William and Harry (32 page)

Kate Middleton sat at the kitchen table and turned the pages of the Sunday newspaper in horror. It was 19 July 2009 and in the Middleton household the mood was one of panic. As Kate’s mother Carole boiled the kettle to make another pot of tea, William’s girlfriend could only stare at the front page of the
News of the World
. I C
ALLED
W
ILLS
A
F***
ER
! was the headline above a grainy black and white picture of her uncle Gary Goldsmith preparing to snort a line of cocaine through a one-hundred-euro note, his oversized gut spilling onto a kitchen worktop. ‘Tycoon who boasts of hosting Wills villa holiday supplies cocaine and fixes hookers’, ran the strap line. Gary Goldsmith had unwittingly invited two undercover reporters into his £5 million villa, the dubiously named Maison de Bang Bang, and told them all about his niece and her royal boyfriend. Worryingly, and rather embarrassingly for William’s police protection officers who have to make a detailed reconnaissance of everywhere the prince stays, William and Kate had been guests at the villa on Ibiza, where Mr Goldsmith has his initials daubed in gold on an outside wall,
in 2006. ‘My first words to Prince William were, “Oi you f***er! Did you break my glass pyramids?” He and a pal had been throwing balls around and broke all these ornamental pyramids I had loads of them,’ recalled Mr Goldsmith.

Kate could not believe what she was reading. Her uncle claimed that she and William planned to get married at the end of the year and that Prince Philip had taught her to shoot: ‘When William was away one Christmas, she was invited over.’ He also boasted that he could score drugs and procure Brazilian call girls for visitors to the island.

The Middletons had always known that Gary was the black sheep of their otherwise faultless family, but they had never imagined how much trouble he was capable of causing. This was far more serious than when Kate’s younger brother James had embarrassed the family when he was photographed urinating in the street after getting drunk on his twenty-second birthday – fortunately the pictures were only published in an Australian magazine.

Kate had received several messages of support that morning, including a call from William, who told her not to worry. Even Charles had rung to assure her it was a storm in a teacup that would soon blow over. Kate wasn’t sure whether Charles had even read the story. He dislikes newspapers in general and only reads the
Week
magazine to keep him up to date. Upstairs Kate could hear her father packing. The family needed privacy, and the only place to get away from the media storm and the paparazzi camped on the doorstep of their home was Mustique. William’s friends jokingly refer to the close knit family as the ‘OM Middletons’ meaning the ‘On Mass Middletons’ because they are always together, and it was en masse that they flew to the
private island while the furore blew over. The Robinson family had once again offered the loan of their villa and the Middle-tons had gratefully accepted. Within a fortnight Kate would be back, tanned and on William’s arm at the wedding of their friend Nicholas Van Cutsem. As Charles had predicted, the story had blown over, but as far as wedding bells between Kate and William were concerned, everything was on ice.

William had signed up for eighteen months of training with the RAF and there was simply no time to even think about a wedding. Besides, he had used up all his holiday that year skiing with Kate’s parents in the French Alps and seeing the New Year in with Kate at his father’s Scottish holiday home Birkhall. It was the first time the pair had been invited to stay with Charles and Camilla in residence, and Kate had felt very much at home. According to one aide she had laughed ‘until she had tears in her eyes’ when Camilla told her how much she hated the heavy moth-eaten tartan curtains that Charles refused to change because they were his grandmother’s favourite. She had joined William and Charles shooting, and at the end of the day the four of them enjoyed family dinners. It was William’s way of assuring Kate that he was more serious about her than ever. Right now though his focus was on his course. He had graduated from flying a single-engined Squirrel helicopter to a double-engined Griffin and was proving to be an accomplished helicopter pilot.

He was based at RAF Shawbury, and although they managed to see each other most weekends their time together was fleeting. It was a difficult period for Kate, who was dividing her time between her flat in London and her parents’ Berkshire home, where she still slept in her old bedroom. William had asked her
to keep a low profile after their last visit to Boujis, and Kate didn’t go out much these days. She had lost touch with many of her old schoolfriends from Marlborough, and most of their friends from St Andrews were married. Fergus Boyd and Sandrine Janet – one of Kate’s best friends at university – had got married in May at the fifteenth-century Château de Boumois in the Loire Valley, but Kate and William had pulled out at the last minute. Their absence was the subject of speculation among their friends Alasdair Coutts-Wood, Olli Chadwick Healey and Oliver Baker, who they had lived with during their third and fourth year and who had recently got engaged to another St Andrews graduate. William was said to be concerned that the wedding would be full of guests they didn’t know, while Kate was said to be dreading the inevitable ‘When will you two be next?’ question

However, in the summer Kate’s spirits were lifted. She had a contact at Harrods, who told her there was a vacancy for a buyer’s assistant in the fashion department. Kate had always wanted a job in fashion, and was keen to pursue this new opportunity. ‘It was discussed,’ a senior source at the store told me. ‘Kate is a regular shopper at Harrods and the chairman had an idea to approach her to do something but it never came to anything.’ The Knightsbridge store is owned by Mohamed Al Fayed, who has installed a shrine to his son Dodi and Diana in the lower ground floor of the store, and according to sources close to Kate she was worried that the job could turn into a potential PR disaster.

She kept as busy as she could at Party Pieces and raising money for the Starlight children’s charity. In September 2009 she hosted
a charity dinner at the Saatchi Gallery in London, which William attended. It was the perfect opportunity for them to step out together with Kate secure in her own role, but she refused to have her picture taken with William. Society photographer Dominic O’Neill remembers being asked to stay away from the event.

It was not just William and Harry who were increasingly wary of prying cameras. For the first time the Queen was also taking an active interest in the paparazzi, and before Christmas she met the Press Complaints Commission and a leading privacy lawyer in a concerted effort to protect her family and their friends. Every year the paparazzi stake out Sandringham and the Queen wanted the practice stopped. William, Charles and Harry all supported the Queen’s intention to take action against newspapers if they
printed pictures of the family in private situations. ‘Members of the royal family feel they have a right to privacy when they are going about everyday private activities,’ explained Paddy Harverson. ‘They recognise there is a public interest in them and what they do, but they do not think this extends to photographing the private activities of them and their friends.’ Inevitably the Queen’s initiative triggered engagement rumours, but Christmas came and went without any photographs of the family on their traditional Boxing Day shoot and without news of a forthcoming royal wedding. There was, however, still huge interest in their holiday plans and on Christmas Day Kate Middleton was photographed playing tennis during a family holiday at Restormel Manor, a Duchy of Cornwell owned mansion complete with its own tennis courts in Cornwall. Fearful of the repercussions, none of the British newspapers printed the set of pictures which had been taken by Niraj Tanna, a well-known photographer who claimed he was standing on a public footpath when he took the images. When a German newspaper published the pictures Kate instructed the Queen’s solicitors Harbottle and Lewis to pursue action on her behalf. Months later, in March she reportedly received £10,000 in damages for breach of privacy. It was a victory for Kate and the royal family, and a warning to the world’s media.

As the Range Rover with tinted windows sped through the gates of Clarence House, Chelsy Davy hid beneath a blanket on the back seat. But there were no photographers: the late-night clandestine meeting had been carefully planned. Inside
the palace Harry was waiting for her with dinner and a bottle of wine. It was early August and Chelsy was still tanned and relaxed from a recent holiday to Portugal. From her Facebook pictures, it had clearly been a great two weeks. One particular snap – a candid shot of Chelsy in a swimming pool, sitting in a giant inflatable ring with a nightclub promoter called Dominic Rose – had stuck in Harry’s mind. Back in the UK, Chelsy had received a flurry of emails and texts from Harry. In fact they had been in constant touch since Valentine’s Day, but until now there had been no talk of getting back together. ‘Chels was devastated when they split up, but she knew they needed some time apart,’ recalled a girlfriend. ‘Initially she loved the attention that came with being Prince Harry’s girlfriend, but she came to resent it. She’s actually quite a private person and she hated the cameras following her all the time. Harry begged her many times to get back together – he told her he had lost the best thing in his life – but she stuck to her guns.’ Now, after a summer of meaningless flings, they realised they had missed each other, and over drinks they decided they would give their relationship another chance. Chelsy stayed the night for the first time in months.

On the night of Harry’s twenty-fifth birthday they were together again – at Raffles nightclub on the King’s Road. Chelsy had cooked dinner for them before they sneaked into the club un-noticed. They had spent the night drinking vodka Red Bulls and at one point hit the dance floor together before leaving separately at the end of the night. The ruse fooled no one, and by October their secret was out. Harry and Chelsy were pictured leaving Beach Blanket Babylon, a fashionable bar and restaurant
in west London, where they had spent the night celebrating. Harry had passed the the latest part of his helicopter course and was just one step from getting his wings. As they sat in a private booth sipping Porn Star Martinis, a cocktail of vanilla vodka, passion fruit and champagne, they discussed their futures. Chelsy had decided to defer her trainee solicitor’s job so that she could take another gap year – the fact that they were prepared to give the relationship another chance when they would be thousands of miles apart was testimony to their closeness. Harry had inherited £6.5 million of his late mother’s fortune when he turned twenty-five, and when he treated a group of friends which included Natalie Pinkham to a water safari in Botswana in October, Chelsy didn’t object. She was once again wearing the topaz ring Harry had given her, safe in the knowledge that this time they were both committed to making things work.

The Way Ahead group had met in summer 2009 as it always did in the Queen’s private sitting room at Balmoral. Privately Charles referred to these twice-yearly meetings as the ‘trailing behind group’. When the Way Ahead was started by former Lord Chamberlain the Earl Of Airlie in 1994, it was suggested that the in-house forum should consist of the Queen, Philip, Charles and their private secretaries, but at Philip’s insistence Anne, Andrew and Edward also sit in on the meetings. Male primogeniture, royal marriages to Catholics and public access to palaces are all regular subjects on the agenda, but according to one of the Queen’s aides,

William has been attending the meetings for several years and now Harry sits in too. He may be the spare, but William has made it clear how much he depends on his younger brother, and the Queen recognises the importance of Harry in shaping the future of the House of Windsor. The purpose of this particular gathering was to discuss the Queen and Philip’s overseas engagements over the coming months. The Foreign Office had pencilled in trips to New Zealand and Australia, Bermuda and Canada all in the space of several months, and the Queen was concerned about the number of long-haul trips in her diary. She was eighty-three and had carried out 400 official engagements including two overseas tours the previous year, but the trips were perhaps beginning to take more of a toll on the eighty-eight-year-old duke, who had been troubled with ailments. In April 2008 he had spent a fortnight in hospital with a serious chest infection, and that February the Queen had cancelled a state visit to the Middle East because she and the duke had ‘too much on their plate’. It was the first time she had abandoned a trip because of her workload.