William and Harry (15 page)

According to aides at Buckingham Palace, the Queen was furious and deeply embarrassed. As a future ambassador for the UK and the Commonwealth, Harry ought to have known better, and it was the job of his minders to keep him on the straight and narrow. While her husband was often accused of public gaffes, this sorry episode was unprecedented and potentially very damaging. To the Queen it seemed that Harry lacked both judgement and common sense and was in desperate need of some fatherly attention. Her views seemed to be reflected by the public, 53 per cent of whom in one national newspaper poll thought that Prince William should succeed the Queen as the next monarch in place of Charles. Rattled by the criticism, which had
reached as far as Germany and France, Charles insisted that he would not allow Harry to be hung out to dry. His son had apologised, and as far as Charles was concerned that was good enough. With Sandhurst just weeks away, Harry just needed to keep a low profile. There would be no nightclubbing or parties with his friends. Instead Harry was sent to Home Farm to muck out pigs for the rest of the month. The irony of Harry being knee-deep in manure was wasted on nobody.

While the royal family have traditionally gone to Oxford or Cambridge, Prince William was set on breaking 150 years of tradition by going to St Andrews, Scotland’s oldest university. His father, his Uncle Edward and his great-grandfather King George VI had all attended Cambridge but the four-year history of art course at St Andrews, which is considered one of the best in the country, appealed to the prince, who was keen to postpone royal engagements for as long as possible. The Queen was delighted that her grandson had enrolled at the elite college where the Scottish King James V studied in the early sixteenth century. The Queen Mother, who William visited at Balmoral for tea before he arrived for his first day, also shared a connection with the university, from which she had received an honorary degree in 1929.

William arrived at St Salvator’s Hall, his home for the next year, on a crisp morning on 23 September 2001. Dressed in what was to become his staple university outfit – jeans, a casual
shirt and a warm fleece – he had an unconventional arrival for an undergraduate. More than 3,000 residents, students and well-wishers turned up to welcome him to his new hall of residence situated next to St Salvator’s quadrangle and facing the cold grey sea and the cathedral ruins. William greeted the crowds with a cheerful smile and told them how excited he was to be embarking on student life. He settled in quickly, and although the town’s 18,000 residents were initially inquisitive, they soon left him in peace. William wanted to be treated the same as everyone else, and at St Andrews he was. He could walk down the street without being bothered and shop at the local Tesco. ‘I’ve had lots of kids come up to me and ask for my autograph [and] I’ve had a grandmother stop me and ask me if I know a good place to buy underwear,’ he later joked.

The centre of the town, which is eighty miles north of Edinburgh, comprises just three roadways, North Street, Market Street and South Street. Peppered with fashionable cafés, lively bars and well-stocked charity- and bookshops, attractive halls of residences and beautiful historic quads, the busy town centre is dominated by undergraduates. When the Palace confirmed Prince William would be starting in the autumn of 2001, the university’s registrars recorded a 44 per cent rise in applications, the majority wealthy American heiresses desperate to meet the prince. They were to be disappointed, however, as William missed freshers’ week. Even though there were no paparazzi lurking outside nightclubs, William was wary and didn’t want to be caught in any compromising situations.

According to one former lecturer at the university, his arrival sent the administration, especially the press office, at St Andrews
into a state of panic. They knew the kudos that William would bring to the small university, and while they were keen to capital -ise on royal patronage, they were also aware that William would need to be well protected. His room, B31, was situated on the second floor of St Salvator’s Hall and overlooked the Scores, which runs the length of the town and boasts incredible views of the thirteenth-century castle and the famous golf course. To the left William could just see the history of art block on North Street, a grey stone townhouse with original fireplaces and chandeliers, where he would attend eight hours of tutorials a week. To his right he had a view of the castle museum, which is set in green parkland overlooking the sea. Like every other undergraduate, William’s bedroom was painted cream and had a burgundy-flecked carpet. The room contained a single bed, a mahogany-coloured double wardrobe with a full-length mirror, an armchair and a desk and chair in front of the window. Unlike every other room, however, its window had been reinforced with shatter-proof glass and a bomb-proof door was fitted ahead of his arrival. A small en suite with reinforced walls was built into the room with its own loo, washbasin and walk-in shower, which could be used as a shelter in an emergency. Should there be any need, William’s protection officers were just twenty yards down the blue-carpeted and fluorescent-lit corridor, their rooms separated by a small bathroom.

It had already been decided that a small team of Scottish police officers would assist the prince’s close protection officers, while the university’s principal, Dr Brian Lang, insisted that every student sign a confidentiality agreement when they enrolled promising not to speak to the press about the VIP undergraduate. ‘When
it was first mooted that Prince William might be coming, the university executives tried to keep a lid on it,’ recalled Dr Declan Quigley, who lectured William in his first year.

It was a great irony that it would not be the newspapers that ruined William’s first week at university. While the vast majority of the press pack which had gathered in the small town ahead of William’s arrival had left in compliance with the media embargo, the prince noticed that one crew remained. He alerted the university’s press office as it had only been days since the PCC issued a reminder that he was to be left alone. After further investigations it was discovered that the camera crew, who had interviewed several undergraduates, belonged to a production company called Ardent. While it was not entirely surprising that someone had broken the embargo, it was incredible that the cameras belonged to this particular company – Prince Edward’s – which was making a TV show called
The A–Z of Royalty
for an American TV network. After all the fuss
that had been made about protecting William from the media, it was a member of the royal family, his uncle, who had broken the rules. The British press could barely contain their glee. While the Palace would only say that it was ‘disappointed’ by the unfortunate episode, Prince Charles was said to be apoplectic. His angry call to his youngest brother at Bagshot Park could apparently be heard in the room adjacent to his study at St James’s Palace.

‘The Prince of Wales was very unhappy about what had happened,’ Mark Bolland, who was in charge of handling William’s media relations at St Andrews, recalled. ‘A lot of effort had gone into creating an embargo to protect William. No one expected it to be a family member who would breach it.’ According to Andrew Neil, lord Rector at St Andrews 1999–2002,

Reluctant to be drawn into family politics, William soon forgot about the embarrassing debacle and set about making friends. Nicknamed ‘Sally’s’, St Salvator’s is one of the university’s eleven halls of residences and split into male and female living quarters. As he bounded down the stairwell with his folders in his hands, William would often bump into the same brunette, who also happened to be on his course. He had noticed her as soon as he had arrived. It was hard not to. Kate Middleton had been crowned the prettiest girl at Sally’s by the end of freshers’ week. She was shy and quieter than the other girls, which William liked, and he looked forward to their meetings. Often Kate would go running before breakfast and arrived at the canteen just before breakfast was over. Within weeks William had been bold enough to invite her to join him. Every morning he and his friends sat in the same place next to the head table, where a crimson throne and eighteen seats were reserved for the wardens and deans. The impressive ground-floor canteen was decorated with heavy oil paintings of philosophers from the Scottish Enlightenment and beautiful stained-glass windows, and there was always a cooked breakfast on offer. Being health-conscious, a trait he inherited from his father, William would choose muesli and fruit, as did Kate.

They quickly discovered they had plenty in common. Kate
was a country girl who loved playing sports and a keen swimmer like William. She was also a good skier and just like William had enjoyed a gap year travelling around the world before coming to St Andrews. Kate had spent several months in Florence soaking up the culture and art in the city’s famous galleries, and chatted with William about the Renaissance artists they would soon be studying and the modules they planned to take. She got along well with William’s friends Olli Chadwick-Healey and Fergus Boyd, the son of a country solicitor from Wiltshire who was with him at Eton. They were part of a group known as the Sally’s boys, which also included Ali Coutts-Wood, a former pupil at Uppingham School, Graham Booth, Charlie Nelson and Oli Baker, who would later share a house with William and Kate. If William had a timetable clash, Kate would take notes for him, and at the end of the day they would catch up over a drink in the common room where the floor-to-ceiling Georgian windows looked onto the tidy gardens.

When it came to socialising, William kept a low profile. Although St Andrews boasts more pubs per square mile than any other Scottish town, he preferred keeping company with the Sally’s group, who enjoyed dinner parties rather than nights out at the clubs in St Andrews. William is naturally cautious about the company he keeps. He is known to privately vet friends and often plants red herrings to catch out anyone he suspects is selling stories on him. ‘People who try to take advantage of me, and get a piece of me, I spot it quickly and soon go off them. I’m not stupid,’ he once remarked.

While many of the student organisations were keen to get William on board, including the gentlemen-only Kate Kennedy
Club, which aims to maintain the traditions of St Andrews and ‘improve town and gown relations’, William kept his distance. He joined the water polo team and would swim most mornings at the luxury Old Course Hotel with Kate. He also enjoyed cycling along the Scores and in the evenings occasionally dropped into the student union for a game of pool. Sometimes he would pay three pounds for a ticket to the Bop, the weekly disco on Market Street, where he could drink ‘the cheapest G&T in town’, but the truth was that William was developing a reputation for being aloof and even a touch boring. The glamorous undergraduates who spent thousands on new wardrobes and drinking in St Andrews’s fashionable bars hoping to chance upon the prince were disappointed.

Having enjoyed performing in school plays, William was keen to join the drama society and in his first semester auditioned for a role in an adaptation of the J D Salinger play
Franny and Zooey
put on by a small independent company called A&E Productions. Accompanied at a distance by his protection officer, William cycled to the Byer Theatre, a recently refurbished glass-fronted venue off South Street, where auditions were being held in one of the second-floor rehearsals rooms. William auditioned for the lead role of Zooey and read straight from the script. Under the dimmed house lights and in front of a small group of students he delivered a convincing and commendable audition. It was not an easy part and the passage of the play selected for the auditions was a conversation Zooey has with his mother while taking a bath.

‘William was actually very good,’ recalled one of the production team.