Prince William (47 page)

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?'

They had been discussing marriage for at least a year before William proposed. ‘We've talked about it lots,' he said in the interview. ‘So it's always been something we've had a good chat about and … both of us have come to the decision pretty much together, I just chose when to do it and how to do it – and obviously being a real romantic I did it extremely well!' He also wanted to give
Kate and her family time to have a good hard look at what life with him would mean, ‘and to back out if she needed to before it all got too much.'

He finally proposed during a holiday in Kenya with friends, and had chosen Lake Rutundu in eastern Kenya, the remotest and most beautiful place imaginable, and despite their conversations in the past, he took Kate by surprise, not just with the proposal but with the ring.

‘I had been carrying it around with me in my rucksack for about three weeks before that,' said William, ‘and I literally would not let it go. Everywhere I went I was keeping hold of it because I knew this thing, if it disappeared, I would be in a lot of trouble, and because I'd planned it, it went fine. You hear a lot of horror stories about proposing and things going horribly wrong – it went really, really well and I was really pleased she said, “Yes.”'

He had chosen his mother's ring because, ‘I thought it was quite nice because obviously she's not going to be around to share any of the fun and excitement of it all – this was my way of keeping her sort of close to it all.'

Tom Bradby said how ‘incredibly happy and relaxed' they both looked. ‘We are. We are,' said William. ‘We're like sort of ducks, very calm on the surface with little feet going under the water. But no, it's been really exciting because we've been talking about it for a long time, so for us, it's a real relief, and it's really nice to be able to tell everybody. Especially for the last two or three weeks it's been quite difficult not telling anyone, and keeping it to ourselves for reasons we had to. And it's really nice to finally be able to share it with everyone.'

The reason they delayed the announcement was that they came home from Africa to find Kate's much-loved and last remaining grandparent, Peter Middleton (aged ninety), was seriously ill. He had been a fighter pilot and instructor during the Second World War and had then gone on to fly civilian aircraft for British European Airways; by coincidence, he had been chosen as First Officer to fly with the Duke of Edinburgh on a two-month tour
of South America in 1962. He sadly died and they waited until after his funeral to make the announcement.

The first person to hear the news was Kate's father, Mike. ‘I was torn between asking Kate's dad first, and then the realisation that he might actually say “No” dawned upon me,' said William. ‘So I thought if I ask Kate first then he can't really say no. So I did it that way round. And I managed to speak to Mike sort of soon after it happened.' He told his own father and grandmother a few days later, but the only element of surprise was that he'd finally got on and done it. Everyone in both families expressed the greatest delight. There did seem to be very genuine happiness all round.

There were no planning committees for an engagement, but the Household had been secretly preparing for some time – never certain when or if it would happen. A couple of people in the office had privately thought William might pop the question in Africa, but when there was nothing, they assumed it hadn't happened. So when William and Kate arrived that Tuesday morning, 16 November, and said, ‘We've got engaged,' and started joking about their plans for a small family wedding, they were slightly caught on the back foot. Paddy Harverson was asleep in a hotel room in Washington DC when he got the call, at 4 a.m., from Patrick Harrison, his number two. Delighted, he jumped on the first plane and reached home to find the story all over the news. As one of them says, ‘We had a brilliant plan but it's not such a great plan if your communications secretary is in the wrong country!'

The news first broke to the outside world on Twitter, the online social networking site. ‘The Prince of Wales is delighted to announce the engagement of Prince William to Miss Catherine Middleton.' It was the first indication that Kate preferred to be called by her proper birth name, in preparation, perhaps, for the day when she becomes Queen. It is the name her parents have always called her and the name she was known by when she was at Marlborough. She first started using Kate at university, but it will be hard for the public and the headline writers to change – and to make it less confusing, I shall continue to use her abbreviated name.

By pure coincidence, Clarence House had just launched itself on Twitter, lagging behind the Queen who had been tweeting for some time, and who very swiftly tweeted back her congratulations. They put out a full-length press release on the website, which they also emailed to a long list of media recipients, but Twitter demands only 140 characters and is instantaneous, so it was first to break the news.