William to join military
2005-03-06 16:04
London - Prince William will follow his younger brother Harry to Britain's elite Sandhurst military academy, The Sunday Times reported.
William, who graduates from Saint Andrews University in Scotland in June, would enrol at the military school in January 2006, when Harry would be starting his third term of a yearlong course, it said.
Twenty-year-old Harry was accepted last year at Sandhurst, after declaring a desire to follow his father and grandfather into the military.
William, 22, also revealed in an interview last November that he was using Harry as a "guinea pig" at Sandhurst while contemplating a future military career.
In that interview, he pledged that as an army officer he would fight alongside "his men", saying: "The last thing I would want to do is be mollycoddled".
The Sunday Times also reported that William was poised to lose his protected status from Britain's invasive media when he graduated from Saint Andrews in June.
Up until now, the prince, regularly labelled Britain's most eligible bachelor, has been sheltered from Britain's paparazzi by an agreement reached between Buckingham Palace and the media following the death of his mother, Princess Diana, in August 1997.
The press vowed in a 1999 deal to respect William's private life at university, as long as the palace organised regular, carefully choreographed photo opportunities to satisfy the public's curiosity of the photogenic heir to one of the world's great fortunes and grandest thrones.
But Clarence House, the office of his father Prince Charles, has been warned that the agreement ended when his son is handed his degree in art history.
- SAPA