Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
MAKE SURE SHE'S YOUR BEST FRIEND first
With rare new insights, two brilliant Mail writers chart over the next 12 pages the romantic saga of a royal love affair - starting with William's mother's invaluable advice...
HE SAID HE DIDN’T WANT HER TO SUFFER AS HIS MOTHER HAD
Four years before the nation revelled in the excitement of their wedding William, with heavy heart, made a telephone call to Kate. She had been having terrible trouble with the paparazzi. In the fifth year of their romance (although the world had only known about it for three) photographers seemed to be permanently camped outside the Chelsea flat bought for their children by Michael and Carole Middleton.
Wherever Kate went, so the cameras followed. It was desperately unsettling for the young history of art graduate, with no police protection to help her. But it was even more troubling for William. In Kate’s predicament he felt a grim echo of what had happened to his mother – he blamed the paparazzi then, and he blames them still, for Princess Diana’s death in a car being chased by photographers on motorcycles into the Pont d’alma tunnel in Paris.
He and Kate had talked endlessly about the problem, but it seemed to be one with no answers. There was a solution, of course, marriage – but William wasn’t ready to settle down. Hence ‘Waity Katie’, that mocking soubriquet invented by snobbish royal hangers-on which had become more than just a bad joke; it had wounded the beautiful, intelligent girl who could have had the pick of the crop, and a life of blissful privacy, if she chose.
William had also been struggling with the burden from his teenage years of shielding a younger brother from the vicissitudes of their parents’ stormy marriage, a responsibility he took very seriously. Where Kate’s family life, with a brother and sister and parents who were blissfully happy, was idyllic, William’s was a torment. He was of the firm belief that if Diana had not married so young – engaged at 19, married at 20 to a man 13 years her senior – her troubled life could have been so different.
And so, working in the Kew head office of fashion shop Jigsaw, owned by friends who employed her as an accessories buyer, Kate’s mobile rang. It was 3pm on Wednesday, 11 April, 2007. William said he had been thinking about the relationship, and what it meant for them both. Of one thing, he told her, he was sure, ‘The press will make your life unbearable, as long as we’re together. I don’t want you suffering the way my mother did.’ Kate said simply that he made her happy, and
that she believed she made him happy. Wasn’t that all that mattered? Yes, but...
They talked for an hour. When the call ended, her romance with the future king was over. They’d been together for five years. Now he’d broken it off.
So just what were the forces that ultimately brought them back together – forces so strong that William was prepared to shed those anxieties, and
Kate was allowed to prove to him that she could survive in the spotlight?
Passion, certainly. William’s much-quoted comment, ‘Wow, Kate’s hot!’ when she sashayed in a see-through sheer dress with visible black underwear down the runway at a university charity fashion show in 2002 might never have been murmured in the ear of a friend had she not ignored the original plans for her costume.
A chunky knitwear top was meant to be worn over the diaphanous skirt. But moments before going on Kate suddenly decided – she has never explained why – it wasn’t right and took it off, wearing the skirt as a dress, revealing her well-toned figure. It was a decision, as things turned out, with historic consequences.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, that was the night their relationship matured from friendship into romance. Later that evening after the show they were drinking together, and reported to have been seen kissing. Not everyone, it must be said, was entirely surprised at the development.
A BLOSSOMING FRIENDSHIP FOR WARY WILLIAM
They had known each other for six months as chums since arriving at St Andrews, doing the same course in the first year (he switched to geography after that) and living in the same hall of residence, St Salvator’s – known as Sallies.
Kate had always known the student William was not relaxed, even though huge efforts had been made on his behalf to enable him to live a normal academic life with as little interference as possible. In phone calls to his father he admitted to Prince Charles that he was finding it hard to settle in and was, frankly, homesick. Despite best efforts, there were always people who were trying, so irritatingly, to get to know him when he dreamed of academic anonymity.
He’d hoped that by avoiding a big metropolitan university he’d be able to merge into local life relatively unnoticed. Now he was finding that in a small town like St Andrews the opposite was true. He was weary of avoiding eye contact with strangers and pointedly declined invitations to join university clubs. He even went jogging before dawn
when he knew the streets of the seaside town were empty.
Certainly, his university experience was so very different from his father’s at Trinity College, Cambridge. There to read anthropology, Prince Charles was accompanied by a retinue of aides, including a private secretary-cum-equerry and a valet. Apart from his police security William was on his own, in a standard room and sharing a bathroom.
Intriguingly, it was Kate to whom he unburdened himself about his unhappiness. She was by now a chum, though with no romantic involvement (long gone were the days when she had a picture of Prince William pasted up in her school dormitory). At the time she had a boyfriend, Rupert Finch, a dark and handsome fourth-year student reading law. (These days Rupert is a company lawyer with Johnson Matthey, the science and tech company, married, with three children, to Lady Natasha Rufus Isaacs, dressmaker daughter of the Marquess of Reading.)
WHEN HE MISSED A SEMINAR SHE WOULD LET HIM COPY HER NOTES
But then, William also had a girlfriend, second-year English student Carley Massy-birch, a Devon farmer’s strikingly attractive daughter who was, according to her mother Mimi, ‘definitely an item’ with the prince for a couple of months.
He’d met Carley while auditioning for a part in a college play based on a JD Salinger story (he didn’t get it) and they embarked on what her mother describes as ‘a regular university romance’. He found her fun, but Carley couldn’t take the secrecy and special planning on which William insisted. ‘She got bored with all the drama,’ explained a friend after they broke up. In later years Carley would have a brief acting career, appearing in a number of Radio 4 plays, before settling down to marriage with Frenchman Florian Franke.
Meanwhile, meeting around the campus as friends, William and Kate were entirely relaxed in each other’s company. The tall, slender brunette who liked an early morning jog soon became one of the group who joined William for breakfast before lectures.
She was different from the kind of girls he had dated in the past – the socially ambitious offspring of his
father’s polo-playing circle – and he found her natural and unaffected ways comfortingly reassuring. When he missed a seminar she would cover by letting him copy her notes. Her room in halls was not far from his, although on a different floor, and sometimes they walked to lectures together. With others they played tennis and met up in the local pubs.
The budding friendship, it must be said, did not go unnoticed. Fellow students would joke to her, ‘Bet you’ll be wearing a tiara soon’. Certainly, some of the other girls in her year, a number of them from well-connected families, were positively suspicious of the middle-class girl’s easy closeness to the Queen’s grandson.
Meanwhile, in his uncertainty at St Andrews, William had been talking to his father and to his former housemaster at Eton, Dr Andrew Gailey, about dropping out. And yet, tellingly, it was after talking to Kate about it that he made up his mind to stay. She had also been uncertain about whether to remain at St Andrews, she told him, but on the whole thought it better to stay. She felt that having invested so much time there, it would be mad to chuck it in. When William told her he thought his biggest mistake was his degree course, it was Kate who suggested switching to geography. Which he did.
KATE’S BIGGEST GAMBLE – AND HOW IT PAID OFF
Her own uncertainty may well have had something to do with the fact that, as has been well documented, her original university choice was Edinburgh, particularly as it specialised in the history of art, and that she had previously accepted a place there. Her sudden switch to St Andrews followed the announcement that William was going there. It is tempting to wonder if family ambitions really did motivate this change. It certainly induced a rush of last-minute applications from young women around the country and the world, especially America.
Indeed, at Kate’s school, Marlborough College, it was suggested she write a letter of apology to Edinburgh. So why did she make the change? Not even her housemistress Mrs Ann Patching was sure. ‘After she left school, Catherine made some different decisions,’ she said. ‘But why she made those decisions, I don’t know.’
One of those decisions, of course, was to take a gap year, which meant she would arrive at university at the same time as the prince. For his part, William had made it plain in a preuniversity interview that he was not drawn to people because of their background. As he said, ‘I just hope to meet people I get on with. It’s about their character and who they are.’
As things were to turn out, no one fitted that requirement better than Kate Middleton, known to her family as Catherine. Hers was a background that some royal princes would have viewed with disdain. But Princess Diana had dedicated herself to making sure that her sons were brought up to understand and value life lived outside palace walls. ‘Not everybody drives a Range Rover and takes several foreign holidays a year,’ she would tell William, and later Harry, while shepherding them to meet homeless people.
Kate’s family, it has to be said, were anything but homeless. Her parents were running an online party goods business which was doing well. They also possessed all the qualities Diana had taught William to cherish and admire – ambition, tenacity, but above all the warmth in which William was to immerse himself in Kate’s family home in Berkshire.
Diana’s thoughtful son found the impressive story of social mobility in Kate’s family moving, even inspirational – and it would add a compelling dimension to their romance.
A GIRL FROM A VERY DIFFERENT BACKGROUND
William loved the fact that Kate’s mother Carole had been brought up in a council flat in Southall, Middlesex, being wheeled about in a large Silver Cross pram that had to be lugged up and down the communal stairs.
Kate’s maternal grandfather, Ron Goldsmith, was a painter and decorator. His wife Dorothy was known to friends as ‘The Duchess’ since they all knew Silver Cross prams were what the Royal Family used and she’d insisted on having one as well. (Providential, perhaps, and surely not lost on Prince William since his mother was always known as ‘Duch’ to her Spencer clan.) All Dorothy wanted for her family, in fact, was to improve their lot in life. She was ambitious for them – a trait which, as we now know, she passed on to her daughter Carole, Kate’s mother.
For most of the 19th century her family had been coal miners. It was a hard life of disease – mainly TB – and early death. Dorothy’s own grandfather John Harrison was a Durham miner working down the pit at Hetton-le-hole until he was trampled in a freak accident by a startled, runaway pit pony.
Only with the arrival of the 20th century did the family fortunes begin to change. Dorothy’s father Tommy, born in 1904, avoided going down the pit by training as a joiner. Then he moved south to seek work, putting down roots in Southall, west London.
And Southall is where the Kate Middleton story really begins. It was there that her mother Carole was born in 1955, and later her colourful Uncle Gary, he of the £5 million Ibiza villa, La Maison de Bang Bang,
where years later an undercover reporter was allegedly offered drugs by Mr Goldsmith, now 55.
Carole inherited the poise and ambition of her own mother. When she applied to British Airways for a ground staff job, brother Gary recalls his big sister practising her flight announcements into a tape recorder.
At Heathrow she met Michael Middleton, a flight despatcher. His family history of banking and the Leeds textile industry was very different. A comfortable upbringing included being privately educated at Clifton College in Bristol.
Carole went to a local state comprehensive, left school at 16, briefly worked with Prudential insurance company in Holborn, and returned to gain four A-levels. She wanted to teach but the long training involved would have stretched the family finances. Finally came her move to BA, and meeting Michael, six years her senior. They were married on 21 June, 1980 – their anniversary two
THE KEY WAS THAT THERE WAS NEVER A FLICKER FROM HER OF PURSUIT
years later just happened to be the day Prince William was born.
For a couple of years, when Kate and Pippa were still toddlers, the family lived in Jordan where Michael worked as a BA manager, and life revolved around socialising at the British Embassy. Kate attended a local nursery where she learned some Arabic and listened to verses from The Koran.
Had life continued that way it would have plotted a very different future for the children. But Carole ‘wasn’t convinced I wanted to be an expat mum’. She also ‘had this strong feeling that I hadn’t achieved anything. I got married at 25, had Catherine at 26.’
By the time they returned to Britain in 1986 Kate was four and Carole was pregnant with third child James. If Carole was going to achieve anything, it was now. And so Party Pieces was born, initially at home. Carole had spotted a gap in the market and busied herself on the kitchen table, starting off by preparing party bags for the parents of her daughters’ school friends.
Some family money had been left in trust to Michael for his children’s education. But by the time Kate was arriving at Marlborough, Party Pieces was flying, aided now by Michael who had given up his airline job to join the family business.
The Middletons were soon very well off indeed.
No one could have been more thrilled than ‘The Duchess’. Here, surely, was social mobility beyond her wildest dreams. Sadly, Carole’s mother was to die, aged 71, in 2006, too early to see her granddaughter become a princess, married to a future king.
This, then, was the circuitous route which brought Kate into William’s orbit. Curiously, though, in a remarkable parallel to the Queen, who was just 13 when she first met Prince Philip at Dartmouth where he was a naval cadet, Catherine Middleton first clapped eyes on Prince William years before St Andrews – she was only nine, he five months her junior, and they shared a playing field.
Poor William. As the most famous schoolchild in Britain, everyone knew who he was. He and Kate were on opposite sides in a hockey match, with hard-playing Kate being in the mixed team of St Andrew’s prep school in Pangbourne taking on the boys of Ludgrove. They were not introduced, at least not formally, but may well have bumped into each other. (It actually happened again when she was at Marlborough College and William arrived from Eton for a school event.)
A decade later as university chums – but not yet lovers – Kate took great delight in reminding William of their near-meeting as nine-year-olds.
ABUDDINGROMANCE–AND AVERYCLEVERDECEPTION
Now at university, arriving at the same time for the same course, they met. As Kate recalled in their engagement interview: ‘I turned bright red and sort of scuttled off, feeling very shy about meeting him.’ It wasn’t too long, however, before, seeing him every day around the campus – and in the university pool where they often swam together early in the morning – she was as relaxed with him as he was with her.
Kate, it must be said, is more like her father in that quiet and unobtrusive manner that William liked. Crucially, he never felt threatened by Kate Middleton. Never was there a flicker from her of pursuit. Here was the key element of their growing friendship. Besides, in those early days each was attached to someone else.
One evening at a freshers’ party William was, so very politely, trying to shake off the unwanted attentions of a particularly persistent girl. At that moment Kate came up on a rescue mission and put her arms around him, enabling William to tell his pursuer, ‘Oh sorry, but I’ve got a girlfriend.’ As the girl faded, he and Kate moved away giggling, and William mouthed at her, ‘Thanks so much.’ As one observer that night recalls, ‘Kate was the only girl in the room who could have done that – and who William would have allowed to do it.’
It is surely an indication of how he viewed Kate at that time in that he’d seen her endlessly in a swimming costume at the pool and never made a move to develop their relationship beyond a platonic friendship – not until she strode down the catwalk in that slip of a dress. After this, to his relief, he found that Kate was prepared to go along with the planning and secrecy that went with the role of being a royal prince’s girlfriend. Indeed, she found it fun.
Despite the kisses that some said they’d seen the night of the fashion show, it wasn’t generally known she was now his girlfriend. For their part, the couple went to great lengths to keep their secret. Not even when Kate and William, together with two others, shared a flat in their second year – in aptly named Hope Street – did anyone think they were an item.
The foursome were William, his Eton chum Fergus Boyd – a godfather to Prince George – Army officer’s daughter Olivia Bleasdale, and Kate. William had asked Kate to join the group. They gave supper parties, the girls cooked and William and Fergus did the shopping and the washing-up – everything in the open in cheery, typical student style. Except for one thing – him and Kate. Their passionate relationship remained not for public consumption.
Prince William, it must be said, didn’t do this for himself. To the world at large Kate would have been viewed as just another girlfriend. He did it for her and her family, whose lives, he knew from bitter experience, could be made unbearable by media attention.
Now he could be found walking to geography lectures with another delicious young lady, Bryony Daniels, the beautiful daughter of a Suffolk landowner. Around the campus they were photographed together, generating the inevitable gossip. Bryony was, of course, in on the deception. Indeed, it’s a true measure of just how deeply William already felt about Kate that such a deception was necessary.
Could he, arguably, already have been looking into his future? Over the next three university years their relationship deepened. One of their circle, Michael Choong, who played rugby with William and is these days a property developer in Scotland, recalls, ‘They never showed any affection in public. Kate was good for him. She was very loyal and did not gossip. William was naturally gregarious – he’d always get a round of beers in at the pub – but Kate was less so and hated having her picture taken.’ He adds, ‘Will used to take some of his mates shooting. He would go down to Norfolk at weekends and they would bring back game, which Kate would cook for dinner parties.’ As university flatmates, no one saw anything special about William being one of the guests at Kate’s 21st birthday party, a 1920s-themed extravaganza with flapper girls and the Charleston. William arrived a bit late. That was the moment he was first introduced to Carole and Michael Middleton. And Kate would attend William’s Out Of Africa 21st birthday party at Windsor Castle.
NOW HE WAS WALKING TO LECTURES WITHANOTHER DELICIOUS YOUNG LADY
Significantly, however, he had already had her as a guest at Wood Farm, the royals’ favourite bolthole on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk.
When the prince gave an interview marking his coming of age, he was evasive about his love life. ‘There’s been a lot of speculation about every single girl I’m with,’ he said. ‘It’s a pain for the girls.’
But he couldn’t keep Kate a secret forever, try as he might. Skiing in the Swiss resort of Klosters with his father, he agreed to a photocall on the understanding the photographers would leave him alone afterwards. None of the media there knew Kate was present too. Photocall over, she joined him at the ski lift and – flash, flash, flash – suddenly the world knew Diana’s boy was in love. Kate’s life would never be the same again.
TWIST SAND TURN SON THE PATH TO TRUE LOVE
By now they were in their third year at St Andrews, and installed in a comfortable farmhouse on the nearby 400-acre Strathtyrum estate. Not alone, of course. Two other discreet chums joined them, Alasdair Coutts-wood and Oli Baker. Here Kate’s natural homemaking skills were allowed to flourish – she ran up some new gingham curtains. There in the kitchen was her dream – an Aga cooker – and not only that, in the baronial dining room was a table that could seat 18. More dinner parties followed.
Even so, William was beginning to show the first signs of unease at being tied down so young. It was a constant in his mind in the early years of the relationship. They agreed to spend the summer break apart. He slipped away to America, flying to Tennessee to join the family of an old (and platonic) friend, Anna Sloan, a department store heiress who was at Edinburgh University. Kate went to the Dordogne as a guest of the family of one of their old flatmates, Fergus Boyd. One evening she disclosed that their being apart was something of a trial separation, adding, ‘I miss him.’
She didn’t have to wait too long before seeing him. At summer’s end they were back together again sharing the same house in their final year. Judged on what happened next, William had been missing her too. He decided to teach her to shoot, taking her up to Tam-naGhar, a cottage on the Balmoral estate which the Queen had given him as a refuge. And by now Kate’s family were in on the secret, her rather more outgoing sister Pippa (who was a student at Edinburgh) and brother James sometimes joining them there.
Some months later the couple were once again in Klosters – she skied rather better and with more daring than her boyfriend. And again there was a photocall with brother Harry and Prince Charles, but no Kate – even though everyone knew she was there. It was just one week before Prince Charles was to marry Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles, and there was William, in relaxed après ski mood in the Casa Antica nightclub, when he was asked a relatively simple question: ‘So is there going to be a second royal wedding?’
His answer was very much to the point. ‘I am too young. I don’t want to get married until I’m at least 28 or maybe 30.’
We can never know for certain what effect these remarks had on Kate. She had only recently had her 23rd birthday. William was still 22. William was, undoubtedly, trying to protect his girlfriend from the unrelenting spotlight that he knew was bound to follow the girl whom the world believed he would marry. As for Kate, she already knew from endless conversations they’d had about Diana that William considered his mother’s fatal error was marrying too young.
On the other hand, William had long recognised that his father’s biggest mistake was letting the girl he really loved, Camilla, slip through his fingers. Unscrambling this complicated romantic riddle
HEWAS TRYING TO PROTECT HER FROMTHE UNRELENTING SPOTLIGHT
was all very well. But would Kate really have to wait so many years before she had a ring on her finger?
She would, and she did, with considerable grace it must be said, despite a global preoccupation over whether this girl whose forebears were Durham coal miners was destined to be a queen. To help her handle the relentless attention William, who was often away on military training, gave her a list of telephone numbers she could call for help. They included his media lawyer and his Palace press secretary.
Two difficult years passed. But 9 January 2007, her 25th birthday, was a turning point. The paparazzi outside her Chelsea apartment,
convinced that there was to be an announcement about an engagement, swarmed around her. Normally she had managed to cope, beaming prettily for the cameras and giving a flick of her long, glossy hair.
Today it was different. She found herself almost overwhelmed and close to tears. William watched TV footage of the melee going on around her with a sinking heart. The trouble was, although he knew he loved Kate, he was still only 24 and uncertain whether his feelings for her might change.
He’d really meant it when he talked in that Swiss nightclub of not marrying until much later. One family figure who knew of his dilemma was his grandmother, the Queen, who by now had met Kate several times and liked her very much, while being somewhat uneasy about her not having a career.
Hence William’s phone call to Kate and the apparent end of what had been a beautiful relationship.
THE SECRET PROMISE THAT SEALED THEIR REUNION
Kate’s response will, surely, be studied by psychologists the world over when the story is retold. Far from following the miserable path of Charles Dickens’ Miss Havisham, withdrawing
from the world after being jilted, Kate sallied forth to engage with it in a spirit of joyful liberation.
She went out nightclubbing in a revealing mini-dress, exposing both cleavage and thigh. She was photographed in the back of taxis displaying those well-toned legs that had brought William’s eyes out on stalks at that fashion show five years earlier. She briefly joined an all-girl rowing crew. But just how liberated was she really? For nearly all the time she was chaperoned by William’s friends. As for William, it didn’t take long for him to realise that leaping onto a table at the Mahiki nightclub in Mayfair after that phone call to Kate and crying ‘I’m free!!!’ was utter nonsense. He missed her as much as she missed him. There was no great public reunion. All it took was the concert marking the 10th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death. Kate was there, not with William, but her presence said it all – they were together again.
Now William gave her a secret undertaking: they would marry, but just not yet.
With all the public scrutiny and gossip about her family, and the ghastly ‘Waity Katie’ nickname, the months and years that followed were not easy. But she loved William, and trusted him. Significantly, so did her family, to whom he had become almost like another son. Indeed, friends knew that
WITH HER HE’D FINALLY FOUND A FAMILY LIFE HE DREAMED OF AS A BOY
when he pondered how awful it would be if he ever lost Kate, he was also thinking of those cosy evenings with her family in Bucklebury. With her he’d finally found a family life he had dreamed of as a boy.
What he adored about the Middletons was that all of them – mother, father, daughters and son – were clearly happy in one another’s company. It was so different from his own childhood experience. Just how much he treasured this domestic happiness became clear in 2010 on one of his many holidays with her family to the French ski resort of Courchevel, where with the smallest of smiles he was overheard at an outdoor restaurant referring to Michael Middleton as ‘Dad’.
That October he and Kate went to Kenya, a part of the world William has always been drawn to. Unknown to her, he had in his backpack Princess Diana’s engagement ring. When they returned she knew she would be his wife. And the ring? She had slipped it on her finger, but then had to take it off again. It wouldn’t remain on until William had formally asked her father and, of course, the Queen.
Thus, joyfully, concluded the first part of a romantic saga lasting – astonishingly – almost a decade. They were both 28. One of his first jubilant calls was to his brother.
Harry’s response: ‘What took you so long?’