Brutal message hidden in Prince William’s new makeover

The Prince of Wales has debuted a surprising new look that will revive debate about one of Prince Harry’s wildest claims in his tell-all book.

The date: Christmas Eve, 2008. The place: Kings Lynn, Norfolk. The world: Shooketh.

Prince William had taken to a football pitch near his Granny’s Sandringham Estate for a friendly football game with estate workers and locals, as you do, and he had, pause for dramatic effect, somehow acquired a BEARD:

A very hairy Prince, in late 2008. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty

The following day, when the royal family put down their selection of novelty gifts and the occasional Faberge egg hidden in a Terry’s Chocolate Orange box for a wheeze to walk to church, the suddenly hirsute 26-year-old stole the show.

It was not to last. Within days, His Royal Hairiness was no longer. Vale:

Back to beardless: William with Harry in the first week of January, 2009. Picture: AFP

Until. now.

William, and Kate, the Princess of Wales, have emerged from their current holiday fug of buckets and spades and teatime prawn sandwiches to film a video congratulating the British Olympic team and the royal has clearly returned to his aughties roots.

Just call him the Hair to the throne.

Thus today we have to contemplate two possibly uncomfortable questions. Is William suddenly … looking a bit dishy? And more intriguingly, how much of this can be read as a pointed gibe of a sort vaguely directed towards younger brother Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex?

See, sometimes a beard is not just a beard, especially if one has given over parts of one’s Guinness World Record-breaking memoir to writing about the deep personal and emotional importance of this bit of manly accessorising.

In his infamous tell-all Spare, Harry writes that having a beard had become “an effective check on my anxiety. Illogical, but true … it helped, along with therapy and meditation, and a few other things, to quell my nerves.”

A bearded William makes a new appearance in a video congratulating the UK Olympic team.

So he went to the late Queen to ask for permission to keep it for his 2018 wedding (it was against Army rules) and Her late Majesty agreed. When Harry then told William this, the elder prince “became livid” and “raised his voice.”

“The argument went on, in person, on the phone, for more than a week. He wouldn’t let it go,” the duke writes. “At one point he actually ordered me, as the Heir speaking to the Spare, to shave.”

The reason his elder brother had become so het up about such a seemingly trivial point? As Harry explained, after William had turned up in 2008 with his own beard “someone [had] told him to be a good boy, run along and shave it. He hated the idea of me enjoying a perk he’d been denied.”

So you see, thanks to the duke, in the royal context, facial hair is not just what happens when one’s valet takes a few days off and leaves one to have to do battle with a Gillette all of one’s own but deeply symbolic.

And now Willy, as Harry calls his older brother in said tome, has co-opted exactly the duke’s signature look.

So, accident or deliberate provocation? Laziness or bit of unspoken fraternal poke? Did Holiday William (distinguishable from Royal William by the fact he has exchanged reading about compostable forks at his desk to reading about compostable forks on a Norfolk beach getting sand in his briefing papers) stand in front of his mirror and consider this? Did he think to himself, what better way to irritate his younger brother than purloining something he ascribed such deep personal meaning to?

A beardy Will circa 2008. Picture: Getty

Clean-shaven this year. Picture: WPA Pool/Getty

Or did the prince just decide he couldn’t be arsed to shave and would prefer to be helping Prince Louis bury one of their bodyguards up to his neck at the beach?

Feel free to speculate away.

However, I think we need to agree that now with the addition of The Beard, it’s starting to look like the future King is having something of a Hot Prince Summer.

While on the personal front 2024 has clearly been a rotter of a year with not only his father King Charles but Kate diagnosed with cancer, on the professional front he has been smashing it overall.

His Earthshot Prize is going great guns, having already dispensed $29 million to help fund 15 innovative solutions to the climate crisis. While this is clearly very good, top marks and all that, what is also incredibly valuable is the way he has been trying to change the tone and tenor around the crisis. No doomsaying, thundering speeches about how we are all going to drown in our beds thanks to melting polar ice caps. Instead Earthshot has seen him out on the stump busy cultivating a buoyant sense of optimism and hope that we can stave off the apocalypse.

Prince William has endured a string of family crises this year. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty

The same goes for his program to try and end homelessness in the UK, Homewards, which earlier this year saw him announcing he is building 24 homes to serve as temporary housing on his Duchy of Cornwall land. Again, the prince’s work is not just focused on doing tangible, useful things but about changing attitudes and beliefs. Last week, the Homewards foundation opened a deeply moving exhibition called Homelessness: Reframed opened at London’s exclusive Saatchi Gallery which not only tells human stories but seeks to instil confidence that long term solutions can be found.

All of this is not to say that the prince is getting perfect tens in the royal-ing game. He didn’t bother to support the British team in person in Paris, unlike a slew of other European heirs to thrones, and made frankly infuriating choices like not being arsed to attend the women’s World Cup final in Sydney last year, a turn of events impossible to conceive of if it had been the men’s team.

Also there is plenty to quibble with – those 24 homes for the homeless on Duchy land are swell and all but the estate is worth nearly $2 billion and controls 135,000 acres of land. Couldn’t we at least add a zero to that number?

These are questions though for when Workaday William returns next month when we shall wait with bated breath to see whether The Beard makes it back to the office or will, again, meet its maker over a Norfolk sink.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.

Originally published as Brutal message hidden in Prince William’s new makeover