Royal biographer Christopher Wilson commented on the ‘laddish’ culture of the British army officer that had clearly seduced William. ‘They take a light-hearted approach to the opposite sex,’ said Wilson. ‘The most important thing is bonding with men because you might need them under fire, whereas women are seen as adornments and people to have sex with.’
That was shrewd sociology – but for Kate the problem was emotional not academic. On 11 April she excused herself from a meeting at Jigsaw, the fashion store with which she had recently started working, to take a call from William in a conference room out of earshot of the other buyers. She shut the door for more than an hour. When she rejoined the meeting, she was single.
The Middletons rallied round. Mum whisked her daughter off within days on a trip to Dublin to support an artist friend at the opening of their private view, then rounded off the cultural adventure with a tour of the National Gallery of Ireland. Brother James escaped with her to Ibiza, and back home again there were reports of William’s ‘ex’ being sighted enjoying herself on the London party circuit. Guy Pelly proved an unexpected ally, inviting Kate to Mahiki – and quietly advising her to give Wills some space.
Ms Middleton was not going to be seen as defeated. As the mornings got lighter she started heading out for the Thames to practise with an all-female dragon boat crew. Twenty-one-strong, the young women called themselves the Sisterhood – ‘an elite group of female athletes on a mission to keep boldly going where no girl has gone before’. Their ambition was to paddle the twenty miles across the Channel from Shakespeare Beach in Dover to Cap Gris-Nez to raise money for children’s hospices, and it was undoubtedly a good cause. But from Kate’s point of view, her mission was to convey a very definite message to the world too – and to one particular person.
That person got the message quicker than he or anyone else expected. William found the dating difficult, for a start, when a surprising number of young women from his circle turned him down flat. They could suss out the truth about where his heart lay, even if he himself could not. Suddenly young students from Brazil no longer seemed so glamorous, and the prince missed his family – which by now meant the Middleton family. One pillar of William’s year at Sandhurst had been his regular Friday night escapes to Bucklebury, where he could collapse and be mothered by Carole – and also fathered by the quiet and affectionate Michael who, whisper it, could provide a better ear for confidences, on some issues, than Prince Charles.
William had actually had his quad bike transferred from Highgrove to Bucklebury – he felt so much at ease being part of the Middleton clan. Their warm domestic closeness was something he had never known before. So often when he and Harry had been theoretically ‘at home’ with Dad, Charles had really been doing business over dinner, while the two boys ate alone. William had also become attached to the Middletons’ upper-middle-class habit of renting villas for summer breaks around the Med – and to this day that remains a feature of the Cambridges’ summers. He is the first and only senior British royal to holiday annually as the guest of his non-royal in-laws – sometimes flying privately, but also flying budget in the back of the plane like everybody else. Small wonder then, in April and May 2007, that the phone calls should resume.
‘I don’t think it’s really over,’ one Middleton pal had whispered to People’s Simon Perry on the April day that the break-up first became news. ‘I don’t think this is the last you’ll see of the two of them.’
And so it proved. On 24 June, just ten and a half weeks after the Jigsaw conference room phone call, the tireless Katie Nicholl revealed in a ‘World Exclusive’ on the front page of the Mail on Sunday that ‘Wills and Kate Are Dating Again’. She also disclosed some juicy details – the couple had been seen kissing and dancing closely at a party in William’s barracks in Bovington, Dorset.
‘They couldn’t keep their hands off each other,’ reported Nicholl on the testimony of ‘eyewitnesses’ at the party. ‘But William didn’t care that people were looking. At about midnight, he started kissing and smooching her. His friends were joking they should “get a room”, and it wasn’t long before William took Kate back to his quarters.’
Nudge nudge, wink wink – just what we all like to read on the front page of our Sunday newspaper! But Nicholl was engaged in some serious business – and on behalf of some people who were clearly serious. The reporter had spoken to sources who were representing both William and Kate and who wanted the world to know that the couple were back together again and were working out how to move forward on a new basis.
The break-up had happened, explained Nicholl, because of ‘William’s unwillingness to commit to a long-term relationship and, ultimately, marriage’. But now things had changed. ‘I understand that William has told Kate he is very serious about getting back together … William wants to make things work and said that if they get back together, it will be the real thing.’
For her part, Catherine explained – through another helpful friend, of course – that ‘she absolutely loves William’, but that she ‘is thinking about things … It is the toughest decision of her life … She knows if they do get back together, there’ll be no turning back. There will have to be an engagement and then marriage.’
Hmmm, so here was the m-word again … A friend of the prince’s was very happy to confirm for the record that ‘William hasn’t stopped pining
