Prince William: Gang of 25

Sandip Patel, 23, has been named in Prince William’s inner circle of 25 close friends by Tatler, the monthly glossy which takes itself seriously as “Britain’s most stylish and indispensable society guide”.

As a general rule, while members of the royal family cultivate cordial relations with select personalities from the ethnic minorities and even invite them to lunch or dinner, intimate friendships are almost invariably restricted to “people like us” — which usually means landed aristocracy or old titled families.

The Tatler article, which has set out to identify 25-year-old Prince William’s inner circle, is an exercise inspired by a photograph of him enjoying himself with his friends at a sporting occasion.

“Will Prince William’s real friends please stand up…” is the theme of the article by one “Ticky Hedley-Dent”, whose double-barrelled byline suggests she may herself have useful connections.

Tatler has a relatively modest circulation of 88,920 and a readership of 186,000 — 59 per cent of it in the upmarket “AB” category.

The 25 in William’s inner circle are introduced with the comment: “They’re the jolliest on the dance floor with the future king or looking out for him when times are tricky.” The second observation is significant: the price for being admitted into the royal inner sanctum is discretion at all times.

Not much is known about Sandip except that the 23-year-old is an “Old Harrovian and King’s College graduate who had a career in corporate finance before serving Queen and country in the 1st the Queen’s Dragoon Guards”.

The reference is probably to King’s College, London, rather than King’s College, Cambridge.

Assuming Sandip is a close friend of William, the one activity he must not engage in should he wish not to be excommunicated is speak about the prince to the media.

Among Asians who have had a taste of royal friendship, though this was very much on the fringes, is Aatish Taseer, now 25, who was for a while the boyfriend of Lady Gabriella Windsor, the daughter of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent.

Aatish, whose mother is Indian journalist Tavleen Singh and whose father, Salman Taseer, is a Pakistani businessman, met Gabriella — who is technically “30th in line to the throne” (29 people have to die before she can become Queen of England)— while she was studying Spanish and English literature at Brown University, Rhode Island, in America. He was at the nearby Amherst College.

There were media reports at one stage that they were practically engaged and about to marry but the relationship ended.

Princess Michael, herself an Austrian Catholic and a divorcee when she met Prince Michael, has been given a hard time by the British media which calls her “Princess Push” and regularly rakes up dirt on her late father’s Nazi connections.

Princess Michael has strongly denied she had a hand in the break-up of her daughter’s romance on the grounds that she did not want an Asian son-in-law.

The one Asian who can claim to have been embraced by the royals is the Pakistani surgeon, Hasnat Khan, who, according to reasonably reliable accounts by Princess Diana’s servants and others, was her lover and could apparently have married her had he so wished. To his credit, he has never cashed in on the relationship by discussing it in public.

It is worth stressing that people who offend the royal family — “the Firm” — are dumped unceremoniously.

Princess Diana was herself notoriously fickle and would end friendships suddenly if she felt slighted in any way. And, in turn, when she and the Prince of Wales were divorced, the Queen, Prince Philip and her former husband saw to it that she was downgraded to “Diana, Princess of Wales” from “Her Royal Highness The Princess of Wales”, which had previously been her formal title.

Apart from Sandip, who will have to watch every step he takes now that he has been “outed”, the other 24 conform very much to the kind of people William would be expected to befriend.

Typically, they include: Lady Mary Douglas-Home, 24, rock singer granddaughter of the sixties’ Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home; Peter and Zara Phillips, his cousins who are Princess Anne’s children; Dr Holly Branson, 25, daughter of Sir Richard Branson and a slight misfit in the sense she is said to be “brainy”; James Meade, 25, one of William’s contemporaries from Eton; and Lady Natasha Rufus Isaacs, 24, a “tall beauty and the daughter of the Marquess of Reading”.

Perhaps the one notable exception is William’s on-off-on girlfriend, Kate Middleton, a wholesome middle-class girl of 25 who had been his contemporary at St Andrew’s University in Scotland.

Some sociologists will argue that times have changed in Britain and the new aristocracy is now made up of massively well-paid footballers, pop singers and TV celebrities who are forever staggering out of night clubs at 3am. In that, they do have something in common with William, his younger brother, Harry, and their set.