How Prince William won the PR game – and left Harry and Meghan playing catch up

The Duke of Cambridge has turned his own balding, dull, unassuming personality to great advantage

There must be some great irony in the fact that Prince William, parked in Norfolk, managed to keep one of the best royal stories of the year completely secret from the media, while his poor brother took off to start a new life in California and never seems to be out of the news.  

Had the very worst befallen the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cambridge after their brush with Covid then the crown would have passed to the seven-year-old Prince George. There would have had to be a regency until he reached the age of maturity. The two strongest claimants to that particular gig would have been Prince Harry and Prince Andrew...

There is an even more impressive irony here too. So far from being left far behind in the race for favourable PR by the Harry-Meghan machine, William has turned his own balding, dull, unassuming personality to great advantage. If you remember, Harry and Meghan argued, with some justification, that they were trying to modernise the monarchy – not as much contradiction in terms as it sounds. Yet the palace and the press, in their different ways, sabotaged that project. And so the Fab Four split.  

William didn’t seem much of a prospect for any similar project, lacking glamour and charisma. Yet he’s surprised us. He has picked his causes and his allies shrewdly. With the assistance of his wife and charming children, for example, he’s been able to co-opt Sir David Attenborough to his own environmental campaign, stressing how much he loved the huge old oak trees on the Sandringham estate, saplings when the first Queen Elizabeth was on the throne. During the ITV documentary broadcast the other week – A Planet for us All – I noticed how the continuity of nature and the institution of monarchy were subliminally weaved together, consciously or not. The climate crisis is now so widely accepted it can no longer be thought of as a politically charged cause.  

Indeed the prince’s collaboration with the broadcasters looks to be more use to him than Netflix has been for his younger brother. This year’s also seen Football, Prince William and Our Mental Health, produced by the BBC, where William leveraged his honorific position as president of the Football Association to get some of the biggest names in the game to help out. He shared pizza and beer with the lads and hinted at his own struggles with mental health – no longer, thankfully, a taboo subject. He had a helpful tip too, about public speaking, which he felt nervous about – he leaves his contact lenses out so that he isn’t intimidated by a sea of faces but only sees a harmless blur. I couldn’t help but be reminded of The King’s Speech.  

Like his great grandfather George VI, William is emerging from the shadow of his more showbiz brother, and defining himself, and with the aid of a spouse and advisers a lot sharper than sometimes assumed. He and the British public seem to be rediscovering how the British like their monarchs to be – solid, a bit boring, blameless in their private lives, making some token effort to be in touch with the lives of their subjects (or citizens), and generally behaving themselves. In return, they get the palaces, servants, influence, patronage and the best seats at Villa Park. That’s the deal. 

William may not, in the end, be able to save the monarchy either abroad in the Commonwealth or in whatever’s left of the UK, simply because his father misbehaved so badly in the past, and there seems to be no great enthusiasm for him coming to the throne. From Barbados to Australia to Scotland, it seems an underwhelming prospect, even allowing that Charles has a tough act to follow. When Diana said, in that Panorama interview with Martin Bashir back in 1995 that Prince Charles probably wasn’t cut out for “the top job”, she was right, but that’s the hereditary system for you. William and his team can’t really do much about that. All the brilliant PR work may yet be in vain.