Prince William

by Penny Junor

  ‘The first example was when he borrowed the Chinook for that stag party. He could have defended that. There isn’t a single pilot who hasn’t landed in a wife or girlfriend’s field, and it had been cleared at the very highest level. But he thinks it’s terribly unfair when other people take the rap for him and will send me to do the very opposite of what everyone else in public life will do – because that’s the straightforward and honest thing to do. He is an incredibly moral guy, I barely know one who’s more moral than him. His motto to us is, “Do the right thing”: don’t ever take a short cut just to get to the right place.

  ‘He knows he’s playing a long game; he’s in this job for the rest of his life and doesn’t need to get short-term bonus points. He’s got enough confidence in his own integrity and character that by doing the right thing he will earn the respect he wants. He takes after his grandmother in that respect, who has played her cards very close to her chest, and she’s never put a foot wrong, never taken a short cut either. She’s never done anything to court public opinion, nothing populist, always played things incredibly straight, and he sees her life and marriage as a model. He’s taken a leaf out of her book.’

  In January 2009, just a few months after Miguel had settled in, it was announced that the Queen had ‘graciously agreed to the creation of a joint Household for Prince William and Prince Harry’. It was to be funded, as before, by the Prince of Wales and have offices in St James’s Palace, but remain close to their father’s Household in Clarence House (the two buildings are in the same complex), and although they had Miguel as their own dedicated Press Secretary, they still came under the umbrella of their father’s press office and continued to share other back-room offices like personnel, IT and finance.

  The Prince of Wales funds his sons one hundred per cent in their royal lives and takes a keen interest in how they spend his money. They have to seek his approval for all their initiatives – the two private secretaries are in constant touch, and according to a friend, ‘their father gives them stick about every penny. There are constant arguments about money.’ [A member of the Household points out that it is the private secretaries who slug it out and says the arguments are never fractious.] He was in no rush to set them up on their own. It was his view that the process should evolve, slowly and naturally, and he allowed their office to grow up within his Household until it reached the stage where their team were doing most things autonomously. At that point the Queen – in whose gift the creation of a Royal Household is – agreed they should have their own.

  With it came the announcement that, ‘Sir David Manning, the former British Ambassador to the United States of America, has been appointed by the Queen to a part-time, advisory role with the Princes and the Household.’

  Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton had a call from the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Christopher Geidt, asking him over for a chat. The gist of it was that out of the blue the Queen had said she felt that William, moving into the next phase of his life, would benefit from the guidance of the sort of wise old man she’d had as a young Princess. Hers had been Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Browning, known as ‘Boy’ Browning, who had given her advice on how to survive in the realm that she would one day inherit. For William, she had identified Sir David, then in his late fifties, whom the Queen had met on her last State visit to America in 2007. He was just back from Washington and was invited to see the Queen – who personally gave him the job.

  As he says, ‘The idea was to have the old grey-haired guy who had a bit of experience of government and international relations as William moves on to the national and international stage.’

  The small team were at first taken aback; things seemed to be going rather well. Was this some form of criticism, were they failing to give the Princes the right advice? They were assured this was not the case. They were also nervous, as the Princes were too, about the idea of a British Ambassador coming into their little Household of three. They were afraid things would change.

  Now, as one of them says, ‘We don’t know how we survived before David came into our office. He knows everybody, he’s politically very astute, he has been there and done everything and been through some of the most controversial political decisions of the twentieth century, Iraq and all the rest of it. His advice is incredibly wise and he knows how to advise, and the questions to ask. He’s a phenomenal guy, very understated as well and very modest. He’s there as a sounding board.

  ‘Things were hotting up and the Princes were beginning to step onto the national stage and do foreign trips, and it hasn’t changed things. It’s just added a whole new skill to the support we can give them.’

  Having been at the Foreign Office for thirty-six years and knowing the ins and outs of international politics as well as the machinations of Whitehall, David was particularly valuable in Zurich in December 2010, when William was part of England’s bid for the 2018 World Cup. He found himself in the company of presidents, including Bill Clinton, and the great and the good from around the world, most of whom David had met many times. He could give William the low-down on personalities based on firsthand knowledge, he could tell him who he could be open with, who to be wary of, alert him to bones of contention between countries, and the subjects it would be diplomatic to mention and those to avoid.

  He had also been a very reassuring presence in New Zealand at the beginning of 2010, where William, carrying out his first solo official foreign tour, was under an intense spotlight. It was followed by an unofficial visit to Australia, parts of which had been ravaged by bush fires the year before. The trip was only five days in all, but there are very strong Republican movements in the two countries and political tensions with the indigenous populations of both.

  In Wellington, he was given an enthusiastic welcome outside the Supreme Court by Maoris delighted that the grandson of the ‘Great White Heron’ had come among them. The welcome included a fearsome haka dance, the gift of a Maori cloak or korowai made of flax and kiwi feathers, and a hongi (a traditional pressing of noses) with four Maori dignitaries. With the cloak over his suit, he began his speech with a concern for the people of Haiti, struck by an earthquake just days before, who were ‘in all our thoughts and prayers’. Of New Zealand, he said, ‘The overwhelming impression I have is of a nation that believes passionately in itself, in the value of democracy, in each other and other peoples, and in the rule of law.’ It was, he said, a ‘young, entrepreneurial and forward-looking nation. After all,’ he joked, ‘you’ve even managed to catapult my family into the digital ether. The Queen started tweeting a few months ago and now, thanks to New Zealand, I am being Bebo-d and Facebooked for the first time – rapidly catching up with my grandmother.’

  Afterwards, he spent a good half-hour chatting easily to the hundreds of supporters waiting outside to greet him. Some of them were chanting ‘We love Prince William’, but they were nearly drowned out by a noisy crowd of Republicans and even noisier civil servants protesting about their pay.

  In the afternoon, he took a boat trip to the wildlife reserve on Kapiti Island where he cradled a little-spotted kiwi, abandoned by its mother. As he held the struggling bird, he joked with photographers, ‘My date with a kiwi!’ When one of them replied, ‘You look like you are plucking it’, the Prince shot back with the comment, ‘That’s how rumours start.’

  His charm and humour worked its magic in Australia no less than it did in New Zealand. In Sydney, the Aborigines who live in a dismal slum area called the Block in Redfern came out in their thousands to welcome him. Like his mother before him, William hugged babies in hospital wards and spontaneously put his arms around elderly Aboriginal ladies. Putting this visit at the top of the tour was a shrewd piece of programming; the children loved him, and time and again women were heard to say, ‘He has his mother’s heart.’

  He also showed he could use a weapon, when he had a go in a live ammunition firing exercise with the 3rd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment at their barracks outside Sydney. He was usi
ng an F-88 AuSteyr rifle, which he had never fired before, but he proved himself a formidable shot.

  A last-minute addition to the schedule was a visit to a hostel for the homeless, arranged after Kevin Rudd (the Australian Prime Minister) discovered William’s interest in working with disadvantaged young people. Four of them did a three-minute rap song and dance for William, which ended in a discussion about his taste in music. ‘Mine is very varied. Bit of rock, bit of Linkin Park [a nu-metal band] and Kanye West [the rock artist].’ ‘That’s my man,’ whooped Austin Anyimba, aged sixteen, clearly impressed with the Royal taste in music. After loud laughter all round, the Prince added: ‘I have said something right then. Quite rappy. I can’t do beat box. I normally get the piss taken out of me for my choice of music.’

  No day would be complete in Australia without a ‘barbie’, and William’s was hosted by Kristina Keneally, the first woman Premier of New South Wales, who called him ‘a friend of Australia’. In thanking her he said he had received ‘the most warm welcome ever – not just from the weather.’

  Arriving in Melbourne on his final day, he went straight to visit the area near the city where more than two thousand homes had been destroyed in terrifying bush fires in February 2009. Firestorms, fuelled by winds of up to 100 mph, tore through the state of Victoria killing 175 people. Three schools and more than a hundred businesses were destroyed and more than 11,000 farm animals were killed or injured. William listened gravely to the stories of survivors, looked at photographs taken on the day and heard about the reconstruction and recovery programme that was underway. The Premier of Victoria told him that the energy of the fire on ‘Black Saturday’ ‘was the equivalent of forty atomic bombs’. Temperatures were as high as 45°C (133°F).

  By the time William, Jamie, David, Miguel and the PPOs were back on their scheduled flight home, the newspapers were singing his praises. The pro-Republican Melbourne Age newspaper ran the headline ‘All-round Good Egg William Snares Many with his Charm Offensive’, observing that the Prince ‘may have done more to set back the Republican cause than anything since the 1999 referendum’ – which the Republicans narrowly lost. The Australian newspaper declared he had ‘won the hearts of Australians’ with his relaxed, unpretentious and endearing manner. Paul Colgan, writing in the Sydney Daily Telegraph, said, ‘William is a powerful weapon for the Royals in Australia. You’d be happy to have a beer with him. He has a sense of humour, applies himself to his work, loves sport and enjoys a night on the turps with his brother and his mates.’

  As Sir David Manning says, ‘There is emotional intelligence in both of the Princes. They react to people they’re with and their ability to connect is very striking. The first time I saw this was in New Zealand when we went to open the Supreme Court. It was the first time William had represented the Queen and it was obvious he had a gift of getting on with and connecting to people. It’s all about moving people because of who you are, not what you are. He has that quality.’

  Those who accompany the Princes say they have the same surety of touch during the hospital visits they make, both privately and officially, and suggest it might be, in part, as a result of having lost their mother. When Harry was visiting Selly Oak, the critical military hospital in Birmingham where casualties from Afghanistan used to be sent (they now go to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in the same NHS Trust), there were two soldiers who had been unconscious for five days, and their families were sitting around their beds. These boys were in a very bad way but it seemed probable that they would pull through. The staff had put diaries at the ends of their beds, in which the nurses, families and visitors were encouraged to write entries during their time in intensive care. These diaries were introduced in 2008 and have been shown to be helpful when the patient comes round. They are usually disorientated and think they’re still on the battlefield under attack. According to the critical care manager, soldiers read the diaries over and over again and it helps to put their experience into perspective. Harry wrote, ‘For God’s sake, mate. Came to see you and what were you doing? You were kipping.’ The families were delighted.

  THE DAY JOB

  When Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton began working for the two Princes, he took William up to his home in Suffolk, determined to have a serious conversation about William’s role as a member of the Royal Family and his understanding of what that meant in an existential sense. William, then twenty-two and about to go to Sandhurst, listened as he always does and made intelligent comments, but Jamie quickly realised that it was the wrong time and the wrong place for this discussion. What mattered before they worried about any of that was for William and Harry to get their hearts and minds in the right place – and Jamie’s job was to let that happen.

  They needed to be allowed to reach their full potential during their military careers so that they would go into their thirties and take up Royal duties full time, able to look anyone and everyone in the eye. That has been a strong mantra for him and the rest of the Household over the last few years. They believe it’s an important part of their job to make sure that William and Harry hit their own personal goals. From that springs self-confidence and self-belief and means that twenty years down the line, they will be able to say, ‘I’ve been there; I did it.’ As one of them says, ‘William does it flying out to the middle of the Atlantic in a force 9, rescuing people. Harry does it on the front line in Afghanistan, and they can then look at anyone at the end of it and say, “Yes fine, I’m on these tramlines now and I know what I’ve got to do and it’s not necessarily everything that I want to do but I know my duty. But, I knew the day when I was a brave young thing … It’s incredibly important for that reason alone that they get it right in here [he says, passionately thumping his chest].’ For William, it was becoming a search and rescue pilot.

  The island of Anglesey is off the north-west coast of Wales, separated from the mainland by the Menai Strait, twenty miles from the Snowdonia National Park and one of the most beautiful parts of the United Kingdom. At the end of January 2010, soon after his triumphant tour of Australia and New Zealand, William began his advanced helicopter training there, at RAF Valley. It’s the busiest station in the RAF, well integrated into the local community and, according to the Station Commander, Group Captain Adrian Hill, ‘a watersports paradise’ with clubs for most of William’s favourite activities: water-skiing, windsurfing, surfing, sailing, canoeing, angling and sub-aqua. As well as being an operational base – home to C Flight of 22 Search and Rescue Squadron – it’s also a major training centre for fast jet crew and search and rescue pilots and crew. During his year at Shawbury, he had easily qualified for this next step.

  Training began on a Griffin, in which he learned ‘generalhandling flying, underslung-load carrying, night-vision goggle training, procedural instrument flying, formation flying, low-flying navigation and an introduction to tactical employment, including operations from confined areas, plus elements of mountain flying and maritime rescue winching’. With all that under his belt he moved to Royal Naval Air Station Culdrose in Cornwall, where the RAF do Sea King conversion training because the Sea kings – the distinctive big yellow helicopters – are basically Navy helicopters but the RAF use them for search and rescue.

  Having mastered the basics, William then went back to Valley to train with the operational search and rescue unit, refining techniques and taking part in genuine rescues, but only as an observer. In September, after nineteen months of training, having completed seventy hours of live flying and fifty hours of training in a simulator, practising rescue missions over the Irish Sea, the Atlantic and in the mountains of Snowdonia, he graduated as a fully qualified RAF search and rescue pilot. It was a very informal ceremony; he and his fellow trainees – four pilots and four rear crew – were handed their certificates and squadron badges. The course, he admitted, had been challenging ‘but I have enjoyed it immensely,’ he said. ‘I absolutely love flying, so it will be an honour to serve operationally with the search and rescue force, helping
to provide such a vital emergency service.’ The RAF was keen to emphasise that he had no special treatment because of who he is. ‘There can be no place for people who are not up to scratch,’ said Wing Commander Peter Lloyd. ‘You are exposed to your weaknesses and therefore have to adapt to them. The crews have to work with you as a team – there is nowhere to hide in the crew of a helicopter.’

  The next week he began a three-year tour as a member of 22 Squadron based at Valley, which involves an automatic six-month attachment in the Falkland Islands. (When the attachment came up in February 2012, by an unfortunate quirk of timing, thirty years after the war, the Argentinians saw it as an act of aggression. The Foreign Office was bullish about it; William was there in a humanitarian role, in theory to rescue downed Typhoon fighter pilots, but in practice he was more likely to be rescuing sick Argentinian fishermen from trawlers than to be doing anything remotely confrontational.)

  When his three years come to an end in 2013, he has indicated that, if circumstances allow, he might like to stay in search and rescue for a second tour of duty. His second choice of base had been RAF Lossiemouth in Moray in the north of Scotland, and, although nothing has been decided, there’s a possibility he might move there. Beyond 2016, there will be no military search and rescue service for him to be a part of. In November 2011, just a day after William was involved in the dramatic rescue of two sailors off the coast of Wales, the Government announced that the mountains and coastlines would be patrolled by civilian contractors instead.

  At Valley he works on a shift system. He is part of a team of four, doing eight twenty-four-hour watches a month, and when on duty they live on the base next to their helicopters. During the daytime they can be in the air in fifteen minutes, at night-time it’s forty-five minutes, and when the scramble bell goes they have no idea what lies ahead of them or where they are headed. It could be anywhere in the UK or beyond, it could be miles out into the Atlantic, it could be to rescue a stricken tanker or a capsized yacht, a walker who is lost or has fallen and broken a limb in the mountains, a heart-attack victim, a fire on an oil rig, or a community that has been cut off by floods and needs evacuating. As William has said, it’s the ‘fourth emergency service’.