Kate (28 page)
Authors: Claudia Joseph
Two days later, William and Kate were on their fourth skiing trip to the Alpine village of Klosters. In a break with royal tradition – Prince Charles usually stays in the royal suite at the five-star Hotel Walserhof – the party of friends rented an apartment high in the mountains. Prince Charles joined them later on in the week. Wearing a chic white skiing jacket and confidently tackling the offpiste runs, Kate looked relaxed as she was photographed poking William with a ski pole. Her appearance with one of William’s bodyguards invoked memories of Princess Diana, who was often seen skiing with a Metropolitan police guard while on holiday with Charles. The sight caused a group of photographers to gather on a ridge overlooking the terminus of the Gotschna cable car waiting to catch a picture of her arrival, enabling the press to compare the images of Princess William’s mother with those of his girlfriend.
After their holiday, William was stationed at RAF Shawbury, near Shrewsbury, Shropshire – and 170 miles from London – where he flew a helicopter for the first time. He then undertook his final test to gain his wings. ‘William was very good,’ said instructor Wing Commander Andy Lovell. ‘I was very impressed by his flying skills. He had a natural handling ability and was very quick to learn. He responded well to instructions and demonstrated plenty of spare capacity.’ Flight Lieutenant Simon Berry, 26, who was on the same course, added: ‘William was socialising with everyone. He was just a normal bloke, a normal guy and very sociable. He was working really hard, flying in the morning, coming down and doing two hours of flight school, and then working all hours in the evenings like everyone else.’
However, it later emerged that William, codenamed ‘Golden Kestrel’, was not quite as ‘normal’ as the other RAF officers. Stationed at RAF odiham, west of Basingstoke in Hampshire, he spent his final week training with 7 Squadron, learning how to fly a £10-million twin-rotor Chinook helicopter. It was during his time there that the 25-year-old officer let his youth and enthusiasm get the better of him, taking five ‘joyrides’ at a cost of £86,434 to the taxpayer. Although he was accompanied at all times by a senior instructor and experienced crew, and three of the flights could have been a legitimate part of his training – using family residences as navigational marker points to plot his course – two others involved using the helicopter as transport to social events, causing a public-relations nightmare that threatened to overshadow his graduation ceremony.
Having drawn up the flight plans himself, William decided that his first training exercise, on Wednesday, 2 April, should be a trip to his family home, Highgrove, where he could ‘buzz’ his father (it is not known whether Prince Charles was at home at the time). Under tuition, he flew the 106-mile round trip to Gloucestershire. The MoD later claimed that the trip, which cost £11,985 in fuel, maintenance and man hours, was part of a ‘general handling exercise’.
The following day, perhaps in a bid to show off to Kate, William suggested practising his take-off and landing skills at her home in Berkshire, as the MoD routinely uses other locations when their two permanent fields in the area surrounding RAF odiham are busy. After getting permission from the police and the Middleton family, he flew the 12 miles from his base and circled over the house at 300 ft, before landing in a paddock in their grounds. He did not get out of the helicopter but took off 20 seconds later. The trip cost £8,716, but was defended on the grounds that ‘battlefield helicopter crews routinely practise landing in fields and confined spaces away from their airfields as a vital part of their training for operations’.
However, on Friday, 4 April, William bent the rules even further, travelling 260 miles to Hexham, Northumberland. While another pilot flew back to base, he travelled on to the Scottish border town of Kelso, to join Kate at the wedding of their close friend Lady Iona Douglas-Home (granddaughter of Sir Alec Douglas-Home and daughter of the chairman of Coutts, she had met the couple at St Andrews) and banker Thomas Hewitt. The most expensive of William’s jaunts, at £18,522, the ‘general training’ flight took 4 hours and 15 minutes but was defended by the MoD as ‘a legitimate training sortie’.
After returning to base from the wedding, William had to conduct low-level flying training. Having buzzed his father and girlfriend, the obvious choice was his grandmother. He made the 256-mile round trip to the Sandringham estate in Norfolk on Wednesday, 9 April, at a cost of £4,358, although the Queen was not there at the time.
Luckily, news of these trips had not yet emerged when he attended a gala dinner the night before his graduation ceremony to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the RAF. Wearing his No. 5 mess dress for the first time, he joined Charles and Camilla in the officers’ mess at Cranwell, after they’d watched a sunset flypast of Spitfires and Hurricanes.
Twenty-four hours later, William used another Chinook training exercise as an excuse to ferry him and Harry to the Isle of Wight. Avoiding the Friday afternoon rush-hour traffic, he picked up Prince Harry at Woolwich Barracks before flying on to RAF Bembridge, on the island, for a drunken weekend. The official reason given for the £8,716, 190-mile trip was ‘open-water training’, but unofficially the princes were attending the stag party of their cousin Peter Phillips, who was to get married the following month to Autumn Kelly. The 24-man party, which included Zara Phillips’ boyfriend Mike Tindall, was staying in the sailing resort of Cowes, where they spent two days touring the restaurants and bars, starting in a restrained fashion in the Anchor Inn, an eighteenth-century pub, and getting wilder as the weekend went on.
The MoD said that the flight was intended to train William in low-level flying, negotiating busy air traffic over London, crossing water, flying in low cloud and landing at an enclosed helipad, but by the time he took the flight William had already been given his wings, and documents revealed under the Freedom of Information Act showed that he had kept his superiors in the dark over the reason for his trip.
One of the main gripes was that the MoD had allowed William to use one of its 48-strong fleet of Chinooks as his own personal taxi service when the RAF was overstretched in Afghanistan. But once the floodgates opened, the complaints snowballed. Some complained the money the MoD had spent on William’s training had been wasted, as he was never likely to fly on the front line, others that he had been fast-tracked through the course in double time.
RAF-trained pilot Jon Lake, an aviation analyst, said at the time: ‘This is an absolute waste of training hours on the Chinook helicopter that the military are hard-pressed to afford. No other pilot at Prince William’s stage of training would be allowed anywhere near the left-hand seat of a Chinook. It’s like a learner driver being given the keys to a Formula one car just because his father owns the racing team.’
Air Chief Marshal Sir Glenn Torpy, head of the RAF, was reported to have been furious about the situation and the ‘sheer stupidity’ of allowing William to make the Isle of Wight flight, asking for a detailed explanation of how it had come about. Even so, the MoD decided that although ‘a degree of naivety’ had been involved, there should be no punishments as no rules had been broken. While William was enjoying his boys’ weekend in Cowes, Kate spent some quality time with her family. It was her brother James’s 21st birthday on 15 April, and the entire Middleton clan went out to celebrate. They started their evening at Cocoon, a futuristic Pan-Asian restaurant in a former odeon cinema at the bottom of Regent Street owned by the same team as Boujis, on whose dance floor they ended the night.
By then, Pippa had found a job working for the upmarket event organisers Table Talk, who plan exclusive parties for blue-chip companies such as Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, jewellers Asprey and auction house Christie’s. Founded in 1992, the company, which had catered one of Elton John’s exclusive White Tie and Tiara balls, jumped at the chance to employ Kate Middleton’s sister. With her society contacts and love of the high life, she was to be a natural at the job.
James too had left university – he had dropped out of Edinburgh, where he had been studying environmental geoscience, the previous summer, after his first year – and had set up his own offshoot of the family firm, the Cake Kit Company, which provided the ingredients and accessories for making novelty cakes. While he got on his feet, he was working out of his parents’ offices and staying in the family home. ‘I knew that that mouthful of academic prescription was not going to do it for me,’ he told
Tatler
. ‘I wanted to join the workforce. So I quit early and started my own baking business. My parents had planted a gene in me with their business, and for me it was going to be all about baking. I even had a grandfather on my mother’s side, Ronald Goldsmith, who had been a baker during the war, so there was a family link too.’
Two weeks after James’s birthday, during William’s final week in the RAF, he made his first trip to the front line in Afghanistan, from where he was to repatriate the body of the 94th serviceman to be killed in the country since hostilities began in 2001. The prince joined a group of RAF officers flying into Kandahar airport to bring home the body of Trooper Robert Pearson, 22, a Queen’s Royal Lancer, who had been killed when his Viking armoured vehicle hit a landmine in Helmand Province. William took his turn at the controls of the C-17 Globemaster military transporter and spent three hours on the ground meeting servicemen. Back in the UK, he met the family of Trooper Pearson.
Both the Queen and Prince Charles had approved the 30-hour trip, which took place overnight on 27 April and was deemed so risky that a news blackout was imposed until after his return. Cynics claimed that aides had dreamed it up as a public-relations exercise to improve the prince’s battered image, but Clarence House insisted it had been planned before his helicopter joyrides had been exposed. Five days later, on 2 May 2008, William bowed out of the RAF and started a month-long break before an attachment to the Royal Navy. During that time, another royal would take the heat off him and spark a crisis within the family.
S
itting in a pew in the historic St George’s Chapel in the grounds of Windsor Castle, Kate Middleton shared a private joke with Chelsy Davy as they attended their first royal wedding in the presence of the Queen.
Wearing a pale-pink fitted jacket, a black Issa dress and a matching black pillbox hat with net veil, Prince William’s girlfriend slipped into the Gothic chapel on 17 May 2008 for the wedding of his cousin Peter Phillips to Autumn Kelly.
Arriving alone, the 26-year-old brunette was representing her boyfriend at the first wedding of a grandchild of the Queen, as William had been forced to turn down the invitation because it clashed with a prior engagement. While she was at the royal wedding, he was 4,000 miles away in the foothills of Mount Kenya, awaiting the traditional Masai marriage ceremony of Batian Craig, the brother of Jecca, to Melissa Duveen.
Kate’s solitary appearance on such an important occasion underlined the extent to which she had been accepted by the royal family and, to many observers, indicated that it was only a matter of time before she became a royal bride. Her role at the wedding led to flurry of newspaper articles speculating about an imminent engagement, with one friend remarking that they thought there was ‘undoubtedly an understanding’ between the couple since the relationship’s revival that it would lead to marriage.
The wedding also marked a step forward in Harry’s then girlfriend Chelsy’s relationship with the family. She had attended her first official engagement earlier in the month when she had watched her boyfriend being awarded with a medal for his service in Afghanistan. But for Chelsy, who looked unusually demure in a black-and-white floral dress and matching black jacket, this was the first meeting with her boyfriend’s grandmother.
However, the two girls’ attendance at the event was overshadowed by a storm of controversy over the commercialisation of the royal family, as the newly-weds had made a £500,000 deal to allow their nuptials to be featured in
Hello!
magazine. Both William and Harry were said to be ‘deeply unhappy’ that their girlfriends were prominently featured in the coverage, splashed across 59 pages of the magazine, which stated: ‘Even the two glamorous royal girlfriends couldn’t take the spotlight off the bride on her big day.’ Despite having slipped in through a side door of the church, rather than entering through the famous West Steps, in order not to upstage the bride, the two girls were photographed 29 times between them, laughing together, letting their hair down on the dance floor and being entertained by Prince Harry. The two princes were not amused.
The marriage of the Queen’s grandson Peter Phillips and Autumn Kelly, the Canadian daughter of a hairdresser and electrical retailer, was perhaps the most high-profile royal union since the wedding of Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex on 19 June 1999. Although Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall had married the previous year, they had had a civil ceremony, which the Queen did not attend.
Organised by Margaret Hammond (a former assistant to Peter’s mother, Princess Anne, she came out of retirement for the occasion), the service was attended by all the senior members of the royal family, apart from Prince William. Yet when the couple first met, at the Montreal Grand Prix in 2003, Autumn had no idea the man she was dating was 11th in line to the throne. Peter did not tell her about his royal connections, and she only learned the truth while watching a television programme about Prince William.
Peter, 30, arrived at the chapel at 3.40 p.m., 20 minutes before his bride-to-be, wearing a morning suit and accompanied by his two best men, childhood friend Andrew Tucker and Ben Goss, a friend from Gordonstoun. Wearing a £7,500 Sassi Holford dress, a tiara loaned to her by Princess Anne, and a necklace and earrings given to her by the groom, Autumn walked up the slippery steps and into the church clutching her father’s arm ‘for dear life’ to the strains of ‘The Prince of Denmark’s March’ by Jeremiah Clarke. Autumn, who was PA to Sir Michael Parkinson, and a former promotions girl and actress, was attended by six bridesmaids in green Vera Wang dresses, including her childhood best friend Jackie Aubie and her future sister-in-law Zara Phillips.
