An heir of secrecy

For the past two years, a huge experiment has been taking place in Britain. You won't have read about it in the newspapers because the very point of this project is an absence from the press. Prince William of Wales, while studying in Scotland, has been the first protected species among UK celebrities in the 20 years since the declaration of an open shooting season on the famous, of which his mother's life and death was the biggest bagging.

The relative good behaviour of editors - mainly blanking the paparazzi, restricting themselves to occasional innuendo about girlfriends and booze - has now been rewarded with an interview conducted by the Press Association.

Prince William is about to reach 21, the birthday colloquially associated with the key to the door. In the prince's case, there has been a fear that the gates of tabloid hell may be opened to him on this date and this phased feeding of the fame-hunger is an attempt to win further privacy for him.

Except that predators are only distracted by red meat and Wales-PA is largely a vegetarian encounter. Yesterday's breakfast radio shows were full of Swahili after the prince's revelation that he is learning the language because of a "love for the people of Africa...I'd like to know more about them and to speak to them".

In the sweet hippy- dippiness of that, we hear his mother speaking - he never speaks directly of her, though frequently name-checking his father, whose art he admires. We may also sense Diana, with a little shiver, in the admission: "I get very carried away, you know, just food shopping. I buy lots of things and then go back to the house and see the fridge is full of all the stuff I've bought." And, though the talk seems calculated to suggest normality, you need the backing of the Duchy of Cornwall rather than a student loan to fill your basket so generously.

But reading between the lines of the answers is only one part of the analysis of any royal interview: equally significant are the gaps in the questions. Prince William was never asked about girlfriends, drugs or his mother, which are three main elements of the press interest in him. Given that even the most puritanical reporter would have wanted to raise at least Diana, this feels like a deal and indicates the extent to which even this 21st birthday exposure is being carefully controlled.

The most curious missing Q&A, though, is the one about whether William wants the job which makes him the subject of this fuss. Again, we can only speculate. But suppose that you were a royal spin-doctor. If you were certain that the second-in-line could and would deliver an uplifting hymn to granny's and daddy's business and his own ambitions to run it, then you would surely ensure that PA threw in a throne-poser. The fact that the question went unasked may be taken to indicate a lack of confidence in the possible response.

Those tabloid reporters who say they know what's happening in the palaces have claimed recently that Prince William fancies a second "gap year": perhaps, monarchists will now frenziedly speculate, in a Swahili-speaking nation. But that desire, if true, reveals his problem. His father has already endured more than 30 pre-work gap years and, the female Windsor genes suggest, could be due another 20, which will now be shared with his elder son in parallel tragedies of endlessly delayed significance.

The interview's recurrent theme is Prince William's love of his privacy and fear that it may disappear: "I'm slightly concerned that, when I leave here, the media could have a tendency to look into what I've done." The experiment in protecting William from the press assumes that there will be a moment - some time soon in adulthood - when the prince will be willing to bear the ogling flash-bulbs and lascivious pencils.

But what if the man remains mentally forever the teenager who sat at his mother's multi-channel funeral and watched his uncle blame the media for killing her? The stand-off from St Andrews so sensitively arranged by Prince Charles may have served to give William false hopes of invisibility, suiting him only for a non-royal life.

The father learned Welsh to become Prince of Wales on the way to his destiny some distant day. The son's Teach-Yourself-Swahili tapes speak of a young man who, in his head at least, has a fantasy of being Prince of Africa, doing good works far away.

His mum would have understood such fantasies of escape more than his dad. Intended to reassure monarchists about the succession, the interview should perhaps terrify them with what was pointedly never said.