by Penny Junor
They had been discussing marriage for at least a year before William proposed. ‘We’ve talked about it lots,’ he said in the interview. ‘So it’s always been something we’ve had a good chat about and … both of us have come to the decision pretty much together, I just chose when to do it and how to do it – and obviously being a real romantic I did it extremely well!’ He also wanted to give Kate and her family time to have a good hard look at what life with him would mean, ‘and to back out if she needed to before it all got too much.’
He finally proposed during a holiday in Kenya with friends, and had chosen Lake Rutundu in eastern Kenya, the remotest and most beautiful place imaginable, and despite their conversations in the past, he took Kate by surprise, not just with the proposal but with the ring.
‘I had been carrying it around with me in my rucksack for about three weeks before that,’ said William, ‘and I literally would not let it go. Everywhere I went I was keeping hold of it because I knew this thing, if it disappeared, I would be in a lot of trouble, and because I’d planned it, it went fine. You hear a lot of horror stories about proposing and things going horribly wrong – it went really, really well and I was really pleased she said, “Yes.”’
He had chosen his mother’s ring because, ‘I thought it was quite nice because obviously she’s not going to be around to share any of the fun and excitement of it all – this was my way of keeping her sort of close to it all.’
Tom Bradby said how ‘incredibly happy and relaxed’ they both looked. ‘We are. We are,’ said William. ‘We’re like sort of ducks, very calm on the surface with little feet going under the water. But no, it’s been really exciting because we’ve been talking about it for a long time, so for us, it’s a real relief, and it’s really nice to be able to tell everybody. Especially for the last two or three weeks it’s been quite difficult not telling anyone, and keeping it to ourselves for reasons we had to. And it’s really nice to finally be able to share it with everyone.’
The reason they delayed the announcement was that they came home from Africa to find Kate’s much-loved and last remaining grandparent, Peter Middleton (aged ninety), was seriously ill. He had been a fighter pilot and instructor during the Second World War and had then gone on to fly civilian aircraft for British European Airways; by coincidence, he had been chosen as First Officer to fly with the Duke of Edinburgh on a two-month tour of South America in 1962. He sadly died and they waited until after his funeral to make the announcement.
The first person to hear the news was Kate’s father, Mike. ‘I was torn between asking Kate’s dad first, and then the realisation that he might actually say “No” dawned upon me,’ said William. ‘So I thought if I ask Kate first then he can’t really say no. So I did it that way round. And I managed to speak to Mike sort of soon after it happened.’ He told his own father and grandmother a few days later, but the only element of surprise was that he’d finally got on and done it. Everyone in both families expressed the greatest delight. There did seem to be very genuine happiness all round.
There were no planning committees for an engagement, but the Household had been secretly preparing for some time – never certain when or if it would happen. A couple of people in the office had privately thought William might pop the question in Africa, but when there was nothing, they assumed it hadn’t happened. So when William and Kate arrived that Tuesday morning, 16 November, and said, ‘We’ve got engaged,’ and started joking about their plans for a small family wedding, they were slightly caught on the back foot. Paddy Harverson was asleep in a hotel room in Washington DC when he got the call, at 4 a.m., from Patrick Harrison, his number two. Delighted, he jumped on the first plane and reached home to find the story all over the news. As one of them says, ‘We had a brilliant plan but it’s not such a great plan if your communications secretary is in the wrong country!’
The news first broke to the outside world on Twitter, the online social networking site. ‘The Prince of Wales is delighted to announce the engagement of Prince William to Miss Catherine Middleton.’ It was the first indication that Kate preferred to be called by her proper birth name, in preparation, perhaps, for the day when she becomes Queen. It is the name her parents have always called her and the name she was known by when she was at Marlborough. She first started using Kate at university, but it will be hard for the public and the headline writers to change – and to make it less confusing, I shall continue to use her abbreviated name.
By pure coincidence, Clarence House had just launched itself on Twitter, lagging behind the Queen who had been tweeting for some time, and who very swiftly tweeted back her congratulations. They put out a full-length press release on the website, which they also emailed to a long list of media recipients, but Twitter demands only 140 characters and is instantaneous, so it was first to break the news.
There had been conversations in the broadest terms about what William would ideally want in the event of an engagement. He indicated a preference for a single television interview, and the man he wanted to do it was Tom Bradby. Speaking on camera about their relationship would be a nerve-racking ordeal for them both, but less so with someone he knew, liked and trusted. Tom had become close personal friends with Jamie, who was able to quietly establish Tom’s movements and availability, knowing that if some other news story was to take him abroad, they would have to go to Plan B, but it didn’t come to that. What William wanted, at all costs, was to avoid the toe-curling embarrassment of an interview like the one his parents had given on their engagement, in which Prince Charles, when asked if he was ‘in love’ had famously replied, ‘whatever love means’. He knew that the public had been waiting years to have a good look at Kate and would judge her on this first viewing. After the interview, when they were more relaxed, there would be a photo call.
The team knew the choice of Tom would not be universally popular with the other networks and correspondents, and it was a slightly poisoned chalice for Tom himself. As a respected political editor he didn’t want to be written off as ‘a grim patsy asking really asinine questions’, particularly with billions of people watching. He knew he had to touch on some difficult areas, while bearing in mind it was their engagement day and he shouldn’t be rude and aggressive. ‘It was slightly tricky,’ says Tom, ‘but we sat down for about half an hour in a separate room beforehand and had a laugh about it, and I said, “My main aim is not to f*** up your happy day,” and William said, “That would be really helpful, Tom, thank you. Do try not to.”
‘Kate was very nervous – very, very nervous – understandably. She knew that everyone was curious, no one had ever heard her speak and they were probably going to make up their minds for the rest of their lives about what they thought of her in the next twenty minutes. First impressions are very important, and twenty minutes is quite a long time. But I think she was helped by being nervous, because when I got back into the edit suite and played it back, she looked less nervous on TV than in person, and it made her seem quite vulnerable. If she’d been too brassy it would have been unattractive. I think they both got it about right.’
The photo call afterwards was a scrum with lights flashing furiously and every photographer wanting them to look directly into his or her lens. The paparazzi he hates with a vengeance, but William knows many of the legitimate photographers by name and immediately recognised Arthur Edwards’ voice from behind the blinding lights. Arthur has been photographing William for the Sun since the day after he was born. ‘Excuse me, Sir,’ he said in his polite, inimitable Cockney accent. ‘Could I just get the both of you to look down here?’ ‘Oh all right then, Arthur,’ said William, which caused a bit of merriment in the ranks and gibes of ‘You’ll do it for Arthur!’ Ian Jones, who took William’s eighteenth birthday photos, was just in front of him. ‘Excuse me, Will; sorry, Catherine. If you could both look into this camera, which is Arthur’s, and then into mine …’ William leaned forward and said, ‘Is that you Ian?’ ‘Arthur got his shot,’ says Ian, ‘an
d I got a lovely one of them both arm in arm looking straight into my lens.’
Photographers hadn’t always been so polite.
ZERO TOLERANCE
Years ago, early on in his relationship with Kate, William promised Mike Middleton that he would protect his daughter from the media. He reiterated that promise when he asked him for her hand in marriage. Within days of the engagement William asked his office to let it be known that he was going to have a crackdown on any individual or media outlet that invaded their privacy – both before and after the wedding. In future there would be zero tolerance.
The promise was easier to give than to fulfil, but whenever she had problems, William’s office provided the necessary legal advice and clout. For the first five or six months after leaving university, Kate was followed by photographers day and night. The Household was enormously impressed by how courageous, composed and sensible she has been – not just then but during all the years William has known her. ‘Any situation in which a young woman on her own is followed by a man, or in some cases a number of men in vehicles, on motorbikes, in the middle of the night, chased through the streets in the driving rain, you’d bring the police in; you wouldn’t allow it. No one should have to put up with that. She would start every conversation with, “I don’t want to make a fuss but … there are twenty men camped outside my apartment and they’re there all day and night.”’
In October 2005, Harbottle and Lewis, the Prince of Wales’s solicitors, complained to newspapers about harassment and appealed for the press to leave Kate and her family alone. Matters improved, but the odd paparazzo still followed her. Pictures appeared of her putting her rubbish bins out, of walking along the street, of shopping with her mother – all manner of mundane, everyday activities. In one she was sitting on a number 9 bus in Knightsbridge, staring out of the window, lost in thought. When challenged, the newspaper claimed the photographer had just happened to spot her. Kate said he had been following her all day. There were photographs of her at the wheel of her Audi, which a ‘bystander’ claimed was ‘going quite quickly’ along a country road near her home, and she was chatting on a mobile phone, which is illegal. She was, in fact, stationary, having pulled over to take the call, but the idea of the photo being taken by some random passer-by in Bucklebury, the Middleton’s small Berkshire village, is laughable. Harbottle and Lewis wrote letters, but in January 2007 they issued another complaint when, on the morning of Kate’s birthday, she came out of her London flat to find more than twenty photographers and five TV crews waiting. They swarmed around her, calling out to her, their lenses just feet from her face as she tried to get into her car to drive to work. It was a scene eerily reminiscent of the worst excesses of Diana’s treatment in 1980. William issued a plea for the paparazzi to stop harassing her, and News International, publishers of the Sun and the News of the World, also the Times and the Sunday Times, agreed to stop using their photographs of her.
But News International wasn’t the only market for snatched photos, and there were so many photographers surrounding William and Kate when they came out of a nightclub that same month that they had to call for a police escort. In March, Kate issued a formal complaint to the PCC about the Mirror, which published a photo of her walking to work holding a cup and her car keys. And in the week that the inquest into his mother’s death was opened, the two of them were once again surrounded by photographers as they came out of a nightclub. This time their car was pursued by at least seven of them on motorbikes, scooters and in a car – in exactly the way that Diana’s car had been pursued by the paparazzi in Paris on that fateful night in 1997. William found it utterly ‘incomprehensible’ and was so angry that he came within a whisker of taking legal action.
The PCC code of conduct ought to be sufficient. It states, ‘It is unacceptable to photograph individuals in private places without their consent. Private places are public or private property where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy.’ On harassment, it says, ‘Journalists must not engage in intimidation, harassment or persistent pursuit. They must not persist in questioning, telephoning, pursuing or photographing individuals once asked to desist.’ It was this breach of the harassment clause that Kate used against the Mirror. But the PCC code is voluntary and some would say toothless – and while that might change at the conclusion of the Leveson Inquiry, the market then would be the foreign media and the internet.
Protective of Kate (and of friends who suffer the same harassment because of their link to him), frustrated, and above all determined to be in control of his own life, William felt a heavier hand was needed. He has become an expert on privacy law, much of which is highly complex, and watches the latest legal rulings for the implications they might have on his own situation. He is advised by Gerrard Tyrrell, who is senior partner of Harbottle and Lewis, and one of the best media lawyers in the country, and has ongoing conversations about developments with him, and also with Paddy, Jamie and Miguel.
He is particularly interested in the implications of the landmark ruling from the European Court of Human Rights in 2004 in favour of Princess Caroline of Monaco’s right to privacy. She and her children had been hounded by the German paparazzi for years. In France, where she lives, the media can only publish photos taken at official events, unless they get prior agreement from the subject. But that doesn’t stop the paparazzi harassing her in France and selling the photos abroad, where in countries like the UK and Germany, any photo can be published provided it is in the ‘public interest’. The ruling came down to the balance between the right to privacy, enshrined in the Human Rights Act 1998, and the right to freedom of expression, similarly enshrined; her right to privacy against the media’s right to freedom of expression. The court said the balance should be in favour of privacy, as long as there was no overriding public interest justification. Going about your everyday life, even in public places, it decided, did not constitute justification.
It was the outcome of that test case, as much as anything, that encouraged William to issue the warning in the week after his engagement. He was not going to let Kate, or their relationship, suffer in the way his mother and father’s had; history was not going to be allowed to repeat itself. It was made very clear to royal correspondents and editors that he would not hesitate from taking criminal or civil action, depending on the nature and severity of the intrusion. ‘Prince William feels that he and his fiancée have a right to privacy when they are going about everyday, private activities – both before and after their marriage,’ the press were told. ‘He will not tolerate any form of pursuit [by cars or motorbikes] or harassment. They are not just disruptive but they are also very dangerous.’ Nor would they any longer tolerate photographers using telephoto lenses from public land to capture photographs of them in private situations.
‘He feels very strongly about what happened to his mother and father,’ says one of the Household. ‘I don’t think it’s anger in the sense of ranting and raging, it’s more a cold-eyed assessment and understanding of it and desire to constantly draw the boundaries that protect their privacy and strengthen it.
‘The key point is none of them has chosen this life; and their friends are friends because of them, not because they wish to have a public life, and so their privacy should be respected. What happened to his mother and his father informs and shapes that. He feels very passionately about it but it’s not incoherent. He has a good understanding of how the media operates and he’s always been aware of what the media wants and why they want it.’
The good humour on the evening of their engagement, and their friendliness to the accredited media that follow them in their public life – which I have seen for myself – makes that abundantly clear. There is mutual respect for people doing their job. But that is not the way the paparazzi operate.
Not long before the engagement, Kate was walking through an airport on her own when a couple of paparazzi spotted her. ‘Bitch!’ ‘Whore!’ ‘Slag, look this way!’ they shouted, hoping to provoke so
me kind of violent reaction. ‘Ideally, they’d love her to slap them,’ says one of the team. ‘It would be a gift to them. Of course, the press never reports that side of pap activity so you never, ever see it, but that’s how they operate at the rough end.’
A QUIET FAMILY WEDDING
For a good two years before William and Kate bounced into their office and announced that they were engaged, his small team at Clarence House had been playing What If?, agonising over what kind of wedding it should be, if that moment were to come. The credit crunch was turning into full-blown recession, major banks and household names were going to the wall, thousands of people were losing their jobs and their homes. To suggest the kind of extravagant royal wedding his parents had had would have been insensitive and dangerously inflammatory. Should they be looking at some small venue like the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace? Keep the whole thing very low-key?
Come the day, William was in no doubt. ‘What we want,’ he said, ‘is a personal day that’s going to be special to us.’ In an ideal world that would have been a normal wedding in a small country church, like St Mary’s in Bucklebury, the kind of wedding that so many of their friends had had. But that wasn’t possible. There was no shirking the fact that this was a royal occasion. He knew instinctively that it should not be cut-price, and not over the top, but a celebration, a day that was a pick-me-up for the whole country, a chance for people to enjoy themselves, a really beautiful display of royal pageantry that should look good, feel good and stand the test of time. ‘We want a day,’ said William, ‘that is as enjoyable as possible, for as many people as possible.’ Those, his exact words, became the mantra for the entire event. The task was to create a day that was intimate for them and their families, but which would give the British people a suitably royal and memorable celebration.