What must it be like to be Prince William of Wales, Knight of the Garter and second in line to the throne of 16 countries? As he waits for 40 minutes at Westminster Abbey this morning for the arrival of his bride — a pause intended to allow him dutifully to greet the massed ranks of arriving royal families and to have a few moments’ privacy in an antechapel before the ceremony — the thought that he is also under the remorseless gaze of several hundred million people from Hong Kong to Honolulu will doubtless also bear down heavily upon him.
As his aides say, it is a special day for him and Kate Middleton — “a very personal moment,” as memorable as for any other couple getting married — but also one that will be shared with a large proportion of the world’s population, stretching way beyond the Commonwealth. The US networks alone are sending hundreds of staff to provide live coverage through the day.
A religious ceremony, yes, aides say, but also a chance to show potential tourists what Britain is still best at: pomp, ceremony, pageantry and tradition. A personal event, but one happily also combining commercial, political and constitutional opportunities.
William knows all that. He has been the focus of intense, intrusive scrutiny all his life — even before it, actually, as the tabloids could not resist publishing photographs of his five-months pregnant mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, wearing a bikini on holiday in the Bahamas.
From the moment of his birth at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, on June 21, 1982, William Arthur Philip Louis — a prince from birth and immediately second in the rank of succession — has been the center of fascination and speculation: What would he look like, what would he be like, who would he marry? As his father, Prince Charles, wrote at the time: “I have never seen such scenes as there were outside the hospital when I left that night — everyone had gone berserk with excitement.”
Since then, every step he has taken has been scrutinized, analyzed, dissected for hidden meaning and commented upon, usually by people who have never met him and often have never even seen him in the flesh. He is the great Known Unknown. It must be very irksome.
From a public childhood, through a vicious parental breakup as he reached his teens, to the trauma of his mother’s appallingly sudden death and the overwhelmingly public emotion surrounding her funeral — during which he, as a 15-year-old, had to walk behind her coffin through weeping, febrile, self-righteous crowds — to his university days, services career and prolonged courtship of Middleton, he has never not been in the spotlight.
In the circumstances, it is a wonder he has turned out as “normal” as he has. There have been no temper tantrums, no documented instances of peevish bad behavior or shirtiness, no haughtiness or snobbishness, no unguarded utterances, no drug-taking or public drunkenness, no unsuitable girlfriends: precious little, in fact, for the tabloids to get their teeth into.
Had there been, we would certainly have heard about them, read about the revelations of former friends, or the gossip of rancorous palace servants, and seen the pictures spread in glorious technicolor across the pages of the press. They would certainly have found their way into the pantheon of the royal soap opera: The template of a world of passion and emotion into which the family is supposed to fit and so often has, obligingly, in recent decades.
Instead of which, those who have met him speak privately, as well as publicly, of a decent young man, approachable, genial and serious-minded, able to make conversation and not be stilted about it, committed both to the charities in which he is interested and to his nascent career as an air-sea rescue helicopter pilot, a genuinely useful job. Aware of his huge privileges certainly, but also the duties they bring.
Ah yes — duty. It is something that weighs down his father and which has been drummed into William. Easy enough to say he could renounce it all and walk away, but that is not how the royal family works: They see it as their raison d’etre and what holds them ultimately in place.
It is said that, at age seven, William told his mother he wanted to be a policeman, only for his little brother Harry to perk up with: “Oh no, you can’t — you’ve got to be king.”
As William said when giving a rare interview on his 21st birthday eight years ago: “All these questions about do you want to be king? It’s not a question of wanting to be, it’s something I was born into and it’s my duty.”
Patrick Jephson, formerly Diana’s private secretary, says she repeatedly told her son he had been born to fulfill a duty and it would be an opportunity for him to use his influence for the good of those less fortunate than himself.
There is no doubt that his mother remains a hugely formative influence. She was determined to give him and his brother as normal an upbringing as possible — hence the trips to McDonald’s and to theme parks and the playing with her valet Paul Burrell’s children. These were gestures that were highly unusual at the time, given what limited experience of the outside “ordinary” world previous princes, including their father Charles, had had. Diana was clearly a hugely affectionate and protective mother, too, perhaps making up for the neglect she felt from her husband and the isolation of her own childhood.
And there were her own attempts at media training. As a friend told Diana’s biographer Sarah Bradford: “William was in the school play. He was very little, probably three and a half ... all dressed up in a little nativity outfit. And there was this huge bank of photographers all on ladders. They have even got big coats and woolly hats. They look like a rabble and they have all got these big cameras. It’s terrifying anyway, let alone if you are a little tiny boy. And everyone was shouting out ‘William, William, William!’ It must have been terrifically difficult for a child that age to understand.”
“I asked her once, what do you do about that? And she said she had had to say to him: ‘You are going to go to school today and there’s going to be all these people who want to take your picture and if you are a good boy and you let them ... then I’ll take you to Thorpe Park next week,’” the friend said.
Ordinariness had its limits: There could be no state schooling for the boy princes. Perhaps it is easier to protect such celebrities by tucking them away in a boarding school, such as Eton, used to famous offspring. At any rate, they were spared the rigors of Gordonstoun, which their father had hated.
It did not protect them from the highly public crash of their parents’ marriage collapse. William, Bradford says, heard the rows and shouting from outside the door. He and his brother were ruthlessly used as pawns by both sides in the divorce settlement. Burrell — who may or may not be a reliable witness — says the queen told Diana: “My concern is only that those children have been the battleground of a marriage that has broken down.”
Perhaps the queen really does speak like a soap opera matriarch, but the sentiments must have been genuine.
Then there was the ghastly summer of 1997: The teenaged princes again pawns in their mother’s continuing campaign to assert herself. The boys were guests of Mohamed Al Fayed on his yacht, specially bought to impress the princess and encourage her relationship with his playboy son Dodi, and were then packed off to Balmoral to go fishing and shooting with their father.
It was he who broke the news to them that their mother had been killed in the Paris car crash. William said he knew something dreadful had happened because he had kept waking up that night. They were immediately surrounded by the constipated emotions of the royal family, their father moaning: “They are all going to blame me, aren’t they?” and the hysteria emanating from beyond the palace gates.
There were real fears the royal family would be attacked at the funeral. It was the Duke of Edinburgh, usually thought of as a megalith of frosted and unempathetic emotion, who said that if the boys wanted to walk behind their mother’s coffin, he would be beside them.
“Not a day goes by when I don’t think about [the crash] once in the day,” William said in 2007.
Last week he took his bride to visit his mother’s grave on an island at Althorp, the Spencer family’s ancestral Northamptonshire estate.
William obtained reasonable A-levels (school leaving exams taken at about 16) — A in geography, B in history of art, where he could at least cite the royal collection if he needed examples, and C in biology — before proceeding to the University of St Andrews in Scotland to read art history.
It was chosen specifically as a suitably remote location, away from metropolitan distractions, albeit that a chastened media were more respectful of his privacy following the Diana experience.
University was nevertheless something of an ordeal, going out into a slightly less enclosed world, though one with many students of affluent and privileged backgrounds. He nearly quit and it was another student, Middleton, who persuaded him he would be happier switching subjects, to geography.
The pair discreetly moved in together, sharing first a house in the town with other students and then, again in a foursome, a cottage on a country estate. In 2005 William graduated with an upper second, the highest degree a British prince has ever attained on merit.
“He is a really nice young man. I warmed to him: He is very natural, understated. He did not push himself forward. He was very keen to ensure his presence did not disrupt things. He was just a regular guy, fitted in brilliantly,” said Charles Warren, his geography tutor.
Since then William has embarked on the standard military training of a royal prince, in all three services: Sandhurst and a commission in the posh Blues and Royals Household Cavalry regiment for the army; time with the Navy on HMS Iron Duke, chasing drug smugglers in the Caribbean; and then pilot training with the Royal Air Force and most recently with the helicopter air-sea rescue service off Anglesey. Some of his colleagues have been invited to the wedding: He mucks in well, they say, a good bloke. Two weeks’ leave for a honeymoon and then he will be back there.
William has also adopted his mother’s charitable instincts and some of her charities, too, especially those dealing with the damaged and disadvantaged: HIV/AIDS clinics, the Royal Marsden Hospital and Centrepoint, the homeless charity, as well as the English Schools’ Swimming Association and the Tusk Trust wildlife conservation charity in Africa. These are not perfunctory duties.
Just before Christmas a year ago, he spent a freezing night sleeping rough near Blackfriars Bridge in London to see what the homeless sometimes endure. Afterwards, he said: “I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it must be like to sleep rough night after night.” Easy to sneer — at least he did it.
Then there is also the soccer, not normally a royal pursuit. -William has done the hunting, shooting, skiing and polo — he was also rather good at water polo, representing Scottish Universities — but soccer is a real enthusiasm.
Beyond his recherche support for Aston Villa, his appointment as president of the Football Association (he is also vice patron of the Welsh Rugby Footbal Union) and his mobilization on behalf of England’s failed World Cup bid — which is where the Beckhams’ wedding invitation originated — he also still plays.
Only last week a team turning up for a kickabout in Battersea Park were surprised to see him on the other side.
“He was really good in the air, a solid header and good at tackling ... in the changing room we all thought, did that just happen? I didn’t want to be the person who accidentally broke his ankle or gave him a black eye just before the wedding,” said Martin Bruce, a radio producer.
He and Middleton have been partners, with one brief break in 2007, for the past eight years, living together just as many of their generation do and without the censure from conservative churchmen that might have occurred 20 years ago, even though William will one day be defender of their faith, as head of the Church of England.
He and his bride therefore know each other before their marriage better and more intimately probably than any previous royal partnership. William has not been hawked round the royal families of Europe or the aristocracy of Britain in search of a bride, as his father was. That Middleton does not come from such a background is viewed by the less stuffy members of the royal household as a plus.
The couple are also older than their predecessors. Both are 29 — William is now only seven years younger than his mother was when she died — and both have a back story of shared experiences.
They have a close circle of friends from similar backgrounds, carefully scrutinized before being allowed in. William has said he deliberately plants small, false stories with people he does not yet know and, if they appear later in the press, knows not to trust them. He has reason to be suspicious, not only because of his mother’s experience, but as someone whose phone has been hacked. He certainly enjoys evading and misleading the press, most recently over his stag weekend, which went unobserved until it was over.
In person he is friendly enough, genially joshing royal correspondents in the limited encounters he has with them. He is proving good with crowds on walkabouts, too: empathetic, informal, sympathetic, conversational. Even blase Australians fell under his spell on his first official visit there last year.
“He may,” the Melbourne Age said, “have set back the republican cause decades.”
Always hovering nearby is his private secretary, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, a hatchet-faced former SAS officer who looks as though he would rather be cracking skulls than carrying the bouquets thrust into the prince’s hands on walkabouts.
He and the prince’s other advisers — David Manning, a former diplomat; Paddy Harverson and Miguel Head, his press officers — know how easily a gaffe can occur. The nearest so far has been a helicopter jaunt a couple of years ago to drop in on Middleton at home with her parents in Bucklebury, Berkshire. He hasn’t done anything so silly since.
As he gazes up at the abbey’s medieval tracery while waiting for his bride today, William — sensitive, reserved, a worrier — knows that his greatest burdens lie ahead. The royal family is ageing: his granny, though fit, is 85; his dad will inherit the throne as an old man and he himself is fast approaching middle-age. It needs some gilt on its gingerbread and he will have to provide it. The next question: When’s a baby coming?
With escalating US-China competition and mutual distrust, the trend of supply chain “friend shoring” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fragmentation of the world into rival geopolitical blocs, many analysts and policymakers worry the world is retreating into a new cold war — a world of trade bifurcation, protectionism and deglobalization. The world is in a new cold war, said Robin Niblett, former director of the London-based think tank Chatham House. Niblett said he sees the US and China slowly reaching a modus vivendi, but it might take time. The two great powers appear to be “reversing carefully
As China steps up a campaign to diplomatically isolate and squeeze Taiwan, it has become more imperative than ever that Taipei play a greater role internationally with the support of the democratic world. To help safeguard its autonomous status, Taiwan needs to go beyond bolstering its defenses with weapons like anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles. With the help of its international backers, it must also expand its diplomatic footprint globally. But are Taiwan’s foreign friends willing to translate their rhetoric into action by helping Taipei carve out more international space for itself? Beating back China’s effort to turn Taiwan into an international pariah
Typhoon Krathon made landfall in southwestern Taiwan last week, bringing strong winds, heavy rain and flooding, cutting power to more than 170,000 homes and water supply to more than 400,000 homes, and leading to more than 600 injuries and four deaths. Due to the typhoon, schools and offices across the nation were ordered to close for two to four days, stirring up familiar controversies over whether local governments’ decisions to call typhoon days were appropriate. The typhoon’s center made landfall in Kaohsiung’s Siaogang District (小港) at noon on Thursday, but it weakened into a tropical depression early on Friday, and its structure
Taiwan is facing multiple economic challenges due to internal and external pressures. Internal challenges include energy transition, upgrading industries, a declining birthrate and an aging population. External challenges are technology competition between the US and China, international supply chain restructuring and global economic uncertainty. All of these issues complicate Taiwan’s economic situation. Taiwan’s reliance on fossil fuel imports not only threatens the stability of energy supply, but also goes against the global trend of carbon reduction. The government should continue to promote renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, as well as energy storage technology, to diversify energy supply. It
RSS