Just the ticket

Kate Middleton is a Home Counties brunette with pretty, if not quite supermodel, features who has been Prince William’s girlfriend for just over two years, and naturally speculation is flourishing that she will one day be his Queen. The couple are now reunited following William’s first official tour in New Zealand, and though the media largely spared them while they were both at St Andrews University, television and tabloid coverage is already threatening to be ruthless, especially since it now emerges that they will share a house in London. Despite the earlier denials of the Prince, friends now believe this is the prelude to marriage.

Kate first came into the public eye in 2002, when she was identified as one of three friends with whom William was to share a house for their second year at university; since then the romance has been marked by a promising absence of publicity. The nearest the tabloids have come to excitement was when William splashed out £200 to watch her parade on a catwalk in bra and knickers at a charity fashion show.

At Marlborough College she was a housemaster’s delight, the solid all-rounder. She played hockey for the school, was in the first pair for tennis and performed reasonably well academically, though she by no means dazzled. Friends remember her being exceptional at high jump, beating all the boys in her year.

For public school teenagers, looks are crucial to success, and nowhere more so than at Marlborough, where the in-crowd sport the tanned and tousled look of studied public-school nonchalance. Kate was never in that crowd, perhaps because she was a late starter: after St Andrews in Pangbourne, a mixed prep school of 300 pupils, Kate left for Downe House, but following two unhappy terms she ditched single-sex life for the more varied company of Marlborough, where she blossomed into a demure beauty.