How Kate Middleton bagged her student prince

Every step of the way, Kate — or Queen Catherine, as she will be one day — has played it perfectly.

A chance university room allotment at St Andrews placed her automatically at the centre of William's student royal circle.

The most attractive public-schoolgirl at St Salvator's — one of the Scottish university's halls of residence — she was an instant hit with the prince and the group of "Sallies boys" that developed around him. St Salvator's is the only vaguely Oxbridge-style college there, tucked off the quad, near the university chapel, with the winds blowing off the North Sea on the East Neuk of Fife.

In rooms either side of HRH, when he started at St Andrews in September 2001, were two Old Etonians — West Country boys Fergus Boyd and Ollie Chadwyck-Healey.

Both have settled with St Andrews girls. Boyd married Sandrine Janet last summer, a Parisian whom he met in the history of art lecture hall. Chadwyck-Healey has been dating Ginny Fraser, Lord Strathalmond's daughter, since 2003 — another history of art girl. William and Kate met in that same history of art lecture hall. There is a saying about St Andrews: you graduate an alcoholic or married.

Early competition was stiff. Girls left, right and centre vied for Prince William's attention. University acquaintances tell tales of how older girls who managed to get the Prince over for dinner would clean the house from top to bottom, one lot even buying a set of green Hunters to have casually tossed by the front door.

Others suffered the ignominy of the Prince saying he had to stay at home and work when only a few hours later he was spotted renting a DVD from Global Video in Market Street. To be spurned by the Prince was considered the ultimate social suicide, as word whipped around the tiny town's three streets within the hour.

What those girls didn't know was that Prince William was holding hands with Gloucestershire girl Rose Farquhar at the time, and every weekend was spent down south. He soon moved onto Olivia Hunt, pretty daughter of a South Kensington-based doctor, and a first-year student at Edinburgh.

They met at a house party at The Hirsel, Scottish seat of the Queen's friend, the Earl of Home. At any opportunity he'd be sitting in the pub in Edinburgh with her.

But that all changed halfway through their second year. Prince William was by then living in 13a Hope Street, with his old room-mate Boyd, Gloucestershire friend Livy Bleasdale, best friends with Rose, and Kate, whom he'd secretly started seeing.

William appeared to have stopped dating other girls around this time but there was no official confirmation of the romance until March 2004 — more than a year later — when the couple were snapped skiing in Klosters.

Secluded, olde-worlde St Andrews provided the Prince with a secure environment. And a gentleman's agreement among newspaper editors led to a media blackout which gave him the freedom to be a normal student.

But the Prince didn't want to engage too much with his university peers. And fair enough. If he arrived at fashionable drinking hole the West Port, it would be rammed within half an hour. So as often as he could it was back to Gloucestershire and after-parties at Club H, the bar in the basement of Highgrove stuffed with Duchy Originals home brand champagne, with his close county friends whose social lives revolve around the Beaufort Hunt: Guy Pelly, Tom Inskip, Harry and James Meade.

These are the men who will be his ushers, if not in name, then at least in practice. Others will be plucked from the Sallies set; the only members of the St Andrews crew to end up in the Royal Box at the Diana Memorial Concert in 2007 were Ally Coutts-Wood and Ollie Baker, the two boys William and Kate trusted enough to have move in with them into the farmhouse tucked out of town on the Strathyrum estate in 2003.

At the end of their third year, again Kate played it cannily. Fearful of losing her prince's interest, she put it about St Andrews that she was going to leave the farmhouse and rejoin the set in town and went shopping for a Hope Street flat with their friend, Essex-based Bryony Daniels.

Everyone joked that her plans were absurd, that she'd be back in the farmhouse in time for the following September (a Scottish degree lasts four years). Which, of course, she was. Kate had guessed, after all, that the Prince didn't trust anyone else to cook his supper.

During the young couple's years of living together they kept a suitably low profile. Very few of the bigger parties were graced with their presence. Instead they preferred to entertain at the farmhouse the select few Sallies boys and a couple of girls Kate became friends with through her lacrosse. Occasionally they would throw big
parties.

Guy Fawkes' night in 2003 was one such, swiftly dubbed "The Royal Fireworks". Kate could occasionally be dismissive to those whom she'd led to believe were her good friends. Some key members of her set pretended to be elsewhere that night to cover up the fact that they hadn't received an invite.

The one thing Kate couldn't do was hold her drink. The reason she's never been "papped" falling out of a club is that she just doesn't drink. A warning bell came when she was carried out of the May Ball — Henry Cheape, who owns Strathyrum House and was therefore their landlord, held one end, and former flatmate Fergus Boyd the other.

So at the few big, under-thirties social London events Kate and William have attended together — the Black and White Ball at Banqueting House in 2007, which had friends Sam and Holly Branson on the committee and zero press, or the Boodles Boxing Ball in 2008 — Kate has always wafted around looking clean and serene.

And that's the key to why their relationship has worked. He's dutiful and she's well-behaved.

Woe betide if you're one of Prince Harry's friends and you wake up hungover on the floor of the brothers' apartment in Clarence House. If Will and Kate look in on you on their way down for breakfast with the Prince of Wales, William will find it amusing and make a joke. Catherine, on the other hand, will patronisingly ask if "you're OK?". But then who'd want a queen of mayhem? She's perfect.