Prince Wills is hoping to get in shape
After quitting the healthy country air of Norfolk and his job as an air ambulance pilot, it seems Prince William is worried that he’s starting to lose his fitness – and could even develop a dreaded, chubby ‘dad bod’.
So to stave off the effects of a sedentary city lifestyle, I can reveal the soon-to-be father of three has signed on for sessions at an exclusive gym – the Chelsea Harbour Club.
The fitness centre was a regular haunt for his mother Diana in the 1990s, who was often seen there in her gym kit after her marriage to Prince Charles collapsed.
William, 35, visited the club after dropping Prince George off at Battersea for his first day at Thomas’s school.
However, getting fit wasn’t the main thing on his mind when he was shown round.
He asked staff if they still made the special cookies Diana used to buy him as a treat when they went there together.
Says my source: ‘He visited the cafe and told staff that Diana would buy a cookie for him as a treat if he’d been behaving well.
He still remembers how special they were.
The chefs started flapping, saying they’d find the recipe and rustle one up right away, but he said he didn’t want any special treatment.’
It was at the club’s cafe that Diana met England rugby captain Will Carling in 1995 and began a ‘close friendship’ which was never officially confirmed as a romance but resulted in his divorce from then-wife Julia a year later.
Despite William’s fond cookie memories, the gym was the scene of some harrowing experiences for the young princes and their mother.
Princess Diana, Princess of Wales, leaving Chelsea Harbour Club in 1998 where Prince Wills has now signed up
Prince Harry recently recalled a painful episode at the club in a BBC documentary, saying: ‘She was so fed up with being chased … on the way to the Harbour Club, she jumped out of the car, and went running up to these guys and shouted and screamed at them while they took photographs of her.
‘All I could hear was screaming. William and I looked at each other and stared out of the window. It was hard.’
Prince George’s head teacher Helen Haslem turned heads in her extra-elegant outfit on his first day at school. Now I can reveal why she looked so good – she called in a stylist and hairdresser to make her over for her big day. And, perhaps in a bid to comfort the young Prince, she ended up plumping for a look that’s a firm favourite of his mother the Duchess of Cambridge – a £320 pink LK Bennett dress and nude pumps from Hobbs.
Prince George’s head teacher Helen Haslem turned heads in her extra-elegant outfit on his first day at school, right
Spencer: ‘My book launch eye-opener’
Princess Diana’s brother Charles Spencer had the nation weeping in 1997 when he spoke movingly at his sister’s funeral, but last week he turned jester in a speech to launch his new book.
Speaking at the lavish party at Ralph Lauren’s flagship store on Bond Street, he had the audience rocking with laughter when he recounted an embarrassing faux pas as an author.
‘At a very busy book launch I wasn’t looking up and this woman asked me to sign her book “for Linda”,’ Charles revealed at the launch of his Charles II tome To Catch A King. ‘I said, “Is that Linda with an I?” There was silence and so I repeated the question. I looked up and there was literally a Linda with only one eye… she had one eye!’
Stars at Charles’s launch party audience included Dame Joan Collins, Boris Johnson, The Rev Richard Coles, the BBC’s Frank Gardner, Julian Fellowes, Johnny Ball and our own Craig Brown.