Prince William soars while Prince Harry vanishes
That Taylor Swift selfie capped off what has been the best month this year for the prince and he’s a world away from his brother who has all but disappeared.
Irony or a wicked sense of humour?
This week a new portrait was unveiled of Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex with him painted as Bonnie Prince Charlie, James II’s grandson and the pretender to the throne who reckoned he was meant to be King.
Charlie, having hared off to foreign shores to bang on about how hard done by he had been by the crown, then drummed up support for his separatist cause only to return to have a crack at retaking England. It was nothing short of an unmitigated disaster and was the last pitched battle on British soil.
It’s a tale that has a certain familiar ring to it, no?
For years now another pitched battle has been going on, only involving fewer bayonets and broadswords and a lot more banging on about the indignity of being given the smaller bedroom at Balmoral.
Like Charlie a couple of centuries before him, Harry has discovered that besting the crown can be much harder than it looks.
The last month has only reinforced this. If anyone is keeping score then we can very clearly see that Prince William has had a humdinger of a June while Harry has seemingly disappeared underground.
William’s beaut of a month was officially declared this week after Travis Kelce, Taylor Swift’s steady squeeze, and his brother Jason used their podcast to enthuse, and enthuse some more, about how “cool” the prince is after meeting him backstage at one of Swift’s London shows.
“Dude, he was the coolest motherf----r. He was so cool,” Travis said, also saying that he was
“very genuine, very cool” and that it was “an absolute delight” meeting him, Prince George and Princess Charlotte.
“If anyone’s doing it right, William’s doing it right. So thank you, Your Royal Highness, it was awesome meeting you. And very much Charlotte and George,” he effused.
The combination of Taylor, Travis, the Prince of Wales and his eldest children all in one selfie nearly crippled social media this week, with the shot being viewed more than 63 million times on X, formerly Twitter alone, the only platform where there are easily available numbers.
It is hard to overstate him having just gotten the tick of approval from the most potent and powerful cultural force on the planet in the form of Taylor. It might be decades before William is actually crowned but this week saw the pop culture equivalent. Call it ‘The King -the zeitgeist version’.
That Eras tour masterstroke and now the Kelces raving about the prince have capped off a month that has seen things turn a corner for the Waleses after a rotter of a year. Kate made her triumphant comeback, partially at least, by appearing at Trooping the Colour; not one but two new photo portraits of William and the kids, and both taken by the princess, did some very brisk and successful social media and press business; and the prince was officially crowned Dad of the Year, Windsor Estate Edition by taking his kids to see Taylor – and then managing to engineer that internet-rattling selfie.
There were plenty of other nice bits and pieces too in case you want to make sure that your scrapbook is up to date: William got to have a go at being a true global statesman alongside Presidents including Joe Biden at the D-Day commemorations in France; he went to Ascot and was showered with cousinly affection; he got to don his ridiculous Order of the Garter robe (does any adult ever not look ridiculous in velvet?) and revel in being a member of the 675-year-old chivalric order; and someone probably surprised him with a Waitrose mud cake and handmade card covered in Uhu-ed teensy, spare rubies Prince Louis had found down the back of a sofa for his 42nd birthday.
And then we have Harry, who is a mystery, wrapped in a riddle, swaddled in organic cotton and the whiff of a certain aimlessness and rudderlessness.
Remarkably, both he and wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex have not been seen once this June. Not one pap shot of them doing something so extraordinary as going out to eat or walking. Neither of them have done an interview or a podcast or a roundtable or appeared in a selfie or done a single charity thingamabob.
After their successful mini look-we-made-it-ourselves tour of Nigeria in early May, the Sussexes have, it seems, gone to ground.
On the upside, this well could be exactly what they want. 30 days-plus of living a life wholly unmolested by the press or even Californian onlookers furtively snapping iPhone shots of the duke picking up an iced mocha with extra whipped cream to go when Meghan wasn’t looking? This apparent peace has got to be the dream for the couple for whom leering public and media intrusion has long been a major stressor.
Still the question, as always for the Sussexes, is what next? What next for the duke and duchess as they build and shape the next phase of their US lives? What next for two people who left the starched, gaoling embrace of the palace to forge their own way into the great unknown?
Maybe a year from now Meghan’s American Riviera Orchard jam will be on breakfast tables the length and breadth of the continental United States and Harry’s polo series for Netflix will have stormed the streamer’s charts making the sport so popular that JCrew has started selling jodhpurs and you can get a polo mallet at Macy’s.
But in the meantime, just as William’s global consequence and cultural currency seems to be expanding, the Sussexes seem to have vanished off into a mysterious fug with no end of question marks hanging over their futures and careers.
As we wait to see what the coming months bring, believe me when I say that it’s taking every fibre of my being to not finish this all up with a line about ‘shaking it off’ …
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.
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