‘Impossible to believe’: King Charles’ massive ‘missed opportunity’ revealed
King Charles has had a big week – and it included one seriously awkward “missed opportunity” regarding his son Prince William.
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Poor President Biden.
This week he squeezed in a whirlwind visit to the UK and he faced the most arduous, demanding task an American President faces when in Britain – pretending to like the tea.
First he had to have a mug of it with British PM Rishi Sunak for the least natural-looking garden chitchat since the Yalta Treaty participants had a break in the sunshine, before he was off to Windsor to meet King Charles for, you guessed it, more tea.
But once there, POTUS’ quickie pit stop to gladhand, quite literally, the king went off without a hitch.
Charles didn’t once try to persuade him about the benefits of homoeopathic remedies or show him Queen Camilla’s beer coaster collection.
Biden, to his credit, managed to get through the entire engagement without suggesting to Charles they blow off the official schedule and go out to get ice cream together.
Call it a win all round.
Except if your name is William Arthur Philip Louis, ie the Prince of Wales.
See, after all that tea, the king and the president then joined a slew of financiers with so much money under their control they could bankrupt Bolivia on a whim (Friday Funday?) – aka the chaps of the Climate Finance Mobilisation Forum.
Also in the room were UK Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Grant Shapps and US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry.
The whole thing sounds so dull I need a double jolt of espresso to recover from even writing that paragraph, and we could pass right over this climate talkathon – except for the fact that there was one glaring thing missing from the room: William.
The climate crisis is one of two key issues that the prince is ploughing the vast majority his energies and enormous sums of charity money into. (The other being his ambition to end homelessness, with mental health work coming a close third).
In 2020, William launched the £50 million ($A96 million) Earthshot Prize, modelled on no less a figure than John F Kennedy’s ‘Moonshot’ ambition to land a man on the moon. (And make no mistake, it was going to be a man, and a white one, because the closest thing to cutting edge scientific innovation that John probably thought ladies should be getting was wrapping their head around the instruction manual of their new washer/dryer).
Anyhoo, in 10 years, Earthshot will support 50 innovative and creative solutions from around the world trying to address the fact that the earth is warming up faster than that BP pastie Camilla forgot she had put on the central heating.
So William and his prize have travelled to the US, given out just shy of $A20 million, and this year will expand things such that there will be an entire Earthshot Week in Singapore.
And yet, when this Very Important Meeting full of men in Brioni suits gathered at Windsor Castle, only five minutes away from William and Kate’s home, Adelaide Cottage, he was nowhere to be seen, a three-hour drive away talking about sustainable carrots.
While his dear Pa was up at the big house playing the statesman with Joe, the prince was in the Duchy of Cornwall opening the cafe at the Duchy of Cornwall Nursery for what would have to have been the lowest key royal engagement since Princess Anne once opened a new express checkout lane at her local Tesco. (Well, I’m assuming).
I find it impossible to believe that William would have merrily turned down an opportunity to take part in this sort of high-level climate change chit-chatting and large cheque-pledging to spend an afternoon discussing locally sourced produce with cafe staff.
What would you prefer? Hobnobbing with titans of the finance world as you helped save the world, cape not included, or politely discussing the vagaries of the new espresso machine’s milk frother?
It would have made sense for William to be in that Windsor meeting – last year, he met with Biden while in the US for the Earthshot Prize and Kerry was an honorary member of the Boston 2022 Prize host committee.
One interpretation of why the Prince of Wales was not there could be that the king essentially didn’t want to have to share his presidential toy for the day with his son. Here was a plum opportunity for His Majesty to look like a king, hanging out with someone who has the nuclear codes, leading talks and getting resoundingly congratulated by Kerry during TV interviews.
For more than 50 years, Charles was like a sort of royal geisha, always following a few steps behind his mother and then later his wife, metaphorically speaking. He was always the “and” – as in, “and here’s Charles too”. He never got top billing and was never the HRH the public really wanted to see, viewing him with a sort of curious suspicion as he nattered on about conservation, 15th century Tuscan architecture and why the designer of the Tate Modern should be exiled to the Orkneys.
So maybe now that Charles has a crown, a throne and the security code for the Houses of Parliament side door, he doesn’t want his more popular son stealing any of his limelight.
Maybe he wanted to be congratulated for his decades of assiduous work on green issues, to bask in the glow of the praise of the gathered big names at Windsor.
Still, whatever the “why” might be here – why William was not part of this meeting – his absence needs to be filed under “M for Mistake” in the palace files, right next to “Moet, Orders”, “Markle, Meghan” and “Michelangelos, questionably acquired”.
If the Prince of Wales had joined his father, the president and all those finance chaps inside the Green Dining Room, it would have been a real show of a royal united front. Here we would have seen both the king and the next king jointly committed to trying to prevent the sea levels rising such that Highgrove becomes waterfront property.
It would have been an image that really burnished the idea of a royal family all pulling in the same direction and not an institution riddled with insecurities, egos and competing royal households, as books including Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex’s Spare and Valentine Low’s Courtiers have laid claim.
Seeing Charles riding solo (side note – where was Camilla? Had the new Jeffrey Archer finally arrived, thus putting her out of action for a couple of days?) only served as a bit of a reminder of the competitiveness that has historically bedevilled The Firm.
This was a real missed opportunity to show that things had changed, a PR win that was easily within their grasp.
At least now, thanks to his Duchy engagement, maybe William has finally learned how to make a decent latte.
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 ‘Impossible to believe’: King Charles’ massive ‘missed opportunity’ revealed
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