WILLIAM'S EDUCATION TIMELINE:

1984-92 Attends a series of independent schools including Jane Mynors’ nursery school, Wetherby, also attended by Hugh Grant and Julian Fellowes.

1992 Becomes a full-time boarder at Ludgrove School in Berkshire. Is privately tutored by future Conservative leadership candidate Rory Stewart. Shows an interest in football, swimming, basketball and clay pigeon shooting.

1995 Takes the entrance exam to Eton and is tutored by Dr. Andrew Gailey, considered the most likeable housemaster at Eton at that time. At Eton takes up water polo and captains the house football team.

2000 Takes a gap year visiting southern Chile, as part of the Raleigh International programme in Tortel.

2001 Enrols at the University of St Andrews, switching from Art History to Geography. Here he meets Kate Middleton.

2005 Graduates with upper second class honours having written a dissertation on the coral reefs of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean.

2005 On graduation does internships in land management at Chatsworth House and shadows bankers at HSBC.

2006 Chooses to follow a military career and is admitted to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.

2009 Transfers his commission to the RAF and is promoted to Flight Lieutenant.

2010 Is transferred to the Search and Rescue Training Unit at RAF Valley, Anglesey.

2014 Enrols in a vocational agricultural management course at Cambridge, organised by the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership. In the same year, accepts a full-time role as a pilot with the East Anglian Air Ambulance based at Cambridge Airport.

2016 Launches Heads Together alongside the Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry.

2020 Pledges £1.8 million to mental health charities.

first is Harry, and the second is the press. But the more you look at that problem, the more they come to seem one and the same thing.

In the first instance, I speak to Nicky Philipps, the brilliant society portrait painter whose picture of William and Harry hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Philipps recalls painting the commission with great fondness, although she admits that the picture was painted under considerable pressure. “It was very nerve-wracking – until I met them,” she tells me.

Again, the sense arises that these people we think about so much, turn out to be so much like ourselves up close. “Harry was so sweet. The person I knew is not the man in California whingeing about his setup. I don’t know what’s happened now. He was so lovely.”

Philipps explains some of the complexities of organising a royal portrait: “The light is all wrong at Clarence House,” she recalls. “I was determined to have proper north light, but the sun was pouring through and changing the colour and causing havoc so I asked if they could come to my house.” to do – they arranged themselves.”

Today Philipps, who has also painted the Queen on three occasions, looks back on that 2008 sitting and says she’d have liked more time. “They were in uniform so I had to take photographs of the uniform and the medals and couldn’t get much down there. I had five sittings – which sounds a lot but it isn’t when you’ve got to do two heads.” two princes are looking at each other fondly, but they are also irrevocably separated, each inhabiting separate fields of energy, as they sadly do today in real life.

“Never in a million years would I have thought it would have ended like this,” Philipps continues. “Harry was more casual, and William was more on it – but they were one. They were lifelong friends so far as I was concerned.”

And what was that like? “They organised it and the police came.” (Again, the police: harbingers of the royal presence). But when the principals arrived, everything changed. “They were just like everybody, very natural and fun together and they created their own pose. I didn’t have much

It’s worth looking at this painting closely. Over time, the picture has changed – one thinks of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian of Gray, where a picture changes because the world around it cannot remain static. “What’s quite weirdly prophetic,” continues Philipps, “is that I couldn’t find a way to arrange them with William in a doorway and still have Harry to be looking at him. There’s this lintel going down the middle, and I have an awful feeling it’s slightly off centre. Now I look at it and it’s the Great Divide.”

If you look at the picture, it’s true – the

There seems little doubt that the press must bear some of the blame for the deterioration in their relationship. One person who used to work at Kensington Palace was worried at the time about the drip effect of negative stories about the princes: “They would definitely get hurt by what they read in the press about each other.”

Philipps has also painted the Duchess: “Kate’s absolutely sweet and extraordinarily graceful. I never met anyone who carries themselves so well and is so patient.”