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Prince William, heir to the British throne, returned to the public stage on Wednesday, trying to project a strong sense of normality, two days after the announcement that his father, King Charles III, had suffered from cancer.
But as William held an honors ceremony at Windsor Castle and attended a charity fundraiser in London, a shadow of uncertainty hung over the 41-year-old prince. No one other than Charles and his wife, Queen Camilla, faces longer disruption from the king’s cancer diagnosis than his eldest son.
The defense work, family life and zone of privacy that William has carved out for himself are very different from those of his father, when he served as Prince of Wales. It is, at best, uncertain whether William will be able to preserve those qualities as he replaces his father during his treatment.
“William has tended to devote himself less to the routine day-to-day work of the monarchy, compared to his father, focusing instead on larger, more ostentatious engagements,” said Ed Owens, a royal historian. “But now he is expected to occupy many of these more mundane public outlets.”
It’s not just about managing his calendar: William’s professional approach, members of his staff say, has been to pour his energy into a couple of high-impact social issues (most recently, climate change and homelessness) where he believes he can do it. make a tangible difference.
The extent of William’s ambition is evident in an impending restructure at his office at Kensington Palace. He and his wife, Catherine, are expected to name, for the first time, a chief executive. Using a corporate title instead of the traditional private secretary title, a person with knowledge of the office said, is calculated to attract candidates with business credentials and reinforce the professional nature of the office.
Among the prince’s major projects is a five-year program seeking to end homelessness in six towns and cities across Britain. While Charles had a similar attachment to favorite subjects such as organic farming and architecture, he approached them in a more ad hoc manner. Much of his time, like that of other royals of his generation, was consumed by ribbon cuttings and other ceremonial tasks.
Now, part of that burden will fall on your son.
“William was trying to explore the limits of what he could do as heir and what he couldn’t do as king,” said Peter Hunt, a former BBC royal correspondent. “The tension is how to carry out his own activities while he supports the monarch. “William will feel that before his father.”
A spokesman for William, Lee Thompson, said Kensington Palace was consulting with Buckingham Palace on how to divvy up the king’s public engagements (William’s events on Wednesday were in his diary before his father’s illness was revealed ).
Meanwhile, Thompson said, William continues to drop off and pick up his children at their school in Berkshire, west of London. It is another break from the royal family’s more remote parenting style in previous generations.
It’s a ritual William and Catherine often share, but one he took on as a single father when she was unexpectedly hospitalized last month (he had suspended public engagements until Wednesday to care for her).
The zeal with which William has thrown a blanket of privacy around his family was dramatized by his wife’s medical treatment. Kensington Palace offered little information about her condition, beyond saying that she was undergoing abdominal surgery. There were no photographs of the couple’s children (George, Charlotte and Louis) visiting her mother in the hospital. There were also no images of her return home almost two weeks later.
The contrast with Charles was striking. Buckingham Palace revealed that he would undergo a procedure for an enlarged prostate. Camilla was photographed visiting her husband and the couple left the hospital together, waving to the cameras as they walked to their car.
Some of those differences can be explained by history. While Charles has received his share of criticism from the British tabloids, he has continued to work with those newspapers in what is essentially a transactional relationship.
William, however, still bears the scars of the ruthless coverage of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, which led to her death in a car accident in Paris in 1997, pursued by paparazzi. In 2021, the prince harshly criticized the BBC for a sensational interview he aired with Diana in 1995, during which he discussed the marital infidelities of her ex-husband, Charles.
The BBC apologized for the report after an external investigation concluded that its correspondent, Martin Bashir, had used deceptive methods to obtain the interview and that BBC management had covered it up.
“It brings me unspeakable sadness to know that the BBC’s failures contributed significantly to the fear, paranoia and isolation I remember from those final years with it,” William said in a video statement.
The prince’s younger brother, Harry, has claimed that William was not above speaking ill of family members to the tabloids. William has also not hesitated to use lawyers to go after the press, winning a “huge sum of money” in 2020 from Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper group to settle allegations that its journalists had hacked into his cellphone, according to a legal filing. by Harry.
It’s no surprise that William’s emotional scars extend to his brother. The two fell out after Harry and his wife, Meghan, moved to California in 2020, and there are no signs of a rapprochement. Harry flew to London this week to visit his father, but the brothers did not meet, according to a person familiar with his schedule.
As the royal ranks have thinned, William’s family has come to the fore at events such as Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral and Charles’ coronation. That inevitably attracted the camera’s gaze. The couple’s five-year-old son, Prince Louis, has become a modern version of young Harry, writhing and grimacing on solemn occasions.
A lovely picture for the newspapers, no doubt, but also a reminder that William and Catherine still have a young family.
Charles had to wait decades to become king. If his health deteriorates, his eldest son may face the opposite problem: being forced to get a job before having the opportunity to explore his social and philanthropic ambitions, and exposing his children (especially his eldest son and heir, George) to unwanted attention.
“That’s going to be a big problem for him,” Hunt said. “George is only 10 years old. You can imagine William saying to himself, ‘How can I create a buffer for him?’”