William gets it in the neck
WHO knows what sort of faux pas Prince William will commit in Paris this weekend on an official visit. Order a well-done steak perhaps and earn the contempt of toute la France which believes anything less than bloody rare is wussy? He can’t do anything right at the moment.
In any family there’s always someone at any given time who’s getting it in the neck, who has failed to do something, who has been rude, or “gone too far”. The Windsors function as our national surrogate family. And, this week, the proxy relative that none of us can stick, who’s letting us and himself down, the one who is behaving like a right pillock is… Prince William.
What’s he done? Plenty. Not turning up in your best bib and tucker at some solemn event which everyone else in the family is going to is always bad form. And William was a no-show at the Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey.
It’s not as if he was on another “official engagement” like his Auntie Anne. No, William had gone off on a lads’ skiing weekend to Switzerland with his ghastly pals Guy Pelly, James Meade and Tom van Straubenzee. He was seen – smelling salts! – in a Verbier nightclub drinking, dancing in a pathetic Englishman-on-holiday manner and high-fiving a blonde model.
It’s not as if he was snorting cocaine off someone’s thigh. But it was bad timing. Made him look like a thoughtless ass. And just to really pile it on we must also add that his dutiful wife was left at home looking after the children.
Of course boys will be boys and although William, 34, is approaching middle age, he is forever a “young royal”, at least as long as there are so many old royals around. But his young-man-in-a-hurry credentials are not burnished by his apparent lack of ambition or interest in doing too much of what you might call… work.
And, sad to say, he is on the dull side. His grandmother has turned discretion and silence into a magnificently embellished cloak which she has drawn around her since her accession. His father is concerned, eccentric, sensitive, difficult, but clearly a man of passions. So, not dull in the way that William is.
William also suffers from comparisons with his sexier, cooler, happier younger brother Harry. Though of course Harry was himself a target for scathing disapproval in the longgone days when he wore a swastika armband to a fancy dress party.
That’s the thing. Before long the finger of blame will turn elsewhere. Prince Andrew is hardly popular and Princess Michael hasn’t said anything stupid for a while. Time they took one for the team perhaps. And quite soon Prince George or his little sister Charlotte will be falling out of nightclubs themselves. It’s family life. Always someone to be cross with.
DID you watch the final episode of The Replacement? Were you disappointed, feeling that it ended up being less than the sum of its parts? But I do admire Ellen’s hotwiring technique. Do all architects know how to do that, or just Glaswegian ones?