‘It would have been a PR disaster for St Andrews if he had left after one term,’ said Andrew Neil, the journalist and editor who was, at the time, Lord Rector at St Andrews, ‘and we worked very hard to keep him.’ The phone lines hummed between the university and St James’s Palace, with Lamport and Bolland bringing in Andrew Gailey, William’s former housemaster at Eton.
‘It was really no different from what many first-year students go through,’ Mark Bolland recalled. ‘We approached the whole thing as a “wobble” which was entirely normal. St Andrews had a flexible course structure, and when they heard that William might be happier majoring in geography, they made sure there were no roadblocks.’
‘He got “the blues” – which happens,’ said Andrew Neil. ‘We have a lot of public-school boys who get up here, and by November when the weather gets grey and cold, wish they were back home. William was a long way from home, and he wasn’t happy.’
In the end the two royal aides prevailed on Charles that he needed to demonstrate more fatherly backbone. It was not quite Charles’s way to talk of ‘knuckling down’, Prince Philip-style, but in the course of a long parental heart-to-heart over Christmas he managed to persuade his son to think again.
‘I don’t think I was homesick,’ William later admitted. ‘I was more daunted. My father was very understanding about it and realised I had the same problem as he had probably had. We chatted a lot, and in the end we both realised – I definitely realised – that I had to come back.’
So in January 2002 William headed back to St Andrews, resolved to try again, and he was soon making good progress in two new directions. The prospect of switching to geography made his academic work more appealing, and socially he started investigating the possibility of renting a flat in the town with friends the following September. This would release him from the confines of his 15 ft x 15 ft ‘cell’ in St Sally’s and give him a taste of why he had really come to university – to enjoy some flavour of ‘ordinary everyday life’ with his contemporaries.
But in St James’s Palace, Mark Bolland had been reflecting. Just a few weeks earlier, he had successfully turned the News of the World story of ‘Harry’s Drugs Shame’ to Prince Charles’s great advantage (if not to Prince Harry’s). Now he saw a way to boost Charles’s image still further as the concerned and caring parent of Diana’s elder son – the future king. On 3 March, just as William was recapturing his momentum at St Andrews, the Daily Mail ran the dramatic revelation (from an ‘unnamed’ source, naturally) that ‘William Wants to Quit “Boring” College’.
As with ‘Harry’s Drugs Shame’, Prince Charles emerged from the article as the hero of the hour. Far from consenting to William’s wish to leave St Andrews, Charles was presented as a wise and firm father who had urged his son ‘to “stick with it” and not abandon his four-year degree in history of art’. Describing how William’s worries had started the previous summer before he left for Scotland, the Mail revealed – in a detail that can only have come from Bolland – that the Prince of Wales had cancelled a week’s holiday planned with Camilla and the king and queen of Jordan so that he could spend more time with his son.
William meanwhile was portrayed as a spoiled and over-privileged wimp.
‘Frankly, he was feeling sorry for himself,’ commented one ‘anonymous’ unknown, without much sympathy, in a follow-up article next day that pointed out how ‘William continues to spend most of his spare time at Highgrove … He needs to throw himself into the social scene [in St Andrews] a bit more.’ The prince was too stand-offish – ‘snobbish’ was the implication. When he went to pubs like the Westport Bar, ‘he has an arrangement to sit at a table behind a pillar’.
‘We respectfully suggest,’ wrote the Guardian in one of several less than sympathetic follow-ups spawned by the revelation, ‘that spending a night staring at a pillar may not be the optimum way to a splendid evening.’
17
Kate’s Hot!
‘That’s kind of almost why I waited so long …
I’m trying to learn from lessons done in the past.’
(Prince William, 17 November 2010)
Tuesday, 26 March 2002. The date has passed into royal folklore – it was the moment when Prince William first set eyes on Kate Middleton in her underwear sashaying down a fashion runway at St Andrews University.
That was the start of it all – the royal romance, the televised marriage celebrated by millions, the birth of three babies and, eventually, looking into the future, the prospect of this couple sitting side by side on their thrones as king and queen. Everyone agrees that it all started on that catwalk in an austere and draughty Scottish student union – even the lovebirds themselves, who do not normally like to confirm or deny such private matters.
But it was not quite as simple as that sounds …
Tuesday, 26 March 2002 was, for a start, very far from being the first time that Kate and William had encountered each other. Catherine’s deep-digging biographer Katie Nicholl demonstrated in 2013 how the couple had almost certainly met while they were still at school – Wills at Eton and Kate at Marlborough College, where a number of her girlfriends were paid-up members of the Glossy Posse of Berkshire–Gloucestershire socialites who partied with the princes. As such, they had been regular visitors to the gatherings at Highgrove’s Club H in its 1999–2000 heyday, and two of
