MANY a young man meets a girl he does not marry, but whom he cannot quite get out of his system. Courtship and romance are followed by a life-long affection, together with nagging thoughts of what might have been.
Some will wonder if these were the emotions stirring deep within Prince William when he abruptly announced that he was flying to Kenya for the Easter weekend, in order to attend the wedding of his old flame Jecca Craig.
Before Kate Middleton came into the prince’s life, the conservationist’s daughter was frequently described as his ‘first love’, who became so close to him when they were teenagers that they reportedly entered into a ‘pretend engagement’.
Five years ago, the willowy Jecca was a guest – along with her then boyfriend – at William and Kate’s grand royal wedding, but when tomorrow she ties the knot with Professor Jonathan Baillie, a Canadian-born world authority on threatened species for the Zoological Society, the Prince will be attending alone.
Some might say this is simply William celebrating the nuptial bliss of an old friend. And yet, at a time when he has faced criticism over his apparent lack of commitment both to royal duties and his part-time job as an air ambulance helicopter pilot, the visit is bound to lead to questions about the wisdom of making the trip in the first place.
It is, after all, only a few days since he enjoyed a five-day ski holiday with Kate and their children in the French Alps.
But questions will not be confined to the prince’s judgment: quite likely they will centre on the powerful allure of Miss Craig – and Kenya itself – that William first experienced on his gap-year travels in 2001, when both of them were 19.
Courtiers have always insisted that the two were never romantically involved, and were merely close friends. Such was the speculation that royal officials were obliged to issue a rare public statement denying there was any relationship. But the rumours that there was perhaps something more have tantalisingly never gone away.
Perhaps the speculation would have faded more quickly if William had not so often returned to the Lewa Downs conservancy, a wildlife reserve Jecca’s father Ian created on the 55,000 acres his family have farmed since 1922.
It was the suggestion of an engagement all those years ago that provoked the famously private William to instruct aides to issue an official statement about his private life – something that was never done for any of his other girlfriends. Indeed, Jecca has the distinction of being the only woman before Kate to have provoked an official bulletin about William’s love life.
His explanation was that other girls who had been linked to him in the past could take care of themselves, but Jecca, who didn’t live in Britain and had been educated at Pembroke House, a boarding school in the Great Rift Valley, was unused to the attention and was upset.
It didn’t help matters that no sooner had the furore died away than Jecca was being welcomed to Windsor Castle for William’s Out of Africa-themed 21st birthday party.
A year later, and already by then dating Kate, William was still making time for Jecca, too. The friends met up for another holiday on the Craig estate. Later still, when William and Kate briefly parted in 2007, there was wild speculation that the temporary separation had allowed him to rekindle his attachment to Jecca.
With such cosy familiarity between the two, it is easy to see how those rumours of romance never really went away. But according to friends, the real love affair was never between William and Jecca but between the prince and Africa.
‘Jecca helped open his eyes to the impossible beauty of the plains and the landscape,’ says one old friend. ‘Ever since his father took him and Harry as young boys, and challenged them to enjoy the solitude of Africa just as he has, William has been captivated.
‘Why else would he have chosen a visit to Kenya to pop the question to Kate, as he did in 2010.’
Friends were also at pains yesterday to explain William’s long connection with the Craig family. He first met Jecca’s father during one of his early visits to Africa in 1998. Ian Craig nurtured the young prince’s interest in conservation, and is said to have become something of a father figure to him. In 2008, William even missed his own cousin Peter Phillips’ wedding at Windsor to attend the nuptials of Jecca’s older brother, Batian – named after one of Mt Kenya’s highest peaks – leaving Kate to go to Berkshire in his place alone. ‘Clearly he is going to Jecca’s wedding with Kate’s blessing,’ says a former royal aide. ‘But it does look like the behaviour of a bachelor prince, not that of a father of two, including a ten-month-old infant.’
For William, it is all about the romance of Africa. It holds out the possibility of what life might have been had he not been a royal prince, and could have made his own way in the world. It also represents an escape from what he loathes most about his life in Britain – scrutiny.
Even so, the timing of this trip is hardly perfect. As the news broke, it emerged that William has included an official engagement during the jaunt – meaning that taxpayers would have to foot the bill for his staff.
The meeting with the president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta, to discuss ‘defence, security and conservation issues’, took place yesterday morning. As a result, a private secretary flew out with him too, for a single day, requiring publicly funded business-class flights which would have cost in the region of £4,500.
According to Kensington Palace, ‘one private secretary was at the meeting but is not spending the whole weekend there [with the prince]’. Insiders said William has paid for his own flights in and out of the country because the ‘private’ trip had already been planned before the meeting with President Kenyatta was arranged. He will, however, also take with him at least three Scotland Yard police protection officers, whose costs will be met by the taxpayer.
Lest the impression is reinforced that William’s life has become one foreign jaunt after another, by happy coincidence photographs of the prince at work with the East Anglia Air Ambulance also emerged ahead of the trip. They showed him helping to remove a patient on a stretcher from his helicopter, and then going with him in an ambulance to Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge.
And there is one other troubling aspect to this trip, which may rankle among some in royal circles, and it concerns the prince’s absence from the royals’ Easter church service at Windsor.
‘The Queen views Easter Sunday as the most important date in the Christian calendar, and she likes to gather her family round her for the traditional walk from Windsor Castle to St George’s Chapel,’ says a courtier. ‘William, after all, is a future head of the Church of England.’
On this occasion, his longing for the open plains of Africa has proved too strong.