Chelsy Davy - Some day my prince will come

Published on Monday 26 January 2009 21:06

IT SHOULD BE every young girl's dream. But for Chelsy Davy, the prospect of becoming a princess was starting to look more like a nightmare. So much so that last week, Davy called time on her relationship with Prince Harry, bringing to an end five years of rows, tears and tantrums amid the polo-field larks, not to mention rumours of his dalliances with other girls and relentless paparazzi intrusion.

The breakup was far from an easy decision, apparently. Davy, 23, is said to still adore the prince, and he her. "The split was as amicable and as mutual as these things can be," one friend remarked. "They are young people, these things happen."

So what, then, went wrong between the prince and his Zimbabwean playgirl? With her long blonde locks and famously flesh-baring outfits – what has been dubbed the "posh chav" look – Davy has raised eyebrows in the past for appearing less than 'suitable' as Royal girlfriend material (unlike the always neatly attired Kate Middleton). The fact that she is the daughter of an exceptionally wealthy South African businessman, who runs a big-game safari company in Zimbabwe and has known links to Robert Mugabe, was not well received at Buckingham Palace, either.

Meanwhile, her pampered and carefree existence in sunny South Africa, where she regularly drives an open-topped Mercedes around Cape Town, dotting from one designer boutique to another, has also raised a few eyebrows.

Yet despite her privileged background, she has never, it is said, actively courted the limelight. While studying for her undergraduate degree in politics, economics and philosophy at the university of Cape Town, one fellow student and friend observed of her: "She's really down-to-earth and unassuming. In all the time I've known her, she's never once tried to play on her celebrity. If anything, she doesn't like the fuss it causes. When she's at uni, a lot of people try to take photos of her with their phones, which really upsets her."

This constant attention from others – whether it be paparazzi photographers or fellow students – is said to have ground Davy down, particularly when she moved from Cape Town to Leeds in 2007, to study for a postgraduate degree in law and to be closer to Harry. Here, she lives not in a luxurious apartment but in regular student digs, is constantly followed around the city by photographers and is said to loathe the wet, cold Yorkshire weather.

And if she expected that moving from one hemisphere to another would mean that she and Harry would be constantly together, she was sadly mistaken. With Harry clearly devoted to his Army career – he was promoted to lieutenant last April and has just started a gruelling 14-month training course with the Army Air Corps to become an attack helicopter pilot – the reality began to dawn for Davy that a relationship with a Prince, the third in line to the British throne, was never going to be easy or 'normal', and that their time together would, for the foreseeable future at least, be confined to the odd stolen weekend.

This is, of course, the curse of the modern princess in waiting. While Kate Middleton is stuck living at home with her parents as Prince William dithers over whether or not to put a ring on her finger, Davy has always been more independent, pursuing her own career (she has a place as a trainee solicitor at the prestigious London law firm Allen & Overy waiting for her when she graduates) and desperately seeking to hold on to her own identity.

She is not the only former royal girlfriend to have run into such problems. Koo Stark, who dated Prince Andrew before he married Sarah Ferguson, found herself cast aside when it was revealed she had once acted in a porn film. Lady Dale Tryon – affectionately nicknamed Kanga – an Australian society lady and former girlfriend of Prince Charles, was reluctant to comply with Royal protocol and found herself shunned by many within Prince Charles's circle as a result. And then there was Diana, who loathed the gilded cage of the Royal family and spent most of her marriage (and subsequent years of divorce) trying to escape it.

If all that were not enough, as the product of an incredibly rich, privileged and close family in modern South Africa, for Davy, becoming part of the Royal family – with its dusty, old-money ways, regal pomp and circumstance and dysfunctional relationships (let us not forget that Harry's parents divorced when he was eight and his mother died when he was just 12) – probably held little appeal.

One friend said of her in 2006: "She's probably never made a cup of tea or a bed in her life. But she could ride bareback, skipper a speedboat across Kenya's Lake Naivasha and all the time match the boys drink for drink. These are the kind of girls who'll sleep under the stars without bringing a change of underwear, who aren't afraid of spiders and could strangle a snake. That wins them a lot of respect. They also share the same education, impeccable manners and privileged outlook on life as the British aristocracy."

Davy's family were said to be upset, too, by the Royals' supposedly lukewarm reaction to her, as well as being uncomfortable with the level of visibility she acquired as a result of her association with Harry.

"Harry has bodyguards with him every hour of the day. What happens to her when she isn't with him?" Chelsy's grandfather once asked.

Her uncle, Paul Davy, once remarked: "What do you think her chances are of getting into that royal family? She's Zimbabwean."

In the end, though, the decision not to 'get into' the Royal family appears to have been hers, faced with the reality that Harry had chosen to prioritise duty over romance. Although she will now have to live without such dubious accolades as the one given to her by Tatler magazine of "second most powerful blonde in the world" (Elizabeth Murdoch came first), she may instead get the opportunity to live a life that's almost, well, normal.

And when that's the alternative, who'd be a princess?