How William kept training en route to stag party

Interesting comments from the Ministry of Defence, which has sprung to the defence of Prince William for using a £10 million Chinook helicopter to go to a stag party on the Isle of Wight for his cousin, Peter Phillips.

The Prince borrowed the aircraft last Friday only a few hours after receiving his "wings" from his father, the Prince of Wales, at RAF Cranwell in Lincolnshire, pausing only to pick up his brother, Harry, in London on the way.

An MoD spokesman said: “The Prince’s training was designed to give him an insight into the many roles of the Royal Air Force. Having spent a week under instruction with a Chinook helicopter squadron, Prince William flew a legitimate training sortie which tested his new skills to the limit."

He went on: “Flying at low level Prince William piloted the heavy support RAF Chinook helicopter through the busy London flying lanes to a helicopter landing site in Central London before departing the lanes to the South West, making a water crossing and an approach to a civilian airfield routinely used by Chinook squadrons.”

William was accompanied by an unidentified instructor, who opined, according to the MoD: “Prince William showed natural piloting skills and an ability to pick things up quickly."

Pick things up? What, like Harry?

Anyway, it reminded us of some other taxpayer-funded jaunts, such as:

John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister, using his official Jaguar limousine for a 270-yard journey along the Bournemouth seafront during the 1999 Labour Party conference "for security and because my wife does not like her hair blown about".

Tony Blair taking the Queen's Flight on a family holiday to Sharm el Sheikh at Christmas, 2004 - for security reasons, however, rather than to stop Cherie Blair's hair getting messed up. The RAF crew spent eight nights at a luxury hotel waiting to take the Blairs back home.

More recently we had news of a £4,280 taxi bill run up by Mary Martin, wife of the Speaker of the Commons, on shopping trips. This time it was Lord Snape, the former Labour MP who proposed Michael Martin as Speaker in 2000, who rushed in to defend her honour. "Is the Speaker's wife supposed to queue for the No 12 bus when she does her shopping?" he demanded.

Luckily we've still got Gordon Brown, a renowned skinflint who has already ditched his predecessor's "Blair Force One" flight plans. Mr Brown arrived for his official visit to the United States in a rented 757, only to be upstaged by the Pope.

Comments

[William Pender]

As an officer in the Canadian Army, I attended a three-month staff course in Toronto on which a fellow student was a newly-married naval pilot based at Comox on Vancouver Island, some three thousand miles away. We finished at noon on Fridays by which time another pilot on my colleague's squadron, and who had a girl-friend in Toronto, had flown a T-33 jet trainer four and a half hours across Canada (refuelling in Winnipeg) to Toronto Airport, where he handed the plane over to my colleague, who then retraced the route back to Comox, and spent the weekend with his new bride, before they both repeated the exercise in reverse on Sundays! Both had no trouble keeping up their minimum flying training hours!