Meet the team who will raise royal baby no. 3

Prince William and his wife Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, present their newborn son outside St. Mary's Hospital in London. Picture: Xinhua/Stephen Chung

Prince William and his wife Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, present their newborn son outside St. Mary's Hospital in London. Picture: Xinhua/Stephen Chung

Published Apr 24, 2018

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London - For the moment, at least, William will be doing the school run. It’s usually Kate who anonymously joins the rush-hour traffic every morning at the wheel of a Range Rover, driving Prince George the four miles from Kensington Palace to his day school in Battersea.

And as well as four-year-old George, Charlotte - who will be three on May 2 - must be delivered to her nursery just a few hundred yards away from KP, behind the Royal Albert Hall.

With the arrival of a new baby boy, it won’t be that long before the school run is even more complicated.

And Kate will be keen to get back into her routine as soon as possible, listening to poppy Capital Radio over breakfast - just as Princess Diana did when William and Harry were toddlers.

According to a source, Kate and William are "very keen" to make sure George and Charlotte are as involved as possible with their new brother, "hence the dash back to KP" before bedtime on Monday night.

The couple are also determined to keep things as normal as possible for George, as he has just gone back to school for the summer term and they do not want his routine disrupted.

For his part, William is good with the children in the nursery - one quality of his father Prince Charles that Diana acknowledged.

Britain's Prince William arrives with Prince George and Princess Charlotte back to the Lindo wing at St Mary's Hospital in London London. Picture: AP

"He adores bath time with the children," says one of William’s circle.

The new Prince will be introduced to a surprisingly "normal" life in Apartment 1A at Kensington Palace. While there are domestic staff - with an intriguingly international flavour - they are nothing like the number employed by Charles and Diana when William was a child. They had a least a dozen full-time staff in London, including a dresser for the Princess, housekeeper, butler and a valet for the Prince.

The key figure is Maria Borrallo, 47, the stern-looking, but engagingly personable, nanny who has been with the couple since the arrival of George.

READ: LOOK: Duchess Catherine and newborn son leave hospital

Nanny Maria, who was known as ‘Santa’ [Spanish for holy or saint] by friends because they thought she might become a nun, lives in at Kensington Palace, where she has her own private quarters of bedroom, sitting room, kitchenette and bathroom.

Born in Madrid, Maria is a familiar figure in her Norland Nanny uniform of beige nurse’s dress and little brown bowler hat, marshalling the children at the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, sometimes taking them to Hyde Park and, inevitably, to Bucklebury Farm Park deer safari, in the Berkshire village where Kate’s parents Mike and Carole Middleton live.

Then there’s the housekeeper, Antonella Fresolone, who used to be one of the Queen’s senior housemaids, working at Buckingham Palace for 13 years. As well as overseeing the running and cleaning of Apartment 1A, she loves serving up steaming pasta dishes from her native Italy to the family.

Fijian ex-paratrooper Tifare Alexander - known as ‘Tif’ - performs odd jobs and the occasional bit of chauffeuring.

When Prince Philip retired from official duties last year, two of his staff who were on secondment from the Army - Corporal Stewart Harvey and Lance-Sergeant Stuart Hayes - moved across to join William and Kate’s team as orderlies and, when needed, to help Harry at  nearby Nottingham Cottage, which he now shares with fiancée Meghan Markle.

Their duties, apart from walking William and Kate’s pet cocker spaniel Lupo, have been to help as waiters at social functions and official dinners, as well as cleaning shoes and delivering hand-written notes, a royal custom.

The new baby will be brought home to a household that is relative informal by royal standards. William tends to call staff by their first name, rather than their surname as his parents mainly did.

"It’s the home of a modern couple, lots of photographs of the children and the bits of artwork they bring home from school," says a friend.

"It’s a welcoming home, but William does guard their privacy and he limits the number of  outsiders who are let in to the family circle." Evenings are often spent in front of the television with a take-away curry from  Malabar in Notting Hill - collected by one of the orderlies, not delivered.

William has succeeded in creating something of the warm family atmosphere he found with the Middletons when he first knew Kate. But, as working royals, he long ago accepted that his and Kate’s home could never be quite like theirs. He’s matched them in one area, however - like them, he now has three children.

Daily Mail

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