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The middleclass girl who shares William's life (but NOT his bedroom)

Geoffrey Levy Richard Kay

Last updated at 00:00 02 April 2004


THE piquant irony of the situation will not be lost on their customers.

'Princess' dresses at Pounds 18.95. 'Princess' shoes at under a fiver. And to top it off, how about a tiara for a mere Pounds 2.45?

The Party Pieces website that sells these delightful products for children is a business that just happens to be run by Carole and Michael Middleton, whose daughter Kate can currently be found on the slopes of Klosters with Prince William.

How charming it would be, in these troubled times of terrorism and other dark expectations, to be able to proclaim that something prophetic lies at the heart of this amusing coincidence.

Prince William in Love? Just the kind of warm and uplifting story we need, and Kate, whose parents live in the village of Bucklebury, near Newbury, Berkshire, is a charming girl.

But hold on they're only 21, so let's put the student romance of William and Kate in perspective.

All day yesterday, after pictures emerged of them skiing together, people close to William who like to think of themselves as well-informed were divided about just how important Kate is to him. Such confusion is just how William likes it.

All that emerged from an unofficial source at Clarence House, his father's official residence, was a pithy observation that the two 'do not live together'.

In other words, although they with two others have shared a student house at St Andrews University for some 18 months, they don't share a bedroom.

In deliberately obscuring his private life William is doing no more than copying his parents. After all, his childhood was spent in an atmosphere of rumour and speculation over relationships involving both his father, Prince Charles, and his late mother, Princess Diana.

They, arguably, had something to . But William is just three months short of his 22nd birthday, a single young man sowing a few wild oats, and Kate's emergence this week is likely to bestow on him the kind of freedom that his father felt the first time he allowed himself to be photographed in public with Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles.

Privately, William has been proudly showing off Kate with her curvaceous figure and long, dark hair to friends for some months.

Just over a week ago he was casually introducing Miss Middleton as his 'girlfriend' when they travelled from St Andrews shortly before the end of term to join a group of his friends riding with another coincidence the Middleton Hunt in North Yorkshire.

But even there, he was being typically cautious. 'They were not touchy-feely or anything like that they were really so very careful, and afterwards, when everyone else went for a meal, they'd disappeared,' reports one observer.

WHAT is indisputable is that with Kate, William the normally tense heir in line to the throne has been looking utterly relaxed in Klosters this week and enjoying himself more than ever on the royal pilgrimage with his father.

Kate and William are travelling in an intimate party of seven who flew from Heathrow to Zurich on Saturday for a week of skiing.

Others of his friends there are Harry Legge- Bourke ( younger brother of his former unofficial nanny Tiggy), Guy Pelly, the loyal friend who shouldered the blame for Prince Harry's drug taking, William van Cutsem, son of Charles's old Norfolk landowning friend Hugh, and van Cutsem's girlfriend, Katie James.

They are a lively, joshing group of youngsters who nightly set out to enjoy the apres-ski as much as the pistes. On Wednesday evening the merry group arrived at a karaoke bar in the ski village and William took to the microphone.

Last night a table for 18, including Prince Charles and his old friends Charlie and Patty Palmer-Tomkinson and without Mrs Parker Bowles who is back in England was booked at a mountain restaurant overlooking the twinkling lights of the village.

Kate, who was educated at Marlborough the famous public school which has been co-ed for some years and has a sister Pippa, 20, and a brother James, 17, is supremely comfortable in such company. But then she is becoming quite used to it.

She has been a guest at least three times at Highgrove as well as Sandringham, the Queen's Norfolk estate. In recent months she has been taken by William for weekends to his Highlands bolthole on the eastern edge of the Balmor@l estate by the River Muick a cottage called Tom-na-Gaidh given to him and brother Harry by the Queen and renovated at a cost of Pounds 150,000.

But William's admiration for Kate goes back a lot further than the four months they are said to have been an item. She was the lissom figure who strutted the catwalk under his mesmerised gaze at a student charity fashion show soon after they both arrived at their Scottish university.

He paid Pounds 200 for a front row seat, and his youthful appreciation was clear as Kate pirouetted in a seethrough lace dress over a black bra and matching knickers. Both were living in halls of residence at the time but the following year, when he and three others set up house together, Kate was among them.

As the friends went about the university town together it was understood that she was dating another student. Late last year that relationship apparently ended, and that is when she and William are said to have embarked on their romance.

Last September, when the student quartet moved house, they chose at William's request a place out of town and more removed from prying eyes.

It marked a sea- change in his approach to student life, which some ascribe simply to growing up but others put down to Kate's influence. He began joining in more with university life, attending the opening ball in October of the allmale Kate Kennedy Club where 1,500 guests were entertained by fire eaters.

Kate is a founding member of the female equivalent of the Kate Kennedy Club, the Lumsden Club, which aims to support women's issues and donates funds to women's and children's charities.

While William was spending part of his gap year in Africa, Kate was in Chile. Like him she is touched by shyness but also shares his love of sports in addition to skiing and riding, she played hockey and netball at school and now adores sailing.

So just how influential is this girl brought up in rural Berkshire where her parents still walk the family dogs on the future king? Some are convinced that she saved his university career, one which has switched from the history of art (which she is studying) to geography.

Around the campus it is said that when William now, like Kate, in the third of a four-year course was so bored and unhappy at university that he was thinking of quitting after barely two terms, she was the friend who convinced him to stay.

He did and is now certain that this was the right decision.

But the student romance of William and Kate may have been going on for far longer than others suspect.

A year ago he was spotted in the corner at a water polo club Christmas ball kissing a girl with long dark hair in the dim surroundings of St Andrews Sea Life Centre. No one could identify the 'mystery girl' at the time, but now there is speculation that it could have been Kate.

But why would William jettison his desire for privacy and allow Kate to be exposed to all the speculation and attention that goes with being his girl?

FOR years he has gone to enormous lengths to ensure he is never photographed with a 'girlfriend'. And make no mistake, girlfriends there have been. These include Arabella Musgrave, who met him on the polo circuit, and Natalie Hicks-Lobbecke, who also dated the Prince's older friend Mark Dyer, 38.

Then there was Jecca Craig, the pretty girl from Kenya with whom he shared a passion for animal conservation and with whom, it is said, 'it was an open secret that he had a fairly serious fling during his gap year'. He saw Jecca on many visits to East Africa.

It was for Jecca that William broke his custom of saying nothing about speculation involving named girls when she was his 'guest of honour' at his 21st birthday party nine months ago. Just before that land- mark party at Windsor Castle one that was to become infamous by the intrusion of the 'comedy terrorist' Aaron Barschak he issued a public statement denying any romance with Jecca and claiming to be a long-time friend of her family.

He gave no reason for making the statement, but friends believe it was the only way he could save her from being swamped by attentive media. And to a large extent he succeeded.

Significantly no such statement has been issued on this occasion, when it would have been easy for him to explain away the presence of Kate Middleton by describing her as a student friend joining a family party on the pistes.

Equally significantly, no one knows better than William that the snow slopes of Klosters at this time of year are a paparazzi paradise that makes discreet liaisons involving the famous virtually impossible. So why did he bring her?

Could it be that he has grown tired just as his father grew tired of the stress of romancing the girl in his life in the shadows while yearning to saunter nonchalantly into a restaurant or theatre together?

Or could it be that Kate is not quite as important to Prince William as it seems?

After all, everyone knows that for most people student romances are not much more enduring than those enjoyed on holiday.

And the fact remains that only three weeks ago in the Purple Lounge, a Chelsea nightclub near the football ground, William was paying close attention to another pretty girl in the VIP section.

Which brings us back full circle to Party Pieces and those fairytale things (yes, there is even a magic wand) that turn a little girl into a princess.

It surely can't happen to Kate Middleton.

Or could it?


www.dailymail.co.uk/columnists/article-259626/The-middleclass-girl-shares-Williams-life-NOT-bedroom.html