Prince William says it’s ‘hard sometimes’ for public to understand point of royal family

Prince of Wales made the candid confession while launching his five-year project to tackle homelessness in the UK

Prince William has spoken candidly about the public’s perception of the British royal family.

The Prince of Wales recently revealed his plans to end homelessness in the United Kingdom in a new interview with The Sunday Times. While speaking about his William five-year project aimed at tackling homelessness, the heir to the British throne admitted that not everybody in the UK “sees the point” of having a royal family.

“We’re all very busy and I think it’s hard sometimes to see what the family bring and what we do,” he told the paper. “But the amount of causes, the interests, the dinners, the meetings, the visits, whatever it is, that we do day in, day out, throughout the year, we’ve always been involved in that.

“It’s part of what we do. It’s trying to spotlight other causes, other people, other interests, and help people where we can,” he added. “We’ll continue to do that.”

Prince William’s comments come amidst an ongoing rift with his brother, the Duke of Sussex, and anti-monarchy protests outside his father King Charles III’s coronation last month.

As senior royals gathered on Saturday to celebrate Charles’ first Trooping the Colour as the newly-crowned monarch, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, were not invited to the King’s official birthday.

The couple, who stepped down as senior royals in 2020, have continued to share many details about their contentious relationship with the royal family in interviews, in their six-part Netflix docuseries, and in Harry’s memoir Spare, published in January. Harry and Meghan have claimed that the royal family were involved in “leaking” and “planting” negative stories about them in the press, while Harry alleged that William once physically attacked him by pushing him to the ground.

During their bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021, Meghan also alleged that an unnamed member of the royal family once expressed concern about “how dark” their son Archie’s skin would be before he was born. The mother of two also detailed how she experienced suicidal thoughts during her time as a working royal, and claimed Buckingham Palace refused to help her.

Despite Harry’s strained relationship with the royal family, his father King Charles included him in a social media post for Father’s Day on Sunday (18 June). “To Dads everywhere, we wish you a very special Father’s Day today,” the royal family’s official Twitter account captioned the post, which included a photograph of the then-Prince of Wales with his two sons.

Prince Harry had previously attended the coronation of King Charles III on 6 May without his wife or children: Prince Archie, four, and Princess Lilibet, two. The duke left immediately for their home in Montecito, California, where his son was celebrating his fourth birthday on the same day as the coronation.

Elsewhere in his interview with the Sunday Times, the Prince of Wales spoke about his plans to introduce his three children to a homeless organisation – the same way that his mother, the late Princess Diana, brought him to a homeless shelter when he was 11 years old.

“When I left this morning, one of the things I was thinking was, ‘When is the right time to bring George or Charlotte or Louis to a homeless organisation?’” he said. “I think when I can balance it with their schooling, they will definitely be exposed to it. On the school run, we talk about what we see.”