Princes William and Harry are all grown up, and their mother would be proud
LONDON: Princes William and Harry are good lads - and either would make a proper 21stcentury king. Given all that has happened, that is amazing.
On the 20th anniversary of the death of the People’s Princess, the British people have reached a consensus: Diana raised two relatively normal, capable, flawed but decent, and maybe even exceptional sons, under extraordinary circumstances.
That one of them, Harry, once dressed up as a Nazi is mostly forgotten. That the other, William, is a little dull is okay.
All eyes are now on the next generation of royals as the world remembers the strange and unsettling tabloid days surrounding the death of Diana, killed in a spectacularly reckless car crash in a Paris tunnel on Aug. 31, 1997.
William was 15 then; Harry was 12. That they were young and that it was heartbreaking escaped no one. Billions watched the televised reports that day, one of the largest global audiences ever assembled.
Since then, the pair has done well. To recap, the princes got through their teens and survived their roaring 20s without fatal embarrassments.
There was plenty of partying - and some jousting with paparazzi outside night clubs. But both served honorably in the military, which was applauded by the British public.
William worked as a pilot for the East Anglian Air Ambulance until last month. He had a day job. His crew saved lives.
Harry served as an Apache attack helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. Two tours. He got high marks for trying hard not to draw too much attention to himself. Or as the Sun put it in a tabloid headline, “From wild nights to fire fights: How Prince Harry became a man.”
Once dubbed the Party Prince, the ginger-haired bachelor Harry has settled down, a bit. He is now dating the American actress Meghan Markle. He understands your interest, but issued a statement through his Kensington Palace spokesman to back off.
These days, William and Harry are busy promoting charities that seek to help AIDS sufferers and disabled veterans. And most remarkably, they are speaking out on the stigma surrounding mental health challenges - by discussing their own, and by extension, very delicately, their mother’s struggles. She suffered from depression and bulimia.
None of this was guaranteed, not at all.
That neither prince became a punchline, an afterthought or train wreck - growing up in the selfie age under the all-seeing eye of the most unforgiving tabloid culture on earth - is remarkable.
Their parents, Charles and Diana, had a deeply unhappy public marriage with the most lurid details gracing the front pages of the world’s newspapers for years. The fascination continues today.
A documentary that aired on Britain’s Channel 4 two weeks ago generated news about how much sex - or not so much - Charles and Diana were having as their marriage cratered, mostly because Charles could not get over his one true love, Camilla Parker-Bowles, the Duchess of Cornwall, who he later married.
Although many might wish otherwise, the 68-year-old Charles will almost certainly be king when his mother, the 91-year-old Queen Elizabeth II, God save her, dies.
In Britain, at least now, Charles appears a kind of afterthought, a vintage image. The enduring moment of Diana’s funeral 20 years ago is not Charles but sons William and Harry, walking behind their mother’s flag-draped casket, their heads hung low as they shuffled forward through immense crowds of mourners, most silent, but some wailing, others nearly hysterical.
It was a “long and lonely walk,” said Prince William in a new BBC documentary “Diana, 7 Days”, one of several marking the 2 0 t h anniversary of Diana’s death. William said he tried to hide behind his floppy blond bangs, which were like a “safety blanket.”
Reflecting on it today, William says he had many roles to play that day - he was a grieving teenage son, yes, but he was also Prince William, the nation’s future king.
There was a balance, he said, “between me being Prince William and having to do my bit, versus the private William who just wanted to go into a room and cry, who’d lost his mother.”
Until recently, William and Harry haven’t spoken publicly like this about their mother and what it was like to cope with her loss at such an age.
It’s hard to overstate just how unusual it is, even in 2017, for the queen’s subjects to see the princes on the telly talking so openly about Diana.
Old-school British aristocrats are renowned for the stiff upper lip. The royals can be reserved to the point of hypoxia, in a mostly mute doggedness, viewed charitably as keeping calm and reigning on.
The queen has ruled for more than 65 years and she has given exactly zero interviews during her long reign.
But William says he felt now was an appropriate time to honour his mother’s memory. In the two documentaries, the princes paint a portrait of a funloving, cool mum who is dearly missed.
The princes light up when they talk about Diana playing pranks - from hiding candies in socks to sending rude cards to her sons at school to arranging supermodels to surprise William at their home.
“Our mother was a total kid, through and through,” Harry says in the HBO documentary “Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy”.
“One of her mottos to me was, ‘You can be as naughty as you want - just don’t get caught.’ “
Our mother was a total kid, through and through. One of her mottos to me was,‘You can be as naughty as you want - just don’t get caught.’ Prince Harry