There would be no British royal history without sneaky sons, sneaky fathers, sneaky uncles, brothers, friends, dukes, earls, French cousins and certain queens’ Machiavellian boyfriends angling to be the power behind the throne.
But still, it’s another thing entirely to see it up-close and personal.
Only now, this week, Prince William has gone and done a major new interview about his approach to ruling and has all but thrown his dear old dad King Charles under a London bus, implicitly saying his reign is a bit rubbish.
Last week, the Prince of Wales was in South Africa for his Earthshot Prize and while there, he laid out his vision for when he becomes the top banana – a phrase that strangely you won’t find in the Magna Carta.
He wants to usher in a new age of “small r” royalty, which sounds like something of a slightly meaningless phrase that is high on vibes and low on actual facts.
(Does this mean they are going to do away with the footmen, and Prince George as Prince of Wales will be tasked with taking the Buckingham Palace bins out? Will all crests be removed from post boxes? Will King William hold meet’n’greet coffee mornings with the plebs at a rotating series of suburban Cafe Neros with palace-branded keep cups?)
The details, such as they are, come via the Times’ Kate Mansey whom the Prince told of his blueprint, saying “I’m trying to do it differently and I’m trying to do it for my generation”.
“And to give you more of an understanding around it, I’m doing it with maybe a smaller ‘r’ in the royal, if you like. So it’s more about impact, philanthropy, collaboration, convening and helping people,” he said.
“I’m also going to throw empathy in there as well because I really care about what I do. It helps impact people’s lives and I think we could do with some more empathetic leadership around the world. So that’s what I’m trying to bring, that’s what Catherine is trying to bring as well.”
All of this sounds swell and all, but to say “we could do with some more empathetic leadership” suggests we don’t have any right now, ergo, King Charles is lacking in this department.
So too His Majesty’s apparent current deficit in terms of “impact, philanthropy, collaboration, convening and helping people”.
If only Charles had had the idea – oh, say in the 1970s, when he launched his then-groundbreaking Prince’s Trust – of “helping people.”
The sticking point is not what he’s saying, which is basically that he wants to be more of a touchy-feely monarch, but that his comments serve as a not-so-veiled criticism of the way the King is doing things.
And from that, we can take something else too – that William felt emboldened to come out and make these comments says something about the state of the nation inside Crown Inc.
The King seems to have lost control over those unruly relatives of his.
Forget that wayward son several time zones away furtively Googling camera angles when his Netflix crew is not looking, but much closer to home, he has not one but two close family members having very publicly broken ranks this week.
For nearly two years, Charles has waged a very public war on his disgraced if not despised brother Prince Andrew, the Duke of York.
In early 2023, it was revealed that His Majesty was intent on turfing the duke out of his grand home, Royal Lodge, the Queen Mother’s humungous pile of 50 years.
Team Andrew responded with a mature nuh uhhhhhhh and started waving the lease agreement he has about the place.
What followed has been called the Siege of Royal Lodge, which has seen the duke burrow in like a tick into soft flesh and Charles resort to increasingly extreme tactics to try and push out Andrew.
First, in August, he axed the private 10-man security team costing him $5.8 million a year that he had been paying for the 63-year-old in an attempt to force him to trade down to the freed-up Frogmore Cottage inside the Windsor security perimeter.
That didn’t work.
Then, in November, it was revealed that the King would stop giving his brother his $1.9 million annual allowance to try and financially starve him out.
That didn’t work either.
Neither man has blinked – until now.
This week, Andrew triumphed, words that I take no pleasure in writing and which prove no bad deed goes unrewarded.
(Where are just desserts when you need them?)
The Times has now reported that the duke has basically outmanoeuvred the king, somehow having independently found the funds to stay at Royal Lodge.
His supporters have been busy crowing, with one telling the Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes, “We are thrilled for Andrew.
Andrew has a cast iron lease on the property, so God knows why Charles chose to pick this battle.
It’s hard to imagine anyone would have any interest in where Andrew is living if Charles’ aides had not spent the past year banging on about it”.
Another Andrew pal (who knew he had so many?) told Sykes: “It was wicked of the king to try and take (Royal Lodge) off him. Why? Who cares?”
Both the William and Andrew situations point to a ruler struggling to keep control of a defiant lot who are intent on going their own way, no matter that the King is being treated for cancer.
That the 76-year-old has only been warming the throne for a scant two years and already his son is doing some agitating about what his rule will be like and setting out his Kingly stall, hardly redounds to the Prince of Wales’ credit or says much about his loyalty.
Really, what the William and Andrew situations tell us is that self-interest is winning outright now over them all falling in line behind the king.
And if Charles was in doubt about his son’s commitment to his “small r” royalling, then all he had to do was to look at pictures of him in Cape Town.
The 42-year-old wore sustainable white trainers to the formal prize ceremony, a Prince of Wales print jacket sourced from a London second hand shop, a tie made from recycled water bottles and a friendship bracelet adorably reading “Papa”, made by his daughter Princess Charlotte.
Unfortunately, power-hungry has never looked quite so cool.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles
