by Penny Junor
Before investigations into either record began, the Home Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, told the House of Commons ‘There is nothing to investigate … I am absolutely certain that the allegation that this is anything to do with the security services or GCHQ … is being put out by newspapers, who I think feel rather guilty that they are using plainly tapped telephone calls.’ An interesting theory in the light of Prince William’s discovery that his was one of several mobile phones being hacked into, which led to an avalanche of claims against the Murdoch empire.
The Prince of Wales was furious that his phone had been illegally bugged and deeply annoyed that the press should have published the tape. He was also miserable that he had managed to drag the monarchy through the mire yet again, and devastated for Camilla, who was bombarded with hateful letters and accused of breaking up the royal marriage. He was humiliated beyond words and it required huge courage to step out of the car on a visit to Liverpool the following day, not knowing what kind of reception to expect from the crowds. As it was, there was not one single snigger or catcall and no evidence that people had stayed away.
But his greatest fear was for William and Harry, and also for Camilla’s children, Tom and Laura Parker Bowles, who were a few years older. They were all at school and children, he knew, could be horribly cruel. He was terrified about how they would cope.
Yet again, the Barbers worked overtime to keep the most lurid headlines out of sight and to support William and now Harry. The school had had the children of high-profile parents through their doors before and scandals in the press were nothing new, but nothing before or since could have compared with the upsets that these young boys had so far had to handle.
A TOUGH CHOICE
With every episode, the bold, confident, cheeky boy was becoming more muted, while his brother, the quiet, subdued one, still too young to fully understand what was going on, appeared to blossom. It was becoming clear that William was taking onto his young shoulders the burden of responsibility for his parents’ wellbeing and happiness.
He saw the newspapers and the television news, witnessed the sarcasm and shouting, felt the corrosive atmosphere, but because he loved both his parents, his loyalty and emotions were torn down the middle. Fortunately, they were not the only providers of care in his young life and it was perhaps the stability that came from the other people around him that prevented him from careering off the rails when everyone else seemed to be hell bent on self-destruction.
One of these people was a ditzy young aristocrat called Alexandra Legge-Bourke, known as Tiggy, whose mother, Shaun, and aunt, Victoria, were both ladies-in-waiting to Princess Anne. Tiggy was taken on as an aide to Richard Aylard, but swiftly moved sideways as a female presence in the boys’ life and to act in loco parentis when, under the terms of the separation, they were with Charles but he had commitments elsewhere. It was a magical appointment. Tiggy was twenty-eight and a bundle of fun, something between a loving, liberal mother and a slightly wild big sister. She was a nursery school teacher who had a delightful rapport with children of all ages and temperaments, whom she called her Tiggywigs. She said of her royal charges, ‘I give them what they need at this stage; fresh air, a rifle and a horse. She [their mother] gives them a tennis racket and a bucket of popcorn at the movies.’William and Harry took to her like ducks to water but their mother once again grew frightened that she was being usurped.
Meanwhile, another crisis was brewing. The veteran writer and broadcaster, Jonathan Dimbleby, had spent two years working on a double project: a television documentary about Charles and a biography, which he had managed to persuade the Prince to authorise. He was given unrestricted access to the archives at St James’s Palace and at Windsor Castle, where an entire floor is filled with documents and memoranda accumulated over the last four decades. ‘I have also been free to read his journals, diaries and many thousands of the letters which he has written assiduously since childhood,’ Dimbleby wrote. ‘Not only have I drawn heavily from this wealth of original material but I have been free to quote extensively from it. Nor has the Prince discouraged past and present members of the royal Household from speaking to me; likewise, at his behest, his friends and some of his relatives have talked about him openly at length, almost all of them for the first time.’
Both were timed to coincide loosely with the twenty-fifth anniversary of his Investiture as Prince of Wales, in July 1994. What began as an innocent and well-intentioned exercise had unimaginable consequences and was ultimately responsible for Camilla’s divorce from Andrew Parker Bowles, terrible ructions within the Royal Family, Diana’s devastating Panorama interview, Richard Aylard’s departure and the fiercest controversy yet about the Prince’s fitness to be King. William was twelve and deeply affected by it.
The documentary was called ‘Charles: the Private Man, the Public Role’. It ran for two and a half hours and attracted fourteen million viewers, many of whom understood for the first time what the Prince actually did when he wasn’t playing polo. But what most people remembered about the film ran to no more than three minutes.
Dimbleby asked Charles about his infidelity: ‘Did you try to be faithful and honourable to your wife when you took on the vows of marriage?’
‘Yes,’ said the Prince, and after a brief and rather anguished pause added, ‘until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.’
When asked about Camilla he said she was ‘a great friend of mine … she has been a friend for a very long time.’
At a press conference the next day, Richard Aylard, who had overseen the project, confirmed that the adultery to which the Prince had confessed was indeed with Mrs Parker Bowles.
His reasoning was sound enough, even if the results were not. The question had to be asked because after the Morton book, the taped phone calls and everything else that had gone before, it was the only thing the public was interested in. How he should answer it was a tough choice. The Prince could have refused to answer, but that wouldn’t have stopped the paparazzi who followed him and Camilla and made their lives so difficult. He could have lied but that was morally unacceptable, and if and when the paparazzi did catch the two of them together, he would be shown to be a liar. Or he could tell the truth, which he did, naively believing that the public would understand that he committed adultery only after the marriage had irretrievably broken down.
‘NOT FIT TO REIGN’ ran the Daily Mirror headline, and other front pages took a similar tone.
Diana went down to Ludgrove to talk to the children. As she said in her Panorama interview, ‘I … put it to William particularly, that if you find someone you love in life you must hang on to it and look after it, and if you were lucky enough to find someone who loved you then one must protect it.
‘William asked me what had been going on and could I answer his questions, which I did. He said was that the reason why our marriage had broken up? And I said, well, there were three of us in this marriage and the pressures of the media was another factor, so the two together were very difficult. But although I still loved Papa, I couldn’t live under the same roof as him, and likewise with him.’ In answer to what effect she thought her explanation had on Prince William, she said, ‘Well, he’s a child that’s a deep thinker and we don’t know for a few years how it’s gone in. But I put it in gently, without resentment or any anger.’
It was Dimbleby’s book that followed in the autumn, simply called The Prince of Wales, or more precisely its serialisation in the Sunday Times, which did the most damage. Inevitably sensationalised and cherry-picked, it gave the impression that Charles was a whinger whose parents had never shown him any affection, that he had loved Camilla for most of his adult life and never loved the wife his father had bullied him into marrying.
The Prince no doubt thought it would be a good vehicle for delivering his message about the serious issues that consumed his time. Instead it turned into an own goal of staggering proportions. His parents were left hurt by the portrayal Charles gave
of his childhood and bemused that he should have agreed such access. And Andrew Parker Bowles felt honour-bound to formally bring his marriage to Camilla to an end. They were divorced the following January and he married his long-term girlfriend.
Sir John Riddell was amazed that his advisors had ever allowed it to happen.
‘They released Jonathan Dimbleby and the Prince of Wales on to the Scottish moor together at 9.30 and they came back breathless and excited at 4.30; and when you go for a very exhausting walk with anybody – if you went with Goebbels – after a time the blood circulates, the joints ease up, the breath gets short – you’d pour out your heart to anyone, even Goebbels. Jonathan Dimbleby’s charms are huge so the Prince of Wales gave him all that stuff about how unhappy he was when he was a boy – the Queen never spoke to him, the Duke of Edinburgh was beastly to him – and it very much upsets them.
‘Everyone was told this book would finally show what a marvellous person he was; and people were bored out of their wits by Business in the Community and the Prince’s Trust; they wanted to know about their private life. We’re interested in who they’re going to bed with, except we got rather bored by that because we couldn’t keep up with it.’
And just as the excitement over one book started to wane, there was another hot on its heels. James Hewitt, having licked his wounds, decided to tell the writer Anna Pasternak about his five-year love affair with Diana. Princess in Love hit the bookshelves in September 1994. The Queen can’t have been the only person wondering what revelations would dominate the headlines next in this battle between the Prince and Princess of Wales – and which of them could inflict the most damage on their two sons.
The answer wasn’t long in coming.
THE PLAYING FIELDS OF ETON
On 6 September 1995, Prince William arrived at Eton College, probably the most famous public school in the world, having successfully passed his common entrance exam. It was a big leap from the cosy surroundings of Ludgrove, and it had a whole new and contrary vocabulary to learn: a ‘school’ was a class but more commonly called a ‘div’, a teacher was a ‘beak’, homework was called ‘EWs’, ‘chambers’ were elevenses, and the smart outfit he wore, marked with his name and laundry number, was called ‘formal change’. For lessons the next day he would be in ‘school dress’, black tailcoat, waistcoat, a stiff white collar with a paper tie and pin-striped trousers, which were apparently adopted to mourn the death of George III in 1820.
Once upon a time, having the right name was enough to guarantee a place in this bastion of privilege, but while that was no longer true when William joined the school, it had no shortage of boys with their own grouse moors and salmon rivers, two or three houses and a brace of Range Rovers. Be that as it may, the education and the quality of the teaching staff, the academic and sporting facilities and the opportunities it provided were second to none. It also boasted three theatres, two concert halls, two major libraries, an intranet and computer terminals in every boy’s room.
Charles and Diana delivered him to the school together, along with Harry, in a public display of smiles and family alliance. As well as the daunting prospect of being a new boy in a new school that was almost ten times the size of the old one, William was also aware that everyone would be curious about him and that everyone would know what was going on in his family. On top of that he had the press cameras to cope with and the inevitable anxiety about leaving his parents. It was more than the average thirteen-year-old had to handle on his first day at a big school.
Despite their differences, Charles and Diana were united in their choice of this next school for William, and in their choice of house master, the most significant adult in every Eton boy’s daily life. Just as Gerald and Janet Barber had been key in seeing William through uncomfortable times at Ludgrove, Dr Andrew Gailey, who presided over ALHG (houses are known by the house master’s initials) proved to be another exceptional figure, whose support of William through the next five years, and beyond, was nothing short of heroic. An Irishman with a good sense of humour (vital, particularly when Harry joined his brother three years later), he is a historian and has written numerous books on Anglo-Irish relations. It was a case of the right man being in the right place at the right time.
The town of Eton and the school are interwoven and many of the buildings and shops in the High Street are owned by the school. At the top of the High Street, a footbridge across the River Thames links Eton with Windsor, and thereafter, Windsor Castle, the Queen’s main residence. William would often walk to the Castle to have tea with Granny and Grandpa, braving the local youth, who used to take delight – and still do – in duffing up anyone they suspected of being Etonian. In the past boys were only allowed into Windsor in ‘formal change’; now, they are only allowed across the bridge if they are not wearing any sort of uniform. Teenagers in jackets and ties are about as inconspicuous as zebras in a pride of lions.
In stark contrast, when the Prince of Wales was at school he didn’t see any of his family for months on end. At the Duke of Edinburgh’s insistence, he was sent to Gordonstoun in the northeast of Scotland, hundreds of miles from everyone and everything that was familiar. It was a Spartan regime, including runs before breakfast and cold showers, and he was profoundly unhappy there. He would never have let William suffer the same fate.
While the scholars, or Collegers, inhabit College and eat in the most magnificent room in the school, the rest of the boys, known as ‘Oppidans’, are distributed between twenty-four boarding houses scattered about the town, typically with fifty other boys, ten to a year group. But unlike most schools of its type, there are no dormitories. Every boy from day one has a study bedroom of his own, which changes every year as he moves up the school.
There are many idiosyncrasies that set Eton apart but one of the most obvious is that day-to-day life is more akin to a university regime than a school. From the age of thirteen, boys have to manage their own time. They can choose whatever extracurricular activities they want – and there is every conceivable extracurricular activity on offer. The only requirement is that lessons and tutorials are attended and that their work is completed and handed in on time. There is an unexpected amount of freedom, but plenty of sanctions for boys who misuse it.
Several weeks into the Michaelmas term, every new boy had to take a Colours Test, set by the older boys. It was supposedly to ensure that they had learned their way around the school and had mastered the vocabulary. In reality it was an alarming initiation ritual, and if any boy slipped up they were made to sing the Founder’s Prayer in Latin while standing on a table, and any boy who was seen to falter was dragged onto the floor and bashed with cushions.
Although always referred to as ALHG, the real name for Dr Gailey’s building was Manor House. It is situated in the centre of the school, next to School Library and ‘the Burning Bush’ (an elaborate wrought-iron street lamp). Like all the boarding houses, it has two separate doors, the Boys’ Door, leading into the boys’ living area, and the door to the Private Side, where the house master lives with his wife and family, if he has one. Dr Gailey was married with a young daughter, but the wives, unlike at Ludgrove, have no role as far as the boys are concerned. Each house employs a woman known as a Dame (except in College where she is called Matron), whom the boys address as ‘Ma’am’. She looks after the physical welfare of the boys and deals with laundry, administration, catering (in those houses with dining rooms) and domestic issues. William’s Dame was Elizabeth Heathcote, said to be ‘a bit firm but very nice’.
Security was an obvious issue in a school as spread out as Eton, and where townspeople and boys intermingled so freely. The grounds stretch to four hundred acres and include a rowing lake. Many of the classrooms are similarly spread out and to reach them boys must cross public roads and walk through narrow pedestrian passages between buildings.
The school took William’s security very seriously. When a boy idly sitting at his bedroom window spotted William walking down the street,
he thought it would be funny to point a laser pen at him. Seeing the red dot homing in on its target, William’s PPOs immediately thought he was a sniper. The boy found himself looking down the barrel of a much more serious weapon – and, rumour had it, was soon looking for a new school.
Every boy was visible to the outside world on a daily basis, yet because the school had such a long history of educating children of the rich and famous, including Princes from other parts of the world, the arrival of the Queen’s grandson was not entirely out of the ordinary. It didn’t take long for people’s curiosity to fade and he was soon treated like any other boy, both at school and in the town, and that was possibly William’s salvation. Boys and locals alike became surprisingly protective; a few tried to make money out of the new arrival, offering items of ‘William’s’ uniform to gullible tourists, but on the whole they would question anyone hanging around with a long lens and never give truthful answers when quizzed about William.
Sports played a major part in his life at Eton. Boys are divided into two groups during the summer: those who choose to row are called wet bobs; those who play cricket are dry bobs. He chose rowing, but swimming was where he excelled. Eton has an Olympic-sized indoor pool and William was the Under-16 60-m Freestyle champion in his second year. A year later he won both the Senior 50-m and 100-m Freestyle competitions and later broke the school 50-m record (in 27.94 seconds). He also took up sub-aqua diving, which became a major enthusiasm, and played on the school water polo team.
On land, he played all the major sports for his House, except cricket. These included football and rugby in the Michaelmas Half, hockey and rowing in the Lent Half and athletics, rowing and tennis in the Summer Half. He also played rugby for the 3rd XV until he broke a finger badly, which required an operation. Thereafter, he concentrated on the Field Game and the Wall Game, two hybrids unique to Eton. (It’s said that the only other place these games have been played is Ford Open Prison.) Both games are a type of football, but of the two, the Wall Game is the least explicable. Two teams of sweaty boys covered in mud form a ‘bully’ or a scrum up against a high red-brick wall and push against each other, endeavouring, I am told, to free the ball. It rarely happens; goals are scored every hundred years on average, and if the scrum moves more than a couple of feet in either direction it’s considered an exciting match.