Love certainly did strike at some time during that Hope Street flat-share – the couple acknowledged as much in their engagement and wedding interviews. And it intensified in the following academic year when they moved to a romantic house on the Strathtyrum Estate near the famous St Andrews Golf Course. Hope Street had been a modest grey stone terraced house, where William and his friends had occupied the upper two floors – an absolute nightmare for William’s protection officers, who had had to fit bulletproof windows and a bombproof front door.
Balgove House stood in its own grounds with some two acres of wild meadow surrounded by a six-foot-high stone wall. William said it was just like a miniature Highgrove – and only a quarter of a mile from the St Andrews campus! Here Kate became Queen of the Aga, presiding over a household of three men – Wills’ friends Oli Baker and Alasdair Coutts-Wood were their new housemates – and they quickly earned a reputation for hosting premier parties.
By the end of 2003, rumours had started to circulate that William and Kate were a serious couple, and Kate made the mistake of confiding their romance to her mother Carole. Carole herself was perfectly trustworthy, but that Christmas she could not help passing the news on to her brother, the garrulous Gary Goldsmith – who was so delighted that he started a new year business meeting by pushing a note across the table to a colleague: ‘I think I’m going to be the uncle of the future Queen of England!!!’
In fact, the Middleton/Goldsmith dam held water. The revelation came more predictably, and catastrophically, from the tabloid press. At the end of March 2004, William could not help getting affectionate with Kate on a ski lift, stealing a kiss during the family’s annual skiing holiday in the Swiss Alps at Klosters, and the Sun ran the photographs in a front-page story on 1 April as a ‘World Exclusive’: ‘Finally … Wills Gets a Girl: Prince & Kate So Close in Klosters.’
‘Fuck!’ exclaimed William in fury when his friend Guy Pelly showed him the paper. ‘They have no right. We have an agreement!’
In fact, the palace had two carefully negotiated agreements in place with the British press. There was the fundamental pact applying to both boys – and, in this case, to Wills’ 2001–5 sojourn in St Andrews – that they would not be photographed without their consent during their full-time education. Then Prince Charles had taken the further precaution, through his new press officer Paddy Harverson, of negotiating a second deal to ensure specific privacy during the royal skiing holiday, in return for which Charles and William had posed for pictures when they arrived – rather charming, affectionate ones, as it happened, in which William had put his arms around his father, ragging him fondly.
The Sun made no attempt to deny these agreements and issued no apologies. Editor Rebekah Wade argued rather that the pictures had been published in a higher cause, since William was now fully adult – twenty-one the previous year – and one of his girlfriends could well become queen one day.
‘Her subjects will be entitled to know all about her,’ argued Wade. ‘Our story about Prince William and his girlfriend Kate Middleton is 100 per cent true. Therefore, there is a strong public interest in publishing these delightful photographs.’
Wade had a point – and then her rival tabloid, the Mirror, weighed in with more evidence confirming that William and Kate were a serious item. The paper cited plausible St Andrews sources showing that the couple had been romantically involved for months, and in the ensuing stand-off, Clarence House stumbled. Its royal briefers wandered into excessive detail, arguing that while the couple may have shared student accommodation for eighteen months, they had not actually shared a bed and didn’t ‘live together’ in the way that that phrase was popularly understood.
Too much information …
‘Look, I’m only twenty-two, for God’s sake!’ exploded William when asked in 2004 about his marriage plans. ‘I’m too young to marry at my age. I don’t want to get married until I’m at least twenty-eight or maybe thirty.’
So, dear Catherine, that means you’ve only got eight years to wait …
William’s wariness derived from the example of his parents’ disastrously failed marriage. By this point he was old enough to have dipped into several of the vast library of books about Diana and to have glanced at some of the newspaper articles on her – though he hated them all. He had also begun to get a taste of the remorselessness of the royal system, and he was determined not to be prematurely pressured towards the altar as his mother and father had been.
So in the summer of 2004, with just a year to go until his graduation, William rather welcomed the mischievous suggestion of Guy Pelly that he might leave Kate at home and join his friend on a ‘boys only’ sailing trip to Greece. And Pelly being Pelly, he made another suggestion: that the yacht might be staffed and operated by an all-female crew. Kate was not impressed and she made sure William knew it.
Mischief was Guy Pelly’s middle name. He had been one of the original and most rowdy ringleaders of the Glossy Posse and a stalwart presence at Club H. As the son of Diana’s friend Lady Carolyn Herbert, Pelly had been close to both princes from childhood. When St James’s Palace had wanted to suggest a ‘bad influence’ who might have led Harry astray in his 2002 ‘Drugs Shame’, it was Pelly’s name that it floated to the newspapers – most irresponsibly, as it turned out. Pelly had actually been in Australia in the weeks when the News of the World was gathering its incriminating evidence of Harry’s pot smoking. But this did not save him from being asked to leave Cirencester’s Royal College of Agriculture, after which he had
