A dad who would have made his mum proud
HE is the man who walked up the aisle as a Prince, and came back down as the son-in-law of a suburban solicitor and a former air hostess. And this week he walked into a hospital ward as royal heir with a duty to maintain an ancient monarchy, and came out as a slightly awkward, endearingly giddy and utterly besotted young dad. Since boy George made his appearance this week – with typical British decorum, to join a very orderly queue – it was inevitable that his father’s status as a future king would be overshadowed by his new successor.
Given the family’s longevity, with Charles still awaiting his turn on the throne at retirement age, there’s every possibility that George will be the British monarch who ushers in the next century, something none of those celebrating his arrival this week will live to see. Given that exciting prospect, it’s hardly a surprise that William’s reign, whenever it comes, now looks set to be a mere hiatus in history.
Not, however, that his place in the succession stakes seemed to bother him half as much, this week, as his skill with a €130 baby car seat. Once he’d snapped it safely into place in the back of his Range Rover – easy peasy when you’re practising with an empty seat at home, much tougher with the world’s media watching and the world’s most famous baby cradled inside – the Prince heaved a sigh of relief.
And there can’t have been a new dad in the world who didn’t recognise a look that said, ‘give me a Sea King helicopter and a Force 15 gale any day’. Because the Prince, who lives with his wife in a very ordinary cottage in Anglesey and is getting all of two weeks paternity leave from his job as a rescue pilot, this week showed a side to himself that even those obvious trappings of normality didn’t really illuminate until now – a determination to echo his late mother’s parental warmth and reject the stilted customs icily observed by his own father, to be a hands-on dad without the benefit of nannies and chilly nurseries.
Tellingly, it was the Middletons who paid the first visit to the new family, while Charles fulfilled some dreary engagement in his patched grey suit and wittered about hoping to see his grandson ‘in the near future’. And tellingly, it was to the Middletons’ home, and not Kensington Palace, that William took his wife and child this week – again, unlike previous generations of royal men, deferring to the wishes of a mere woman, and a commoner at that. And it was Diana’s engagement ring, with its appropriately royal blue glitter, that featured in every picture of the new baby as his mother held him.
The casually-dressed William, who bantered with the hacks outside the hospital, joking about the baby’s abundant hair and boasting of changing a nappy was a million miles from the sullen young man who was said to blame the media for Diana’s death. It was as if it had suddenly dawned on him that the best way to commemorate his mother was not with resentment and regret, but with a jubilant embracing of an occasion at which, no doubt, she would have stolen the show.