Prince William broke up with Kate Middleton over the phone, shouted ‘I’m free’

Private details from Prince William and Kate Middleton’s headline-making split, before they went on to marry, have emerged in a new book.

To many, Prince William and Kate Middleton are an ideal couple, but they’ve encountered some struggles to get where they are now.

According to royal author and journalist Robert Jobson, William once broke up with Kate in a phone call, then went to celebrate with friends at a London club. Jobson claimed that a drunk William told patrons of the bar that he was “free,” but it didn’t take long for Kate to get him back.

In excerpts from Jobson’s new book, Catherine, the Princess of Wales, obtained by the UK’s DailyMail, the author wrote that after several years of dating, William “unexpectedly cancelled plans to attend a New Year gathering in Dundee, arranged by the Middletons” in 2007.

“She sensed something was wrong,” Jobson continued, referring to Kate. “It certainly wasn’t helping that newspapers were confidently predicting a royal engagement. Soon afterwards, seemingly out of the blue, William – now a 2nd Lieutenant in the Blues and Royals – telephoned her to suggest that they split up.”

The Prince and Princess of Wales are now married with three children. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

“He told her they both needed ‘a bit of space’ to ‘find our own way’, and he was unable to promise her marriage. In an emotionally charged 30-minute conversation, they both acknowledged they were on ‘different pages.’”

Jobson claimed that the break-up was “a devastating blow to Catherine, who felt doubly let down at being dumped over the phone. Though it wasn’t the first time William had called time on their relationship, it felt final.”

Meanwhile, William allegedly “celebrated their break-up with an alcohol-fuelled night at the Mahiki nightclub in Mayfair with his close pals.”

“‘I’m free!’ he shouted as he slipped into a drunken version of the robot dance,” Jobson claimed. “He then told his friends that they should all ‘drink the menu,’ which they more or less ended up doing.”

The excerpt explains that instead of moping about the split, Kate continued living her life, despite continued attention from paparazzi. Photos circulated of her going out and experiencing the London night-life on her own, and William, who was stuck in the Army barracks during much of this time, noticed, and he “began having serious second thoughts.”

Just a few months later, William and Kate were separately invited to a party by a mutual friend – a costume party with a “Freakin Naughty” theme.

The royal couple famously split, before later getting back together. Picture: Reuters/Wire

“She’d arrived dressed as a nurse and William had made a beeline for her,” Jobson wrote. “They then spent the first part of the evening deep in conversation before hitting the dance floor, where they ended up kissing. When friends joked they should get a room, they sloped off together.”

A spokesperson for Kensington Palace, which handles the office for the Prince and Princess of Wales, as well as Buckingham Palace, didn’t immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.

The couple spoke about the break-up in their 2010 engagement interview with ITV, with William explaining, “We were both very young … we were sort of both finding ourselves as such and being different characters and stuff, it was very much trying to find our own way, and we were growing up.”

He added, “It was just sort of a bit of space and a bit of things like that, and it worked out for the better.”

Kate said that while she “wasn’t very happy about it” at the time, “it made me a stronger person.”

“You find out things about yourself that maybe you hadn’t realised, or I think you can get quite consumed by a relationship when you are younger, and I really valued that time for me as well, although I didn’t think it at the time,” she said.

This story originally appeared on Fox News and was reproduced with permission.

Originally published as Prince William broke up with Kate Middleton over the phone, shouted ‘I’m free’