Ten police officers were summoned to protect Kate Middleton, the girlfriend of Prince William, from photographers as the pair left a nightclub in the early hours of yesterday.

Interest by paparazzi in Ms Middleton, who will be 25 on Tuesday, has increased in recent months. They now follow her wherever she goes and their attentions have encouraged speculation, as yet unfounded, that an engagement may be imminent.

On Thursday four police officers were posted outside her home in Chelsea, West London, as photographers lay in wait hoping to get a picture of her leaving for work.

As a private indivdual, Ms Middleton is not entitled to round-the-clock police protection. But she would immediately be assigned her own team if she were to become engaged to Prince William.

Formerly a fellow-student and flatmate of Prince William, 24, at the University of St Andrews, Ms Middleton has complained of being followed by paparazzi since she left the Scottish university.

She now finds herself in the position of Diana, Princess of Wales, who was hounded by cameramen from the first rumour of her romance with the Prince of Wales until her death in a Paris underpass in 1997.

Two years ago Ms Middleton, the daughter of solidly middle-class parents who have never sought publicity, hired the Prince of Wales’s lawyers to appeal to newspaper editors for the press to leave her and her family alone.

Neither Clarence House nor the Metropolitan Police would comment on the matter yesterday, saying that they never made statements on security matters.

Evidence that long lenses now follow Ms Middleton’s every move was shown in recent days when she was photographed receiving a parking ticket when she left her Volkswagen Golf in a temporarily suspended residents’ parking bay near her home.

And all eyes were on her when,dressed in a scarlet coat, she attended Prince William’s passing-out parade at Sandhurst shortly before Christmas, even though she was seated in the public stand and not with other members of the Royal Family.

Lipreaders hired by a television news channel claimed that she remarked how sexy the Prince of Wales’s elder son looked in the uniform of a cornet (second lieutenant) in the Household Cavalry.

Last month Ms Middleton, who has suffered some criticism for not having a “proper” job, started work as a buyer for Jigsaw, the fashion chain that has 40 clothing shops around the country.

It was reported in November that Woolworths was so confident of the couple’s impending engagement that they commissioned a set of William and Kate souvenirs, including plates, mugs, mobile phones and mouse mats.

Ms Middleton, whose family run an upmarket mail-order business, would be the first commoner to marry a future king of England since Anne Hyde married the ill-fated James II in 1660.

She died aged 34 and James, a staunch Roman Catholic in essentially Protestant times, effectively abdicated and was routed by William of Orange at the Boyne in 1690.

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