For the Prince of Wales, private jets are political. Cast your mind back four summers, and you may recall a photograph of Prince William lugging his own suitcases onto a £73 budget flight to Scotland, wife and three small children in tow. A row had erupted that week over allegations that the eco-preaching Duke and Duchess of Sussex had taken four private jet flights within 11 days. Thus it came to pass that in the last week of August 2019, William and Kate were photographed by a news agency boarding a FlyBe EMB-145 at Norwich International Airport. Coincidence, or trolling on take-off?
Fast forward to August 2023, and our future king once again appears to be leaning heavily on the politics of private jets. His failure last week to support the Lionesses in person at the World Cup final, despite the prince’s long-time role as President of the Football Association, has provoked heavy criticism. Behind the scenes, it has been suggested that William is pointing the finger at his brother.
William, or so the palace briefing goes, has made environmental activism a central pillar of his mission in public life. Founding the Earthshot Prize; hanging out with David Attenborough; campaigning against wildlife poaching. It was left to “royal commentator” Angela Levin to stick in the fratricidal knife. William “doesn’t want to look like Harry and be a hypocrite”, she told Sky News this week. Appalled at Sussexes’ use of private jets, “he can’t really stand firm against Harry’s behaviour if he does the same thing and uses a lot of oil and all that stuff”. Thus the real royal risk of taking a flight from London to Sydney to attend a sports match: it might make one look like Prince Harry.
There will be readers who wonder why we should care about such tittle-tattle of warring brothers. You have my sympathy. The fraternal jostling for position is pathetic; the Extremely Online supporters of each camp are unhinged; the underlying landscape of a feud between once-loving brothers is too profoundly sad to be treated as popcorn-fodder. But the peculiarity of monarchy is that the twists and turns of personal behaviour among royal principals still have an outsized effect on the life of nations. Thus even in 2023, we remain obliged to care about royals and what they do.
William, for example, is under pressure to revive his family’s relationship with Australia in the coming years, whether or not he can stomach the long-haul flights. His father’s ascension as King was greeted Down Under by renewed questions about Charles’s correspondence with the governor-general Sir John Kerr in the early 1970s, when Kerr took the controversial decision to sack the Australian Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.
Jenny Hocking, the historian who uncovered Kerr’s records of his exchanges with Charles, alleges that not only did Charles encourage the sacking – a major royal intervention in Australian internal politics – but also that Kerr considered that 27-year-old Charles was meddling out of “royal ennui” and a frustration at having to play second fiddle to his mother. (Buckingham Palace continues to deny that neither the present King nor the late Queen had prior knowledge of Kerr’s political decisions, but it does refuse to release the relevant correspondence.)
Four decades later, Australia greeted Charles’s accession by removing the British monarch from its banknotes and another round of public agonising about whether Australia should become a republic. William, if he wants to inherit the Australian throne and keep it, has work to do. If more emerges in Australia about his father’s history of sending politicians sprawling letters – a habit well-documented in the UK in the wake of the 2015 scandal of the “black spider” memos to ministers – that is likely to involve damage control.
No doubt, William will visit Australia again – although I suspect we might see him ostentatiously taking a commercial jet for a short leg of his next tour. Representing the British Crown at far-flung corners of the former Empire is about as central to a royal job description as it gets, which is why his decision that he couldn’t hack the travel for women’s football was hard to credit. If we take William’s apologists at their word, the story only becomes more sad. It would be an extraordinary act of royal self-sabotage for the Prince of Wales to have skipped Sydney purely because he has a need to define himself against his brother. If he is to avoid future missteps, William will need to forget about whatever is happening in Montecito.
If our future king doesn’t exist to fly the British flag abroad, what is his role? Briefings from the various Royal Households now tell us that King Charles is content to be a “caretaker” king, understanding that their relative ages make it likely that William will enjoy a longer period on the throne and have scope to make more impact. In part, these briefings exist as tacit promises that we should keep calm and not worry about Charles meddling in politics all over again. But where Charles meddled too much as a Prince of Wales, William’s challenge is likely to be relevance. As hereditary monarchy loses its moral authority, the role of princes and kings is increasingly circumscribed.
The justification of British monarchy used to go a little like this. Monarchs don’t meddle in politics, we were told, except when they really need to. Then, at moments of constitutional crisis, a Good King might step into resolve a deadlock, or uphold an institutional norm. Cue Boris Johnson’s unlawful suspension of Parliament: the Queen looked on, impotent. Cue Brexit, cue a series of political attacks on the judiciary, cue a finding that the Prime Minister had lied to the House of Commons – whatever your view on any of these events, what unites each is that the monarch had no role to play in response to any of them. Perhaps rightly so. We no longer wish to be ruled by whoever wins the dice-toss of ancestry in the womb. But if the royal family cannot heal the divisions of a nation through one of our most divided and dark periods, its next king will face an uphill battle to prove his relevance to his fellow millennials.
Charles has long asserted himself as an advocate for “slimmed-down” monarchy, reducing the number of senior royals invited to the big photo opportunities – anything to ditch those embarrassing Yorks from the Buckingham Palace balcony – and quietly removing perks from his distant cousins. He may leave a longer cultural legacy from his years as heir than as king, but for the next few years his goal is to balance the books and prove the royal family can be cost-efficient.
William is said to be on board with the “slimmed-down” future, with rumours he intends to follow Charles in reducing the number of palaces used by the monarchy. He has also suggested that his children should be free to pursue private passions in their careers: “in theory, there is nothing to stop George from pursuing a career as an astronaut, for example, if that’s what he wants, and then becoming King later”, one of the ever-present royal ‘friends’ recently told the Mail on Sunday.
Yet the risk for William in turning the monarchy into a Scandi-style “bicycling monarchy” – as the low-maintenance, luxury-averse Scandinavian approach to monarchy is often termed – is that he diminishes the ritual and majesty that still gives the British royal family its hold over our imaginations. The extraordinary wave of collective emotion and shared ritual that marked the funeral of the Queen was a profound rejoinder to those of us who consider ourselves to be rational animals.
We treat the royals as if we know them because they carry our hopes and dreams. William may wish, as any father would, to give his son George a more normal life. But in 40 years, will we line the streets to see the coronation of a normal bloke – say, an accountant – who happens to moonlight at Buckingham Palace granting Royal Assent on Fridays? More likely, we will simply lose interest.
If William plans to stay relevant as a future monarch, he should start by forgetting any rivalry with the Sussexes; William’s problems are more substantial, more domestic and more long term. He must head a state religion to which he has yet to show much personal commitment. He must navigate traditional royal concepts of mystique and discretion in a new era of social media. (Can he really expect George to find a spouse who has never tweeted about politics?) He must brace for the coming reckoning between the royal family and its colonial past, with further revelations about slavery and empire surely hurtling down the track. He needs to forget about Harry, or the week-by-week comparison of headlines. And once in a while, he needs to get on a plane, too.
