As I said in a previous post, I was actually a little bit concerned that Prince William was going to “get away” with the Verbier ski trip following his marginally successful image-rehabilitation via a trip to Paris. The photos were good, and William and Kate looked busy, which is notable because it happens so rarely. Thankfully, William isn’t getting away with anything. The British papers ripped him a new one all over the place, mostly through opinion-pieces and columns. I previously covered the Daily Mail’s savage column, but many of you pointed out this brutal piece in the Sun, written by Damian Thompson. Some highlights:
Royal circles are complaining: “I also hear people in royal circles, or who have had professional dealings with the prince, complain about his haughty manner. Journalists are used to his hostility — to the cold-eyed stare that seems to imply that they are no better than the paparazzi who chased his mother to her death nearly 20 years ago. Of late, however, there have been whisperings that William is almost as rude to members of his staff who are insufficiently deferential, or catch him in a bad mood.”
Petulant and grand: “Both of them, Catherine as well as William, have become awfully grand,” says a source in the royal household. William is not as bright as his father, but he does have the armour-plated self- confidence you pick up at Eton. Was it really a good idea to send him there, followed by the picturesque snob factory of St Andrews University? “He’s turning into a mix of Norfolk squire and dim West London Sloane in red trousers,” says one social commentator. “Think David Cameron minus a few IQ points.”
Thompson also calls him lazy and lacking the human-touch of his mother, not to mention his little brother Harry. Thompson compliments Charles as being intelligent and enlightened, even though Charles sometimes comes across as petulant too, apparently.
I also wanted to note this excellent piece by one of my favorite royal-gossips/commentators, Tom Sykes at the Daily Beast. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:
How William will react to be criticized for the ski trip: William will, instead of accepting any blame himself, simply gnash his teeth and bemoan the horrid media, the evil internet and the outrageous invasion of his privacy that is someone shooting footage of him on their cameraphone dancing appallingly in a nightclub. “He won’t listen to advice and hires people too scared to give it,” says one source, who adds that William tends to ‘see himself as the victim’ when these privacy rows blow up.
How the Cambridges & Harry see the media: “William, Kate and Harry have this delusional idea—encouraged by their press team—that they can be both private and public people depending what they are up to, so people have ‘no right’ to see what he is doing,” the source tells the Daily Beast, “Of course this is nonsense, but he won’t accept it. The irony is, it just makes them even more miserable because they will never be private citizens.”
The Queen “licenses” William’s lifestyle: The Queen is not entirely blameless in the PR mess that William’s public/private life has become. She calls the shots, and the miscalculation may be as much hers as William’s. As the royal historian and author “Majesty”, Robert Lacey said, that it is very clear that William’s current low-tempo public life “is licensed by his grandmother…It is clear that she has wanted to spare him the truncated family life that she suffered due to the early death of her father. People talk about the Queen not being maternal—Charles is on the record as suggesting it–but I remember interviewing Lord Mountbatten in those years and him telling me that the Queen’s favorite night of the week was Thursday because, “that was Mabel’s night off.” Mabel was the governess. And on Thursday nights, it was the Queen who bathed the children, read the bedtime story and put them to bed. She wants that for William, and she has very much enabled this arrangement of a family home and base on the Sandringham Estate to facilitate his work with the air ambulance.”
I think that’s an interesting read on the Queen’s place in The Problem With Work-Shy Will. Some gossips claim that she’s washed her hands of him. Some suggest that she simply doesn’t like confrontation, and she’s been-there-done-that as far as arguing with her grandson. I think it’s probably both options, honestly. The Queen has learned not to confront William because she doesn’t want to deal with his temper tantrums. She wants him to make his own mistakes and learn from them. But she also wants him to have some privacy and some semblance of a normal family life. The thing… it’s going to blow up in her face, and Charles’ face, in the years to come.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
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