Harris had given strict instructions that the media should pack up their bags and leave the moment they had got their agreed photo op shots of the prince starting his studies, and when everything seemed calm she handed over to Niall Scott, the university’s press officer. Scott was now in charge, she made clear, and if he should spot anyone wandering round ‘with anything larger than an Instamatic’, he should feel free to run them out of town. The police would back him up and if there were any problems he should give her a call. St James’s Palace was worried about defending the privacy of all the students at St Andrews – since the object of the entire exercise was to enable normal college life for the prince.
‘William was very sensitive to that,’ Scott recalled. ‘He knew the unsettling effect his presence could have and was keen that it should all be quietened down.’
But hardly had the last TV truck disappeared when Scott looked out of his window to see a full-scale camera crew setting up to film.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked – to be told, ‘We’re Ardent – here’s our card. We’re making an A-Z of royalty for an entertainment channel in the States and we’re waiting to film William coming out of his lecture.’
Ardent Productions, they explained, was a TV company owned by Prince Edward. Prince Edward? Yes, that was the one! William’s own uncle was breaching the carefully negotiated embargo that was being observed by the world’s media.
Colleen Harris had not quite left for London, and she could not believe it: ‘They kept saying they had permission to be there, and I said, “Well I’m the person who would give you permission and I haven’t – so you can’t be here.”
‘“No,” they said, “we’ve got permission from Prince Edward.” They just wouldn’t go away.’
In London Prince Charles was reported to be ‘incandescent’ with rage. The air was said ‘to have turned blue’ when the prince heard that his own younger brother had invaded William’s privacy.
Prince Edward and his wife Sophie, the Earl and Countess of Wessex, had not made a success of their attempts to be modern working royals. Sophie had recently been conned by the ‘fake sheikh’ reporter, Mazher Mahmood, whom she believed to be a potential client for her PR company. In their conversation, the countess had talked disrespectfully about the Queen as the ‘old dear’ and derided the grandeur of the then prime minister by calling him ‘President Blair’. But the Wessexes seemed afflicted by a certain grandeur themselves when they went round to St James’s Palace to apologise personally to Charles for Ardent’s antics in St Andrews. They explained that they had walked round to SJP through the park ‘to give pleasure to the people’.
William’s experience of St Andrews University barely recovered from that ill-omened beginning. He had not anticipated quite how ‘boring’ – his word – life in a small Scottish seaside town could be. Highlights of the week included shopping in the local Tesco, while his social life was clouded by everyone’s awareness of his celebrity. As the prince was drinking one night in a bar soon after his arrival, a passing female student gave his bottom a pinch – to which William responded with a look of sharp disdain. ‘He was not impressed,’ said one final-year student who witnessed the incident.
William Wales, as he asked to be known, played water polo and football on Wednesday afternoons, returning every night to his highly secure but cell-like accommodation in the St Salvator’s hall of residence – ‘St Sally’s’. As the term progressed, the winter weather soon grew cold, grey and austere, and he found it difficult to make new friends. He missed his brother too.
There simply was not the ‘buzz’ at St Andrews that William was used to, and he fled the campus as often as he could the moment work ended on a Friday. By media count, the prince spent only two of his first thirteen term-time weekends in St Andrews, voyaging all the way to London or Highgrove in search of social life, at no little inconvenience and expense. He had to journey with a bodyguard and usually a driver for four hours or more each way – and that was if he travelled by air.
Academically, the prince did not find his history of art course all it was cracked up to be either. Its workload was more than he had expected – and under the Scottish system he was sentenced to a full four years to get his degree, not the three years he would have faced in England.
When William got home for Christmas that December of 2001, he told his father that he wanted to leave St Andrews. He was miserable. He had had enough of small town life – and all the travel arrangements that he needed to escape it. He asked Prince Charles to arrange some plan of withdrawal and transfer, possibly to Edinburgh as being more ‘cosmopolitan’ – or to some university in England or even Italy or the United States – and his father agreed to enable the change. Charles asked his private secretary, Sir Stephen Lamport, if he could come up with a ‘strategy’ of extrication and transfer for his son.
Lamport conferred with spin doctor Mark Bolland, his deputy private secretary, and the pair were horrified. They protested strongly to their boss, remonstrating that some way must be found to keep his son at St Andrews.
‘It would have been a personal disaster for William,’ said one of them later. ‘He would have been seen as a quitter.’ Bolland feared a repeat of the debacle that had followed Prince Edward’s decision to opt out of the Royal Marines – an act of surrender that had permanently sabotaged Edward’s credibility.
‘William needs to knuckle down and not wimp out,’ was Prince Philip’s robust and reported response as his grandfather.
Then there was the prospect of
