Prince George photo reveals major palace change
The young prince has just appeared somewhere no one had expected and it signals big changes ahead at the palace.
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Kings and future Kings - don’t they have enough already?
There are the gaudy trappings and the palaces that can only be counted using both hands and both feet and more solid gold sporks that lad tucking into a spot of cottage pie could ever need.
But let us add to that list - Kingship will never be replaced by AI.
The great and wonderful Oz of large language models might be coming for many of our jobs but not that of ruling and making small talk over cups of weak tea, as evidenced by Prince George on Monday.
Over iced sponges and Buckingham Palace’s third best china, the prince has just started his public training to be King.
Monday saw the 80th anniversary of VE Day commemorations kick off in the UK with the working members of the royal family all punching in on the Palace clock.
Princess Anne wore the same uniform that the late Queen did on VE Day in 1945, King Charles looked pleased as non-alcoholic punch and Queen Camilla shared memories of her father somehow surviving being shot in the face.
However, in an unexpected turn of events, the adult HRHs were joined, for the first time in such a setting, by the 11-year-old, with his parents Prince William and Kate, The Prince and Princess of Wales having clearly decided to affix George’s regal training wheels.
It was a surprise the importance and meaning of which should not have been missed by a certain someone in Montecito.
Monday’s events started firmly on predictable script: The King, Queen and the Waleses, plus their three children, walking out the Palace front gates to join veterans to watch a military procession down The Mall before repairing to the monarchy Mothership for the airforce flypast.
Here things deviated from the predictable with George peeling off his younger siblings, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis to join his parents at a tea party for veterans, his debut outing at such a Palace event.
Immediately, royal journalists’ pens went into furious overdrive - what’s this then?
The meaning was clear: George was levelling up and the real starting whistle was being blown on his decades-long slog towards the throne.
Not only was the prince seen but, highly significantly, heard with the media reporting on his conversations as he shadowed his parents as they made their way around the tea party.
“What was it like when you were coming in?”, the year six student asked Alfred Littlefield, who was part of the Normandy landings, according to the Telegraph.
“Pretty awful,” Mr Littlefield said.
At another point Kate, per the Telegraph, introduced her son to 99-year-old Charles Auborn, saying: “This is my son George, I was telling you about.”
He in turn asked Mr Auborn of the tanks he drove during the war, “Were they hard to operate? It must have been very tough with the weather.”
It was, by all accounts, a stirling, top-marks performance for the future King George VII and a clear waymarker.
Until now, George’s royal outings have been generally limited to the occasional photo op, a Palace balcony waving session here and there, a Westminster Abbey service every so often and being forcibly posed in a garden once-a-year while his mother shoots an at-home portrait to mark his birthday to be doled out for front page purposes.
The prince has now taken a major step up as he begins to learn the ropes.
But, the most interesting thing about all this is the timing given it came only days after his uncle Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex gave a blistering new TV interview.
Last week Harry lost his three-year-long UK court battle over his security, a defeat the duke processed by sitting down with the BBC to meet his annual quota of sour and emotional public gos at Crown Inc.
It was a performance that, somehow, reportedly only made the tear in the time/space continuum between Montecito and London that much worse.
Even before this latest outburst Harry had already been shoved to the farthest reaches of royal deep space but afterwards, he was clearly only being pushed even further to the colder, darker reaches.
The appearance of George at the Palace tea party, only days later, just further hammers home inconsequential the duke now is to the future of Crown Inc.
The hurts, the miseries and the tumult of his and wife Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex’s melodramatic exit from royal life, followed by their willingness to regularly air their grievances like washerwomen tirelessly working a mangle, are receding into the rear view mirror, especially as the younger princes and princess are being slowly brought online, so to speak.
Whether intended or not, the images of George intently listening to veterans send the clear message that the royal pipeline is working just fine. Harry might be gone but there are more princes in the wings.
The age of the Duke of Sussex’s relevance, such as it still exists, is closing; the inbuilt obsolescence of the spare, as he himself has talked about, is fast-approaching.
On the same day that Harry was speaking to the BBC, his niece Princess Charlotte turned ten-years-old, with Kensington Palace releasing a shot, taken by Kate, showing her dressed oh-so-casually in a camo jacket on some picturesque bit of hillside.
It is now only a matter of eight years until both she and George are at university or embarking on military stints, adults who can and will be fully deployed and utilised by Crown Inc.
Between Harry’s latest interview (you would need an Excel spreadsheet to even begin to keep count) and George beginning his King training, the image of the duke increasingly seems to be that of an irritant, the grit in oyster, the pebble in the shoe.
Just imagine what things might look like ten years from now for the 90th anniversary of VE Day.
The flypast will be run by AI, Kate will still be giving perfect hat, Louis will nearly have finished high school and in California, you have to wonder, will anyone be having major regrets?
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
Originally published as Prince George photo reveals major palace change
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