiftieth birthday in November. It started out as a party for the Prince's godchildren and their parents. As Tom was his godson, William therefore wanted to invite Camilla, but first he wanted to meet her in more private circumstances.

William had heard a lot of terrible things about Camilla from his mother, and about his father too – she spared him little – but he was beginning to realise that not everything he'd heard was entirely true. The party was an opportunity to say the things that had perhaps gone unsaid in the past, and a meeting with Camilla was an important part of that. He told his father he would like to meet her, and in June telephoned to say he was coming to London. Camilla happened to be staying for a couple of nights. When she heard,
she said she must leave immediately, but the Prince said, ‘No, stay. This is ridiculous.' He then rang William to tell him that Mrs Parker Bowles would be in the house, would that be a problem? To which, William replied, ‘No.'

The meeting took place on the afternoon of 13 June 1998. William said he would arrive at 7.00 p.m. but, typically, turned up at York House, at St James's Palace, at about 3.30 p.m. and went straight up to his flat at the top of the house. The Prince went to find Camilla who was with her PA, Amanda McManus, and said, ‘He's here, let's just get on with it. I'm going to take you to meet him now.' So he took her up to William's flat, introduced them and left them alone to talk for about half an hour. At the end of the encounter, Camilla came out saying, ‘I need a drink.' But it had been remarkably easy – William was friendly and Camilla was sympathetic and sensitive and understood the need to let things go at his pace. They met again for lunch a few days later and had tea a couple of times and, although it was some time before she spent a night at Highgrove when he was there, she did occasionally stay over when they were all in London and they would sometimes have breakfast together.

Nearly a month after the meeting at York House, Sandy Henney had a call from Rebekah Wade, then deputy editor of the
Sun
(and subsequently a prominent figure in the News International phone-hacking scandal). Wade was a good friend of Mark Bolland, whom William and Harry referred to as ‘Blackadder', after the sitcom character, Lord Blackadder, played by Rowan Atkinson. Piers Morgan, editor of the
Daily Mirror
, was another friend and all three indulged in some mutual back-scratching. Wade said she'd heard there had been a meeting between Prince William and Mrs Parker Bowles. ‘I said, “Rebekah, I'm not going to deny it but the shit's going to hit the proverbial fan when the young man finds out about this because he will think that someone's been spying on him and anything we've done in terms of trying to persuade him that the media have a place etc.… it ain't going to work. I'm really pissed off with this.” So she said, “What do you want me to
do?” I said, “Can I have twenty-four hours? I want to talk to William.” “You've got it,” she said, “and you can write the story.”'

‘A couple of hours before the
Sun
went to press, Piers Morgan rang me and said, “I hear the
Sun
's got an exclusive William story.” On a point of honour, my idea of dealing with the press was never to give one newspaper's story to another. I said, “Have they?” The call had come through to Mark, to whom Morgan spoke every other day, but Mark said it was a press inquiry and put him through to me. “Okay. What are you asking me? It's an exclusive story.” “I want to know.” “I wouldn't betray another paper, just like I wouldn't betray you.” “Well, I'm not getting off the line until you tell me what's going on.” “You can stay there till hell freezes over, I'm not going to bloody tell you.” It caused real problems between Piers Morgan and me. He kept coming back with bits of the story and finally said, “There was a meeting and I suspect it was Camilla.” I said, “Unless you can tell me the whole story I'm not going to deal with this.” I think I signed my death warrant with that conversation. But it was a clever wheeze. You give a story to one journalist and then you give it to another. It's as old as the hills but there's some poor sod in the middle. I remember the time when Piers said I was over-protective about the boys and he did a really nasty piece about me. When he finally put the knife in at the end I should have seen it coming.' But that was not for a while.

So Sandy told William what had happened. ‘I knew he wouldn't like it, because he would see it as intrusion, as I did – and he didn't trust the Prince's office at the best of times. I didn't like it, and I thought it was a cynical way of using William – if William's okay with Camilla then the public should be okay with her too. But I had to deal with this young man, so I said, “We can't win this battle but we can lose it slightly more gracefully. The story's going to go in but we have the opportunity to put it from our point of view.” At the end of the day, I said to William, “This is what we're going to say, are you happy?” “Well, I'm not happy,” he said, “but I understand.” And I thought, how grown up. He
could have gone into a real teenage-boy sulk but no – he said, “I understand” and accepted it.'

When the story appeared, an internal inquiry was immediately launched and ten days later, Camilla's PA, Amanda McManus, fell on her sword. Her husband was a
Times
newspaper executive (a paper owned by News International, which also owns the
Sun
); she had gone home that night and told him what had happened. He mentioned it to ‘a trusted third party, unconnected with journalism or News International', who had passed it on to the
Sun
. There was much regret on all sides at her departure, but it was not long before Amanda was quietly reinstated, and there are those who remain sceptical and believe she took the fall for someone else in the office.

‘Mark had incredible contacts,' says Sandy, ‘and balls to do some of the things he did. Whether or not you agreed with some of his methods, he got results. He was incredible fun to work with … but Christ, he had an incisive brain, no wonder the kids called him Blackadder; but scary sometimes. My view of him was that he was working primarily for Mrs Parker Bowles and then the Prince. He wanted to make Mrs Parker Bowles acceptable; but you can't treat the institution of monarchy as individuals, you need to treat it as a whole. They weathered the storm and the damage is behind them now but at the time, the public became almost indifferent to the institution and some of the stuff was very damaging.'

Colleen agrees. ‘Everyone paints this negative picture of Mark and he was a spin master, but if you look at what he inherited and where the Prince was, in terms of reputation, image etc., he had to turn it around and he did turn that. Some of our decisions in the Press Office may have caused some emotional upheaval. It wasn't easy some of the time but I don't think the Prince of Wales could have married Camilla without that groundwork. There's payback each time. And sometimes he got that a bit out of kilter. He was very focused on the Prince of Wales and Camilla.'