Cressida Bonas is a rather bohemian Princess in waiting

By

Catherine Ostler

and Paul Scott

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There’s a fine art to bagging a prince. Be keen, but not too keen. Be available for romantic nights in, but make sure he feels independent — even if the truth is something rather different. And,  of course, be the epitome of discretion at all times.

As Kate Middleton discovered in her occasionally rocky relationship with Prince William, if one of these things becomes imbalanced, if your royal beau begins to strain at the leash, your romance can all too quickly stray into treacherous waters.

It’s Kate’s experience of being the woman scorned and enjoying a well-publicised ‘break’ from William in various London nightclubs, before being triumphantly welcomed back into the bosom of the Royal Family, that Cressida Bonas has taken note of in her budding relationship with Prince Harry.

Free spirit: Prince Harry’s girlfriend Cressida Bonas – who is said to be desperate to keep her independence

These royal boys like loyalty — but they also love the thrill of the chase.

And so it’s interesting to note that this week, Cressida, 25, has been making final preparations to collect the keys to her first London flat at the end of the month. This is not a girl who wants to be seen to be waiting for the keys to Kensington Palace.

But Cressie, as she’s known in her well-to-do circle, will give the first guided tour to one man: Harry.

This week, someone very close to her told the Mail: ‘She’ll be moving in at the end of the month or the beginning of April. She lives an independent life.’

The stress is on the word ‘independent’. As speculation grows that her relationship with the  29-year-old Prince is heading in only one direction — up the aisle — Cressida is keen to show Harry that she’s not giving up her own life in the meantime.

She doesn’t want to be known as ‘Clingy Cressie’, having seen how painfully ‘Waity Katie’ was mocked before her.

This week, high-level royal sources and a member of Cressida’s family — who did not want to be named — joined forces in a bid to dampen the wedding gossip.

They maintain that there are no imminent plans for an engagement between fourth-in-line to the throne Harry and beautiful dance graduate Cressida, even though the Prince is apparently planning to take the significant step of introducing his girlfriend to the Queen and Prince Philip at Balmoral during the summer.

‘Harry has no plans to pop the question any time soon,’ a royal source told the Mail. ‘For the moment, he is happy to let the relationship grow and develop.’

Bohemian: The 25-year-old is keen not to be known as ‘Clingy Cressie’ after ‘Waity Katie’ was mocked before William popped the question

However, the source, who is close to the Prince, added tantalisingly: ‘But Cressida is undoubtedly the girl he will  settle down with — if everything goes to plan.’

It’s certainly progressing at top speed. Last week, Cressida attended her first public engagement with the Prince at the WE Day youth event at Wembley Arena, where Harry gave a speech.

When he returned to his seat, the couple kissed and embraced, seemingly oblivious to the 12,000-strong crowd around them.

Then, last Sunday, Cressida was photographed looking adoringly at Harry as they watched the rugby at Twickenham. Meanwhile, their friends say Miss Bonas has been staying over several nights a week with him at Kensington Palace.

There have been rumours circulating that Cressida has been given her own pass to come and go at will and even, on occasion, the use of one of Harry’s royal protection officers — though a member of her family categorically denied this to the Mail this week. One thing that’s for sure is that the blue-blooded Cressie has quietly moved into something of a position of power in the life of the once free-wheeling Prince.

Step one for her, just as it was for Kate with William, has been to tame Harry’s legendary capacity for wild nights out.

According to members of his circle, Cressida is even attempting to help him shed some of his more riotous cronies.

Certainly, one doesn’t hear much about people like Harry’s former wingman Tom Inskip these days.

‘Skippy’ accompanied the Prince on that trip to Las Vegas when he was photographed naked with a girl in his hotel suite.

Fun-loving: Cressida poses with a friend. The dancer, whose friends insist is just like any other twenty- something is currently working a £20,000- a-year marketing job in the West End

And, just as Kate tried to keep out of the limelight, Stowe-educated Cressie is trying to stay in the shadows, too. Nothing can wilt a royal romance like the burning heat of publicity, after all.

Having studied drama at Leeds University and gained a diploma in dance from edgy Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in Greenwich, South London, she has decided against a career as a dancer for now, because of fears it would not sit comfortably with her role as royal girlfriend.

Instead, she’s taken a £20,000-a-year marketing job in the West End, as well as doing some tutoring for her half-brother Charles’s private tuition firm Bonas MacFarlane.

‘She’s doing a job because young people have to go out and earn money. She’s just like every other 25-year-old,’ says her relative.

‘She has turned down fortunes — serious ones — offered for modelling (French Connection is said to have approached her) because she felt they were only offered ‘ecause of Harry,’ another source added. ‘She is a sensible — and sensitive — girl and wouldn’t jump at anything like that.’

Party girl: Cressida’s parents Lady Mary Gaye Curzon and Jeffrey Bonas as said to be thrilled at a possible engagement

And who can blame her with the prospect of being a royal bride tantalisingly within her grasp? Rather like Kate was successfully guided through the unpredictable terrain of dating a king-in-waiting by her ambitious mother Carole, Cressie is also being carefully watched by her impressive mother, former Sixties It-girl Lady Mary Gaye Curzon.

Certainly, the coup of marrying her youngest daughter into royalty would be something of a jubilant double whammy for the four-times-wed blonde matriarch, known to friends as Lady MG.

A year ago, another of her five children, Isabella, from Lady Mary Gaye’s second marriage to property magnate John Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, married Sir Richard Branson’s son Sam at the Virgin tycoon’s game reserve in South Africa.

All agree that the prospect of an engagement to Harry is something that fills Cressida’s mother and father — Lady MG’s third husband, urbane Old Harrovian businessman Jeffrey Bonas — with undiluted excitement.

‘If she had Branson’s son and heir and Prince Harry as son-in-laws, Lady MG really would have excelled in matrimony at last,’ one of her circle said this week.

Another agreed the 67-year-old would be ‘doing back flips’ if, as expected, the romance ends in marriage sooner rather than later.

It is Cressida’s mother, they say, who counselled her to play it cool in the early days of the couple’s almost two-year courtship.

‘The feeling throughout has been, “Don’t push things, let it happen naturally,” ’ one says.

But, again, all-too recent history bears a heavy weight on Cressie’s family. They don’t want Lady Mary Gaye’s close relationship with her daughter to be compared with Carole Middleton’s suspected machinations with her daughter and Prince William.

This week, one family source very close to Lady Mary Gaye reacted angrily to whispers that she was pulling some of the strings from the shadows. Speaking on condition of anonymity, they said: ‘I can absolutely assure you that stories that exaggerate the support or role of her mother are nonsense. It’s always done slightly salaciously and with invidious comparisons to others, which is not nice.’

Love: Despite rumours the pair may be on the rocks over Christmas, several public displays of affection between the two suggest they are happier than ever

Almost as soon as the couple began dating, after being introduced in May 2012 by one of her closest girlfriends, Princess Eugenie, Cressie’s friends were letting it be known she was in two minds about whether to give up her carefree existence for the royal spotlight.  As recently as last autumn, they were regularly informing the Press that Cressie was in floods of tears and unable to decide what to do as Harry, apparently, came on strong about his desire to settle down.

By Christmas, which they spent apart, wagging tongues speculated that the relationship was on the rocks. Clearly, all that’s changed — largely because of Harry’s decision to put his Army career on the back burner.  After the public mutterings that Cressie was in doubt about their future, Harry gave up co-piloting his Apache helicopter in favour of ‘flying a desk’ in Whitehall. Home, after all, is where the heart is.

But for all that Cressida has barely put a foot wrong, an ever-increasing trail of somewhat embarrassing pictures has emerged, mainly from the open Facebook pages of members of her fun-loving set.

On one Prince Harry fansite, Cressie can be seen sprawled on the ground while on a girly foreign holiday. With green flip-flops lying discarded nearby, her red mini-dress is hitched up around her waist with her lilac and white knickers on show.

Other pictures show her wearing fluffy bunny ears, a pink wig and a neon yellow bikini. She’s also seen downing a shot and drinking from a bottle of wine.

Accepting: Those close to the Bonas family say they adore Harry and, unlike the Windsors ‘it’s all very huggy’ in their family home

Another more racy snap, said to have been accessed by a hacker from Cressida’s private Facebook profile, shows her larking around with a sex toy in an adult shop.

All harmless enough, of course, and no different from the antics of anyone else her age. But enough to have a red-faced Cressida muttering one of her favourite Sloaney phrases: ‘cringe de la cringe’.

Another misstep involved her agreeing to appear in a midriff-baring cheerleader’s outfit in a rather tasteless ITV2 drama called Trinity in 2009. She featured as one of a group of female students being escorted into a room of young men to offer sexual favours in return for votes in a university election.

But easy-going Harry seems unbothered by any of this. And just as William was attracted by the Middleton family’s warmth and closeness, Harry too is enjoying being part of the Bonas clan.

A friend says: ‘They are like a big, sloppy, messy, affectionate family of Labradors. Unlike the Windsors, it’s all very huggy’.

By rights, it should all be deeply dysfunctional given the multiple divorces on both sides of her clan.

Lady Mary Gaye’s first marriage in 1971, was to the late Esmond Cooper-Key. Their 40-year-old daughter Pandora, described by friends as ‘boho and eccentric’, works for Vivienne Westwood, is married to a BBC producer and lives in Kensington.

Like all the other siblings, she calls Cressie by her nickname ‘Small’. Less than a year after her 1976 divorce from Cooper-Key, Lady MG wed Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, and had three children, Georgiana, now 35, Isabella, 33, and Jacobi, 30, a close friend of Prince William.

She then took up with Cressida’s entrepreneur father while he was still married to his first wife Elspeth, by whom he has three children.

When that marriage failed, Lady MG met financier Christopher Shaw and moved with Cressida into Hinton Ampner, a huge stately home in Hampshire.  But in 2000, when they had been married only four years, Shaw traded in Cressida’s mother for 40-year-old Eliza Dugdale, the daughter of a former aide-de-camp of the Duke of Windsor.

In January, Old Etonian Shaw, 76, who was rumoured to be broke, was found dead at his rented flat in Salisbury, after apparently committing suicide.

Cressida loves several west London hang-outs and can often be found sipping her favourite tipple – rum

Lady MG, who lives in Chelsea, has been in a relationship with PR man David McDonough, of whom Cressida is very fond, for  12 years.

Cressie’s close-knit network of friends includes Princess Beatrice and her boyfriend Dave Clark, who works for Richard Branson at  Virgin Galactic.

When they are not skiing or hosting fancy dress parties, her set can be found at nightclubs including Bodo’s Schloss in Kensington, where there’s a private entrance just for Harry and his friends.

Other hangouts include Jak’s restaurant in Chelsea and The Rum Kitchen in Notting Hill, where Cressie drinks her favourite tipple — neat rum.

It’s all very like the reality TV show Made In Chelsea. In fact, Cressida’s first cousin, Richard Dinan, is one of the ‘stars’ of the E4 series. Harry and Cressida have been to stay with his family in Buckinghamshire.

Her best friend is Georgia Forbes, a look-a-like slinky blonde who she went travelling with to Australia after they left university.

Georgia now works at a photographic studio and, like Cressie, is known as a member of the so-called ‘BBB crew’ — which stands for beautiful, blonde, and blue-blooded.

Despite those denials, one wonders whether it really can be too long before the lovely Miss Bonas can swap that acronym for a new one — HRH?

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jennifer,

birmingham, United Kingdom,

1 hour ago

There is just something so contrived about this whole thing, ‘poor, shy Cressida’. i hope Harry isnt settling for the sake of it.

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Cressida Bonas is a rather bohemian Princess in waiting