by Penny Junor
Very serious efforts were made to get William to the front in more than a token way, but they were thwarted by the fear that his being there would put in danger the lives of those around him. Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton and the Prince himself still harbour the hope that one day it will be achieved.
In April 2007, at the end of his bespoke course, he was one of twenty-five students presented with their RAF pilot wings by the Prince of Wales, in his capacity as Air Chief Marshal. The Duchess of Cornwall was in the audience, as was Kate Middleton and Diana’s sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, the only member of the Spencer family with whom he has much contact. His training in the RAF had been accelerated but he had forty or fifty flying hours at the end of his time – as many as most people who get their wings conventionally are able to achieve over three to four years. He felt as though he had slightly cheated, but he came away a competent if not an operational flier with a real understanding of the Air Force and its capabilities, which was the original intention.
It was in the clocking-up of that flying time that William landed himself in trouble. In the last week before his graduation he was based at Odiham in Hampshire, learning to fly Chinooks – tandem-rotor heavy-lift helicopters. Two incidents happened within a couple of days of each other, the second making the headlines before the first. ‘Prince William flies multi-million-pound RAF Chinook helicopter to cousin’s Isle of Wight stag do … and picks up Harry on the way,’ announced the Daily Mail. ‘Most young men,’ it went on, ‘are happy to jump in a taxi to get to a stag do. But not Prince William. The second in line to the throne used a £10 million RAF helicopter to fly to a drunken weekend in the Isle of Wight. He even stopped off in London to pick up his brother Prince Harry on the way.
‘The 80-minute journey – it is understood it costs more than £5,000 to keep a Chinook in the air for an hour – saved William seven hours of driving through rush hour traffic and waiting for a ferry, meaning he and Harry arrived by 4 p.m., ready for the start of the three-day stag party for their cousin Peter Phillips.
‘The Ministry of Defence claimed the sortie had always been planned as part of William’s training and included important elements of a pilot’s skills.’
This was not strictly true, and after a series of other ‘joyrides’ came to light and a variety of MPs had fulminated loudly and the anti-monarchy group Republic had asked to know the costs involved, the RAF admitted the flights had been ‘naive’ and a ‘collective error of judgment’. The Isle of Wight trip cost the taxpayer £9,000.
The truth was the Chinook had flown up to Cranwell from Odiham on the day of William’s graduation to put on a display for the passing-out students. William knew the pilot who said, ‘Where do you want to go? We’re going back to Odiham, we’ll give you a lift.’ William said he had to get to the Isle of Wight, whereupon the pilot said, ‘That’s no problem, we’ve got to do our three hours today to get our hours up, we’ll drop you.’ William turned to one of his team for reassurance, ‘Do you think that’s okay?’ ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘go on,’ thinking no more about it. On the way, which was perhaps the mistake, they diverted across London to pick up Harry from Woolwich Army Barracks. They touched down in a field on the Isle of Wight, William and Harry hopped out, and the helicopter flew back to Odiham. There was nothing unusual in what happened; RAF pilots do their hours and get in their landings wherever they can. Had anyone else jumped out of the Chinook, there would have been no story.
But it wasn’t anyone else and the proverbial rapidly hit the fan. The moment it did, William put his hands up. As that same member of his team is quick to point out, ‘He has a very good instinct for what is right and wrong’, and will always do what is morally right. Those who have worked for his father say that Charles is not always so good at admitting ownership of plans or decisions that backfire. William immediately said it was his fault, that he had asked the crew to take him to the Isle of Wight. It didn’t stop them being dropped on from a dizzy height, but if he had not come forward, their plight might have been considerably worse. As one of them put it, ‘If it wasn’t for him we’d be hanging from a gibbet.’
The second incident caused equal outrage and was equally legitimate. William had taken a Chinook the week before while he was training at Odiham, and ‘bounced’ into a field belonging to the Middletons behind their house in Bucklebury. The RAF have been doing this for seventy years. Trainees, needing to practise their takeoffs and landings, choose a field belonging to somebody they know so they don’t have to pay a landing fee. No one had got in or out of the Chinook; he was simply practising, and his planned route and descent had been cleared and authorised before he left the base. Somehow there was a crossed line between the RAF and the MoD and when the press (tipped off, no doubt, by someone in the village on the make) started making enquiries, the MoD said they knew nothing about it. The Daily Mail lost no time in declaring ‘RAF fury over Prince William’s £30,000 helicopter stunt in Kate Middleton’s backyard.’
Righteously indignant on William’s behalf, his team at Clarence House wanted to object but William refused to let them. ‘No,’ he said, ‘what will happen is that it will bounce down the line and some poor pilot in the crew planning room who misunderstood the question will get it in the neck at Odiham and I’m not prepared to do that. We can ride this. Let’s do the right thing, which is for us to take the hit.’ He wasn’t going to have that guy, whoever he was, swinging from a yardarm.
At the next meeting of the Princes’ Charities Forum, which is a periodic gathering of the chief executives of all their charities, Harry lost no time in taking the mickey out of his brother. While William chaired the meeting, Harry made continual references to helicopters, which had everyone in fits of laughter. Each time William simply put his head down in an embarrassed way while struggling for a suitable riposte.
LIFE ON THE OCEAN WAVE
With his wings successfully won, and the flying bug well and truly established, William moved on from the RAF to the Royal Navy, in which his father, grandfather, great-grandfather George VI and great-great-grandfather George V had all served. After the first four weeks of basic training and learning about every aspect of the service, which included taking part in war games exercises on board a nuclear submarine and a minesweeper, he was sent on an operational attachment to the West Indies. He joined HMS Iron Duke, a frigate under the command of Commander Mark Newland, one of several ships deployed to the Caribbean during the hurricane season in case they are needed for humanitarian purposes. The rest of the time they work with the US Coast Guard on counter-narcotics patrols, stopping and boarding suspicious-looking boats. Typically the traffickers they intercept are from South America bound for Europe and North Africa and use speedboats packed with petrol and drugs, known as ‘go fasts’.
Commander Newland had been told to expose the Prince to every aspect of front-line operations on the ship and, as luck would have it, within four days of his arrival, they seized a massive cocaine haul from a 50-foot speedboat 300 miles north-east of Barbados. It was the culmination of a three-day operation in rough seas and stormy weather. William was part of the frigate’s helicopter crew that first spotted the boat, suspiciously far out to sea for such a small craft, and after a high-speed chase, ordered it to stop. He hovered overhead while US coastguards boarded the speedboat and arrested five men. They found forty-five bales of cocaine – with a total weight of 900 kg and a street value of £40 million – bound for Europe.
Newland was full of praise for William after the raid. ‘He is someone who contributes at every level,’ he said. ‘He is a very professional military officer, and very astute. He acts as I would expect a young officer of his experience and maturity to act in this type of operation.’
It was the beginning of another of several important relationships for Prince William. ‘They were absolutely outstanding with William,’ says a member of the Household of his time on Iron Duke, ‘and the commander of that frigate is a real genius, a charismatic sort of guy who W
illiam absolutely adored.’ He was treated as just another naval officer on board, who had to sleep four to a cabin, get up early, be on watch through the nights and pull his weight. A fellow crew member from Iron Duke was one of the twenty-four Armed Forces personnel chosen to line the path outside Westminster Abbey after William and Kate’s wedding. Leading Physical Trainer Gavin Rees, who was with William throughout those five weeks, said, ‘My abiding memory of Prince William was that he was always late for circuit training, so I always had to give him extra press-ups! Looking back on it now it’s amazing to think that I took the future King for circuit training.’
After the excitement of the narcotics haul they went on to engage in a hurricane disaster rescue exercise on the volcanic island of Montserrat. William was involved in the planning and was a member of the forward command team who were the first Navy personnel to come ashore after an imaginary category 5 storm hit the island. He had to help senior officers and local leaders direct the emergency operations and, according to Mark Newland, Sub-Lieutenant William Wales was a natural leader; commanding small teams of people came as ‘second nature’ to him.
Had such a storm hit for real it would have flattened almost all the buildings on the island and threatened the lives of hundreds of people. Just two months later, Hurricane Ike did precisely that on the Turks and Caicos Islands, and the Iron Duke was involved in a genuine relief operation. But by this time William was back on dry land.
After almost two years of service life near the bottom of the pile, carrying out strategies devised in Whitehall, William’s next assignment took him on a stratospheric leap into the heart of that decision-making process. He spent a week at the Ministry of Defence on attachment to the Secretary of State, Des Browne, shadowing the staff of the Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup. William sat in on meetings with the military representative from NATO, visiting four-star generals and the like, and did not resist the temptation to join in their discussions. In meeting after meeting he was the only one around the table who had experience of all three services, and had been primed by people such as Mark Newland, Commander of Iron Duke, and Ed Smyth-Osbourne from the Blues and Royals to ask difficult questions.
One of the meetings he sat in on was a discussion about the aircraft carrier programme. This was, and still is, a political and financial hot potato – the decision, which came out of the new Labour government’s Strategic Defence Review in 1997, to build two new ‘supercarriers’, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales. At 280 metres long, displacing 65,000 metric tons and capable of deploying forty aircraft including helicopters, they are by far the biggest warships ever to be constructed for the Royal Navy and are expected to enter service in 2016 and 2018. The original cost was estimated at £3.65 billion, although almost double that figure is now the cost of completing just one of the ships (they survived the latest Strategic Defence Review cuts on the grounds that the contracts the last government signed made them more expensive to cancel than to complete).
When William sat in on this meeting in September 2008, the contracts to build them had just been signed and a rather splendid Air Commodore had brought along a model of one of the carriers. As he was pointing out the guns on the decks, where the aircraft would take off and land and explaining that a number of technical specifications in the original plans had been stripped out because of cost, William listened quietly and then asked very politely, ‘Sir, can I just ask one very quick question? Is the plan for these ships to be degaussed?’ Degaussing is a process used on every naval ship since 1917 to demagnetise the hull. It is basically a band of copper that stops magnetic mines going off underneath the ship. It was indeed one of the things they had decided to remove.
The Air Commodore went bright red and said, ‘Yes, we don’t need it.’ William said, ‘But surely, if you’re not degaussed then you won’t be able to go on the continental shelf – because, obviously, magnetic mines have to sit in shallow water so they can pick up the magnetic field – and that will restrict the range of your strike aircraft by 150 nautical miles from both directions, won’t it? And give you time over target of five minutes instead of three hours or whatever it is?’ He was voicing the concerns he had picked up from the men and women at the sharp end, whose lives were potentially being put in danger by the men in brass. The Air Commodore very quickly moved on.
No further illustration was needed about the value of those commissions. He now knows how soldiers, sailors and airmen tick, each one differently from the next. He has made friends in all the services of men and women of his own age with whom he is still in regular contact, and if they stay in the services when William is Commander-in-Chief, his old chums will be the ones calling the shots in the corridors of power.
DRAWING A LINE
William is unlikely to forget the date of his Passing Out Parade from Sandhurst in December 2006, not just because it saw his father, grandparents and future in-laws in public together for the first time. It took place the day after the official three-year investigation into the death of his mother concluded. The verdict was that Diana had died in ‘a tragic accident’. That was the finding of Lord Stevens, former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. ‘There was no conspiracy to murder any of the occupants of that car,’ he said. The evidence suggested that Diana was not engaged or about to get engaged and scientific tests showed she was not pregnant. The £3.69 million inquiry had interviewed some four hundred people, including Prince Charles, the Duke of Edinburgh and the heads of MI5 and MI6.
‘We have spoken to many of her family and closest friends and none of them have indicated to us that she was either about to or wished to get engaged,’ he said. ‘Prince William has confirmed to me that his mother had not given him the slightest indication about such plans for the future.’
Clarence House put out a statement saying that Princes William and Harry hoped that the ‘conclusive findings’ of the report would end speculation surrounding their mother’s death.
But it was not to be. Mohamed Al Fayed, who had lost his son Dodi in the accident, remained noisily convinced there had been a cover-up. It was his allegations that had led the coroner, at the opening of the inquest in 2004, to order an inquiry in the first place. In October 2007 the inquest continued at the Royal Courts of Justice, led by Lord Justice Scott Baker.
As Sir Max Hastings, writing in the Guardian, said, halfway through the proceedings, ‘The inquest into the death of Princess Diana is providing a circus for the prurient, a dirty-raincoat show for the world, of a kind that makes many of us reach for a waxed bag.
‘Day after day for almost three months, a procession of charlatans, spivs, fantasists, retired policemen, royal hangers-on and servants who make [Shakespeare’s] Iago seem a model of loyalty has occupied the witness box at the law courts in the Strand. They have itemised the Princess’s alleged lovers, her supposed opinions of the royal family (and vice versa), her contraceptive practices and her menstrual cycle.
‘The business of an inquest is to examine the cause of a death. In the case of the Princess, we might assume that this would focus exclusively upon what did, or did not, happen in a Paris tunnel more than a decade ago. It should not have been difficult to conclude such an inquiry in a matter of days. Every police officer, French and British, who has examined the case since 1997 has reported that the Princess’s death was the result of a tragic accident.’
In April 2008, the jury released an official statement that Diana and Dodi were unlawfully killed by the ‘grossly negligent driving of the following vehicles and of the Mercedes’, adding that additional factors were ‘the impairment of the judgment of the driver of the Mercedes through alcohol’ and ‘the death of the deceased was caused or contributed to by the fact that the deceased was not wearing a seat-belt, the fact that the Mercedes struck the pillar in the Alma Tunnel, rather than colliding with something else’.
It had been a very difficult time for William and Harry but it was something they knew had to happen if
their mother’s memory was ever to be laid to rest in peace. ‘The great guy there was Lord Justice Scott Baker. He was a genius,’ says a member of the Prince’s Household, who spent many hours at the inquest. ‘He was completely even-handed, he didn’t stand any nonsense, he was tough, considerate, straight as a die, analytical. There were a lot of pressures coming in from left and right and he was just very cool. We owe quite a lot to him.
‘It would be presumptuous to suggest it was cathartic for the Princes. It was probably cathartic for the country, but she wasn’t the country’s mum; she was their mum.’
The year before, as the tenth anniversary of her death approached, they had come up with a plan to celebrate and commemorate her. They wanted to stage a spectacular concert of music and dance with all the artists she loved most, to be held on what would have been her forty-sixth birthday, followed by a memorial service, again with the music she loved, on the date of her death. This was the first time either brother, apart from choosing which regiment they wanted to join on leaving Sandhurst, had been so demonstrative about anything. They thought of the idea, they knew what they wanted and they were adamant about how they wanted to do it. The Household remembers it being a very exciting time, the first time there was a real buzz, and some memorable meetings where they chose the music. ‘I know zero about pop music so they were taking the mickey furiously and at the time, they knew absolutely zero about classical music, so I was feeding a bit in there. Having said that, they knew a lot of their mother’s favourites and probably all of those pieces in the memorial service were ones which they had remembered she loved.’