Prince William, Prince of Wales’ carefully calibrated and finessed PR wünder machine came unstuck recently under a wet tree in Norfolk.
Was there mud? You know it.
Ever since the plod decided to celebrate Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s birthday in February by arresting him and taking him down to the station for not-so-wee chat, the press have been camped out around the Sandringham estate.
Their quarry – the British royal family’s answer to a painful bunion.
And out of the mouths of bored snappers, stuck standing in the Norfolk drizzle with nothing to do but kvetch and consume industrial quantities of digestives, has coming a surprising indictment of William.
“Horrible. Arrogant. C**t.”
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So said one seasoned royal photographer about the next King, according to the New Statesman who had dispatched a journalist up to Norfolk to report on the reporters stuck in a field who are waiting, waiting, waiting like Godots with soggy zoom lenses.
As they sheltered under a tree, the New Statesman reports, the snappers “were swapping war stories about the royals.
They didn’t seem to like any of them. William was the rudest of the lot, apparently.”
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The prince, the same photographer said, “Always tells me to f**k off.”
Oh dear. You cannot buy that sort of bad publicity.
This William – fiery and irascible – is rarely seen in public and could not be further than image he and his reported team of about 60 staff spend considerable time, energy and hashtags trying to promulgate, of a cool King-in-the-wings who knows his way around the recycling bin and loves to selfie with fans.
But what has emerged over the last few years is that there seem to be two Williams, Mr On and Mr Off-Duty. One, who in public, gives picture perfect charm-a-rama prince and the other who has a fuse that can be measured in millimetres.
In 2023, a video emerged of William letting spectacularly rip at a photographer who was filming the Wales family while out for a Saturday bike ride.
During the clip, he angrily confronts the pap, thundering, “How dare you behave like you have done with our children? How dare you? Stalking around here looking for us and our children?
“I’m out for a quiet bike ride with my children … You’re outrageous, you’re disgusting, you really are”.
Decency, I’d argue is firmly on William’s side, given he was clearly in protective Dad mode.
However the prince does not save his ire for the press.
No lesser source than his own brother Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex recounted in his memoir Spare how he is brother lost it in an altercation that resulted in the tragic demise of a dog bowl.
William, during the scene, “stepped towards me, swearing.” Harry wrote. “Now I felt a bit scared … He was right on my heels, berating me, shouting.”
Then, “He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor. I landed on the dogs’ bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me.”
(A source told the Mirror’s royal editor Russell Myers earlier this year of the incident,
“tensions were running very high, and yes, there certainly were cross words exchange … the prince [William] is adamant there was no physical violence.”)
What may or may not have happened, the Prince of Wales is clearly not a cool, calm or collected.
William can be “difficult to handle”, insiders told veteran royal chronicler Robert Jobson for his 2025 book The Windsor Legacy.
“Even senior aides are known to tread lightly around the older prince, mindful of his mood swings before raising sensitive issues”, Jobson wrote.
Others tell a similar story. In Tom Lacey’s revelation-packed Battle of Brothers he says the Prince of Wales “has proved no Sweet William when roused.”
Queen Camilla, per Bower, told friends that after marrying Charles, was “horrified at the ranting and raving that on occasion William … unleashed” at the now King Charles.
Of the father and son, “the rows have been earth-shattering,” Bower writes, “with William doing the shouting and Charles submitting meekly on the receiving end. As she has described it, William holds nothing back.”
Others suggest Charles can dish it out too. Both men, according to Tom Quinn in Yes Ma’am: The Secret Life of Royal Servants, “are prone to tantrums if things are not done to their liking.
“They both get irritated very quickly,” one former member of staff told him.
“They have had these things done for them, so they are very picky. People who have everything done for them from childhood tend to be rather spoiled and prone to bouts of irritation”.
In fact there are plenty of stories about William’s temper going back to his earliest years. When he started preschool he reportedly earned the nicknames “Basher Wills” or “Billy the Basher”.
Aged five years old and at a birthday party threw a tantrum at not being allowed to blow out the candles on the cake and then threw food and ice cream around the room.
His nanny, Ruth Wallace, made him clean up the mess before they went home.
In the mid naughties, when the dozens of press would stake out his girlfriend Kate Middleton’s Chelsea flat, William would get “very angry” and “enormously frustrated”, his friends said at the time.
So what can be done when a coddled man, raised in the valet-ed captivity of royalty, has a tanty? Call in the big guns.
Enter Kate, now The Princess of Wales.
“Those who know the couple best credit Kate – and indeed the Middleton family – with helping to calm fiery William”, Camilla Tominey reported in the Telegraph in 2020.
“When William is flying off the handle, it is often Kate who pulls him back,” one source who knows them both well told Tominey. “Sometimes William would let the press get to him. Kate would always be the one to say: ‘Let it go’.”
How perfectly Elsa-ish of her.
Still, at least William’s tendency towards the furious is in line with a not-so-proud royal tradition of monarchical melting down. Georges V and VI were famously short tempered and who can forget the current King losing it over a pen days after his accession in 2023?
At least he has learnt the subtle art of getting over it.
Back in Norfolk under that tree with the photographers out Andrew’s home know all too well they know His Majesty’s MO well. Said one: “Charles will give me a bollocking and then shake my hand the next day.”
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.news.com.au ’
