Prince William (38 page)

Newland was full of praise for William after the raid. ‘He is someone who contributes at every level,' he said. ‘He is a very professional military officer, and very astute. He acts as I would expect a young officer of his experience and maturity to act in this type of operation.'

It was the beginning of another of several important relationships for Prince William. ‘They were absolutely outstanding with William,' says a member of the Household of his time on
Iron Duke
, ‘and the commander of that frigate is a real genius, a charismatic sort of guy who William absolutely adored.' He was treated as just another naval officer on board, who had to sleep four to a cabin, get up early, be on watch through the nights and pull his weight. A fellow crew member from
Iron Duke
was one of the twenty-four Armed Forces personnel chosen to line the path outside Westminster Abbey after William and Kate's wedding. Leading Physical Trainer Gavin Rees, who was with William throughout those five weeks, said, ‘My abiding memory of Prince William was that he was always late for circuit training, so I always had to give him extra press-ups! Looking back on it now it's amazing to think that I took the future King for circuit training.'

After the excitement of the narcotics haul they went on to engage in a hurricane disaster rescue exercise on the volcanic island of Montserrat. William was involved in the planning and was a member of the forward command team who were the first Navy personnel to come ashore after an imaginary category 5 storm hit the island. He had to help senior officers and local leaders direct the emergency operations and, according to Mark Newland, Sub-Lieutenant William Wales was a natural leader; commanding small teams of people came as ‘second nature' to him.

Had such a storm hit for real it would have flattened almost all the buildings on the island and threatened the lives of hundreds of people. Just two months later, Hurricane Ike did precisely that on the Turks and Caicos Islands, and the
Iron Duke
was involved
in a genuine relief operation. But by this time William was back on dry land.

After almost two years of service life near the bottom of the pile, carrying out strategies devised in Whitehall, William's next assignment took him on a stratospheric leap into the heart of that decision-making process. He spent a week at the Ministry of Defence on attachment to the Secretary of State, Des Browne, shadowing the staff of the Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup. William sat in on meetings with the military representative from NATO, visiting four-star generals and the like, and did not resist the temptation to join in their discussions. In meeting after meeting he was the only one around the table who had experience of all three services, and had been primed by people such as Mark Newland, Commander of
Iron Duke
, and Ed Smyth-Osbourne from the Blues and Royals to ask difficult questions.

One of the meetings he sat in on was a discussion about the aircraft carrier programme. This was, and still is, a political and financial hot potato – the decision, which came out of the new Labour government's Strategic Defence Review in 1997, to build two new ‘supercarriers', HMS
Queen Elizabeth
and HMS
Prince of Wales
. At 280 metres long, displacing 65,000 metric tons and capable of deploying forty aircraft including helicopters, they are by far the biggest warships ever to be constructed for the Royal Navy and are expected to enter service in 2016 and 2018. The original cost was estimated at £3.65 billion, although almost double that figure is now the cost of completing just one of the ships (they survived the latest Strategic Defence Review cuts on the grounds that the contracts the last government signed made them more expensive to cancel than to complete).

When William sat in on this meeting in September 2008, the contracts to build them had just been signed and a rather splendid Air Commodore had brought along a model of one of the carriers. As he was pointing out the guns on the decks, where the aircraft would take off and land and explaining that a number of technical specifications in the original plans had been stripped out because
of cost, William listened quietly and then asked very politely, ‘Sir, can I just ask one very quick question? Is the plan for these ships to be degaussed?' Degaussing is a process used on every naval ship since 1917 to demagnetise the hull. It is basically a band of copper that stops magnetic mines going off underneath the ship. It was indeed one of the things they had decided to remove.

The Air Commodore went bright red and said, ‘Yes, we don't need it.' William said, ‘But surely, if you're not degaussed then you won't be able to go on the continental shelf – because, obviously, magnetic mines have to sit in shallow water so they can pick up the magnetic field – and that will restrict the range of your strike aircraft by 150 nautical miles from both directions, won't it? And give you time over target of five minutes instead of three hours or whatever it is?' He was voicing the concerns he had picked up from the men and women at the sharp end, whose lives were potentially being put in danger by the men in brass. The Air Commodore very quickly moved on.

No further illustration was needed about the value of those commissions. He now knows how soldiers, sailors and airmen tick, each one differently from the next. He has made friends in all the services of men and women of his own age with whom he is still in regular contact, and if they stay in the services when William is Commander-in-Chief, his old chums will be the ones calling the shots in the corridors of power.

DRAWING A LINE

William is unlikely to forget the date of his Passing Out Parade from Sandhurst in December 2006, not just because it saw his father, grandparents and future in-laws in public together for the first time. It took place the day after the official three-year investigation into the death of his mother concluded. The verdict was that Diana had died in ‘a tragic accident'. That was the finding of Lord Stevens, former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. ‘There was no conspiracy to murder any of the occupants of that car,' he said. The evidence suggested that Diana was not engaged or about to get engaged and scientific tests showed she was not pregnant. The £3.69 million inquiry had interviewed some four hundred people, including Prince Charles, the Duke of Edinburgh and the heads of MI5 and MI6.

‘We have spoken to many of her family and closest friends and none of them have indicated to us that she was either about to or wished to get engaged,' he said. ‘Prince William has confirmed to me that his mother had not given him the slightest indication about such plans for the future.'

Clarence House put out a statement saying that Princes William and Harry hoped that the ‘conclusive findings' of the report would end speculation surrounding their mother's death.

But it was not to be. Mohamed Al Fayed, who had lost his son Dodi in the accident, remained noisily convinced there had been a cover-up. It was his allegations that had led the coroner, at the opening of the inquest in 2004, to order an inquiry in the first place. In October 2007 the inquest continued at the Royal Courts of Justice, led by Lord Justice Scott Baker.

As Sir Max Hastings, writing in the
Guardian
, said, halfway through the proceedings, ‘The inquest into the death of Princess Diana is providing a circus for the prurient, a dirty-raincoat show for the world, of a kind that makes many of us reach for a waxed bag.

‘Day after day for almost three months, a procession of charlatans, spivs, fantasists, retired policemen, royal hangers-on and servants who make [Shakespeare's] Iago seem a model of loyalty has occupied the witness box at the law courts in the Strand. They have itemised the Princess's alleged lovers, her supposed opinions of the royal family (and vice versa), her contraceptive practices and her menstrual cycle.

‘The business of an inquest is to examine the cause of a death. In the case of the Princess, we might assume that this would focus exclusively upon what did, or did not, happen in a Paris tunnel more than a decade ago. It should not have been difficult to conclude such an inquiry in a matter of days. Every police officer, French and British, who has examined the case since 1997 has reported that the Princess's death was the result of a tragic accident.'

In April 2008, the jury released an official statement that Diana and Dodi were unlawfully killed by the ‘grossly negligent driving of the following vehicles and of the Mercedes', adding that additional factors were ‘the impairment of the judgment of the driver of the Mercedes through alcohol' and ‘the death of the deceased was caused or contributed to by the fact that the deceased was not wearing a seat-belt, the fact that the Mercedes struck the pillar in the Alma Tunnel, rather than colliding with something else'.

It had been a very difficult time for William and Harry but it was something they knew had to happen if their mother's memory was ever to be laid to rest in peace. ‘The great guy there was Lord Justice Scott Baker. He was a genius,' says a member of the Prince's Household, who spent many hours at the inquest. ‘He was completely even-handed, he didn't stand any nonsense, he was tough, considerate, straight as a die, analytical. There were a lot of pressures coming in from left and right and he was just very cool. We owe quite a lot to him.

‘It would be presumptuous to suggest it was cathartic for the Princes. It was probably cathartic for the country, but she wasn't the country's mum; she was their mum.'

The year before, as the tenth anniversary of her death approached, they had come up with a plan to celebrate and commemorate her. They wanted to stage a spectacular concert of music and dance with all the artists she loved most, to be held on what would have been her forty-sixth birthday, followed by a memorial service, again with the music she loved, on the date of her death. This was the first time either brother, apart from choosing which regiment they wanted to join on leaving Sandhurst, had been so demonstrative about anything. They thought of the idea, they knew what they wanted and they were adamant about how they wanted to do it. The Household remembers it being a very exciting time, the first time there was a real buzz, and some memorable meetings where they chose the music. ‘I know zero about pop music so they were taking the mickey furiously and at the time, they knew absolutely zero about classical music, so I was feeding a bit in there. Having said that, they knew a lot of their mother's favourites and probably all of those pieces in the memorial service were ones which they had remembered she loved.'

But first was the pop, and in the run-up to the concert the Princes agreed to do two interviews, one with American television, NBC's
Today
programme, and the other with Fearne Cotton for the BBC. For the first time, they spoke publicly about their mother and their loss.

‘We were left in no doubt that we were the most important thing in her life,' said William, ‘and then after that there was everyone else, there were all her charities and everything like that and, to me, that's a really good philosophy – she just loved caring for people and she loved helping.

‘We were so lucky to have her as our mother and there's not a day that goes past when we don't think about her and miss her influence, because she was a massive example to both of us.

‘It's one of those things that is very sad but you learn to deal
with it and there are plenty of other people out there who have got the same or worse problems than we've had.'

Harry added, ‘She was a happy, fun, bubbly person who cared for so many people. She's very much missed by not only us, but by a lot of people and I think that's all that needs to be said, really.'

The six-hour extravaganza took seven months and the help and expertise of a cast of many to organise, with both Princes overseeing every detail, but the result was worth every minute of preparation. When William and Harry went out onto the stage at the new £798 million Wembley Stadium on 1 July 2007, dressed casually in jeans, jackets and open-necked shirts, Harry simply said, ‘Hello, Wembley!' The place erupted and the applause was deafening as 63,000 people got to their feet to clap and cheer. ‘This evening is about all that our mother loved in life – her music, her dance, her charities and her family and friends.' And Harry, mindful of those he had hoped to be serving alongside in Iraq, added a word of encouragement: ‘I wish I was there with you. I'm sorry I can't be. To you and everyone on operations we'd both like to say, “stay safe”.'

Twenty-two thousand five hundred tickets had been made available in December and sold out within seventeen minutes. It was broadcast in 140 countries to an audience of around 500 million people, and raised a total of £1 million for the Diana Memorial Fund and her five main charities, including Centrepoint and Sentebale, which William had said were ‘both charities that continue on from our mother's legacy'.

Nothing like it had ever been staged before. There was music of every sort, there were dancers from the English National Ballet, there were songs from Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, a comedy sketch (and an agonisingly prolonged improvisation when the next act failed to appear) from Ricky Gervais, there were speakers including Sienna Miller and Dennis Hopper, Kiefer Sutherland, Jamie Oliver and David Beckham introducing acts and artists, and pre-recorded video tributes from Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

Sir Elton John, who had performed a specially adapted version of ‘Candle in the Wind' at Diana's funeral, opened the concert with ‘Your Song', and was followed by Duran Duran, her favourite band, and stars like James Morrison, Lily Allen, Status Quo, Sir Tom Jones, Rod Stewart, P. Diddy and Take That, while iconic black and white images of Diana, taken by Mario Testino, looked down on them from a giant screen at the back of the stage.

After Sir Elton's closing song, William and Harry returned to the stage for the final word. William thanked everyone for coming and praised the artists for an ‘incredible evening. Thank you to all of you who have come here tonight to celebrate our mother's life. For us this has been the most perfect way to remember her, and this is how she would want to be remembered.'