Yes, Prince William is outspoken. He may be a royal but he’s also a millennial
The future King William has pinned his colours to the mast, unlike his famously discreet grandmother. How the modern Prince of Wales interprets his duty is affected by his generation’s mores.
“Everyone is horrified by what they’re seeing. It’s really horrifying. The news every day, it’s just, it’s almost unfathomable,” the Prince of Wales said as he waded into controversial waters about a war in a foreign land.
This wasn’t his statement from Tuesday, though, in which he spoke of the horrors of the situation in the Middle East. This was 2022 and his comments were about Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Fast forward to this week and William, 41, caused a storm with an outspoken statement about the febrile situation in Gaza. Channelling the great orators Winston Churchill and Barack Obama while also borrowing a line from a speech that the prime minister Rishi Sunak gave on the subject last year, Prince William warned: “Even in the darkest hour, we must not succumb to the counsel of despair.” He added: “There is a desperate need for increased humanitarian support to Gaza. It’s critical that aid gets in and hostages are released.”
A statement from The Prince of Wales pic.twitter.com/LV2jMx75DC
— The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) February 20, 2024
It has been seen as his most significant intervention in international politics to date. Some said that members of the royal family should not stray into contentious topics, particularly one on which there are such strongly divergent views.
Understanding how the @BritishRedCross is providing vital humanitarian aid to those affected by the conflict in the Middle East. Staff and volunteers continue to work day and night to bring life-saving assistance and medical treatment to those who need it most. pic.twitter.com/7OjEQF7zeF
— The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) February 20, 2024
William’s grandmother managed to keep her views almost completely unknown for 70 years. Even, famously, the contents of her handbag seemed to be a state secret. It meant that when the Queen told a wellwisher that she hoped people would “think very carefully” before voting in the Scottish referendum, it seemed like an explosive revelation.
What would she think of her grandson’s radical departure from such careful messaging?
The future King William, however, has pinned his colours to the mast. In his autobiography, Spare, Prince Harry accused his brother of being aggressive, pushing him onto a dog bowl. It revealed an impulsive side to William, a temper perhaps inherited from his father and, if reports of the time are accurate, King George VI.
When the Duke and Duchess of Sussex effectively accused the royal family of racism in their interview with Oprah Winfrey, William was furious. Understandably so. He snapped when a reporter shouted a question about the allegations during an engagement, responding: “We are very much not a racist family.”
Again, he appeared impetuous when his godmother Lady Susan Hussey was revealed to have asked a black guest at Buckingham Palace where she was “really” from? Keen not to be drawn into the debacle, particularly as he was about to board a plane to the US for his Earthshot awards, William gave instructions to an aide to address the claims. Speaking with the prince’s authority, a Palace spokesman said the actions were “unacceptable”, adding: “Racism has no place in our society.”
So why speak out on the Middle East now, when the monarchy is soldiering on with both the King and Princess of Wales out of action owing to ill health? The reason is, on some level, very personal.
William and Kate are understood to watch the television news together and William is said to get updates from Sky News on his phone. Like many people, and perhaps particularly millennial parents of young children, as William is, he has been appalled by the latest atrocities in the Middle East. The images of maimed children are unending. Aides say that, like his mother before him, he feels the burden of using his platform as a royal to make a difference.
Yet there’s also something more seismic happening here. Sources say it is part of a plan for William who, with no time to lose, is manoeuvring from being the well-meaning Duke of Cambridge, who champions mental health causes, to someone altogether more serious. Someone people around the world can recognise as a legitimate king-in-waiting. He has only been Prince of Wales for 18 months and is now the heir to a 75-year-old monarch with cancer.
In many ways William has the opposite problem that his father did when he was Prince of Wales. Charles spent more than six decades in the role, from the age of nine until his ascension at 73. Desperate to make his mark, he created charities and fired off his now infamous spider memos to government ministers.
Outspoken, yes. But Charles mostly sparked controversy without meaning to. When he assumed he was having a private conversation with a Jewish survivor of the Second World War in 2014, he said of Russia’s annexation of Crimea: “Now Putin is doing just about the same as Hitler.” It triggered a war of words between Russia and the UK. The Kremlin decried the comments as “outrageous” and “low”, while the Foreign Office said that it couldn’t possibly comment on private conversations.
On another occasion, a leak of Charles’s diaries from the 1997 Hong Kong handover revealed what he thought of the Chinese officials: “Appalling old waxworks.” Charles sued the newspaper that first published his journal, yet the damage had been done.
By contrast, William’s outspoken interventions are part of a deliberate strategy. Unlike his father, he has made an official trip to China and last year spoke to Singapore’s prime minister about taking his Earthshot environmental prize there. Let’s face it, if William can convince China, the world’s most polluting country, to change its ways, he might really be on to something.
One look at William’s office – for it is much more of a professional office than a royal court – shows that his outlook is much more presidential. He is in the process of hiring a chief executive and has confirmed the appointment of Lieutenant Colonel Tom White, the Queen’s former equerry, as Kate’s private secretary. No anodyne civil servant, the war hero White managed to avert a tragedy in March 2009 when the Taliban rigged up a school with explosives in Helmand, Afghanistan. White helped to spot wires under a classroom door and has said, “These people could have blown a lot of kids sky high and they didn’t care.”
Action in the face of horror is clearly William’s forte, if the past week is anything to go by. So what does this new office hope to achieve as it launches Prince William as a global statesman? Aides say there are two prongs to William’s ambitions: legacy and impact. With regards to the latter, Kate and William seem to have it in spades. Together they seem to have an alchemy of magisterial glamour. Legacy is something a little harder to grasp: it’s impossible to tell if you’re doing a good job until you’re looking back from a future vantage point.
Like most Palace plans, however, this has been a long time in the making. Take last year, for example, when William doubled down on his views of Russia’s invasion as he made a secret visit to a military base near the Ukraine border with Poland. He flew to Rzeszow in Poland, where he thanked British troops for “defending our freedoms”.
When he was furious with the BBC’s deceit and cover-up over his mother’s Panorama interview with Martin Bashir, he didn’t hold back. In a statement during which he looked straight at the camera, he condemned the “woeful incompetence” of the organisation. The delivery was deliberate and measured, which made it all the more forceful.
William made history in 2018 when he became the first member of the royal family to visit the West Bank. During a four-day trip he went to a refugee camp and gave a speech in Jerusalem in which he told Palestinians: “You have not been forgotten.”
William, for the most part, has learnt to put on a mask. It’s a royal role that he seems to play well. Yesterday he conducted an investiture at Windsor Castle as planned. Next Friday, as the Prince of Wales, he is expected to visit the country to mark St David’s Day. He has dismissed the notion of a lavish investiture like his father’s in Caernarfon in 1969, but he might still be wise to learn some Welsh like his father did as Prince of Wales.
“He’s in the reeds,” a Palace source says. “And by that I mean he is across his briefs. He has done his homework and he’s thought about it.” The message is clear that his Middle East intervention was a tactical and deliberate attempt to continue to establish him as a king-in-waiting on the world stage.
The Times
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