Share<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\nOn the face of it, a warm and engaging portrait of the real William.<\/p>\n
But.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ll allow me to read between the lines, Davies\u2019s piece is also a revealing dispatch from the ongoing conflict between William and Charles over what the duties of the Prince of Wales actually are. The Mail, for reasons of access, can\u2019t really afford to tell you the truth about the bitter war simmering between the two courts, but this piece, with its sly digs at William for being lazy, is an interesting exhibit.<\/p>\n
Senior staff at the paper know which side their bread is buttered; many are close to Tobyn Andreae, the King\u2019s chief communications man and a former Mail man who missed out on the editor-in-chief\u2019s chair by a hair. And the first sign that this warm portrait is in fact a hit job dressed up as a hagiography comes in the sub-headline, which promises to reveal \u201cwhy royal aides are concerned\u201d about William\u2019s \u201chidden\u201d blokeish ways. Headlines are written by editors, not journalists, and they reflect a publication\u2019s line.<\/p>\n
The stick used to beat William has always been that he is \u201clazy,\u201d or \u201cworkshy.\u201d And, prima facie, the data supports it.<\/p>\n
Charles, whatever his critics think of him, absorbed his mother\u2019s first commandment, that royals must be seen to be believed, and turned himself into the most visible monarch in modern history.<\/p>\n
The numbers aren\u2019t in dispute. As Prince of Wales he topped the family leaderboard with 601 engagements in 2011, and 521 in 2019, the last normal pre-pandemic year, ahead even of the tireless Princess Anne. (We know all this because of Tim O\u2019Donovan, a monarchist insurance broker who spent forty years counting the Court Circular and publishing an annual tally in The Times. He died last October, aged 93; the papers have picked up his burden.)<\/p>\n
And tempted as any normal person would be to discount the last two years, the hardest of William\u2019s life, Charles\u2019s team emphasize relentlessly that his cancer-stricken, far older and frailer father comprehensively out-publicked him: 372 engagements in 2024 despite treatment, 532 in 2025, while William slipped to seventh on 202. William\u2019s critics go further, noting that his personal best is just 220, hit in 2018 and 2019. The gap, they say, long predates any illness. This is just who he is.<\/p>\n
William\u2019s court argues that he simply sees the job differently. He disdains performative monarchy \u2014 the appearance-counting, the diary stuffed with engagements that exist only to be counted. He believes in impact. Earthshot, Homewards, mental health. Fewer things, done more deeply.<\/p>\n
And the figures speak for themselves: Charles\u2019s never-ending tour, plus the patina of actually being King, have pushed his approval to a record high of around 60 percent \u2014 but William and Catherine outstrip him by a mile, in the late seventies.<\/p>\n
I was also fascinated by Davies\u2019s account of the row over the Pope\u2019s funeral.<\/p>\n
As I exclusively reported at the time, William initially demurred about going, because he wanted to watch an Aston Villa match, to his father\u2019s disgust.<\/p>\n
Davies reports growing concern in royal and government circles about his reluctance to travel abroad unless the destination interests him personally.<\/p>\n
The Foreign Office, one source tells her, has struggled to get him on a plane \u2014 the big overseas trips have all been Earthshot, while he\u2019s made eight visits to watch rugby or football. I can add to this: William is, as of now, reluctant to commit to going to the USA this summer to support England at the World Cup, citing the end of George\u2019s final term at junior school. I\u2019m told he\u2019s resisting unless England reach the quarter-final.<\/p>\n
This is the kind of thing that sends Charles absolutely bonkers. He insists personal wishes, and personal family life, come second to duty.<\/p>\n
William and Catherine feel the two are indivisible. Catherine\u2019s choice of early childhood as her life\u2019s work is her way of saying that raising the first generation of un-traumatized royal children is the single most important thing for the survival of the monarchy. And I think what so infuriates Charles,a jealous man who once complained to Diana, on tour in Australia, that she shouldn\u2019t block the cameras view of him, is that William and Catherine so plainly connect with the public. The Waleses are loved. Just look at the polls.<\/p>\n
You can see the same instinct in how they live. William reportedly finds the formality of his father\u2019s households \u201cstifling,\u201d and has stripped it back, with \u201cfewer flunkeys wandering around,\u201d in the Mail\u2019s words.<\/p>\n
Office staff are kept out of sight; a cook is sometimes redundant because William or Kate just cook themselves.<\/p>\n
Most of it is downstream of the Middletons, from whom William, the well-worn story goes, had to learn to load a dishwasher and lay a table.<\/p>\n
It carries into the parenting. I have friends whose children are at school with the Wales kids, and the line is always the same: they show up to everything, Kate never misses a match, no make-up on the school run, relentlessly cheerful.<\/p>\n
One parent told me: \u201cThey are like caricatures of middle-class parents. I went to the house for a kid\u2019s birthday party, and they were the ones organizing the games and playing rounders. Any of us lot would get an entertainer in and sit in the house drinking ros\u00e9.\u201d<\/p>\n
Compare that to a Queen who came home from long tours to find her children attached to their nannies and shook their hands, or a Charles who played polo the afternoon Harry was born. William and Kate have moved, deliberately and aggressively, in the opposite direction.<\/p>\n
But, and this is the point, all of that is the small stuff. The dishwashers, the soccer, the engagement counts. It\u2019s the cosy, visible face of the divide. The real war between father and son is uglier, and it\u2019s about two men: Harry, and Andrew.<\/p>\n
When Charles and Harry met in London last September, for the first time in nineteen months, almost nobody thought it would happen, because William has made it abundantly clear he doesn\u2019t want to see his brother, doesn\u2019t want to hear from him, and doesn\u2019t want anyone else in the family engaging with him either.<\/p>\n
For Charles to defy that, so publicly, exposed a split at the heart of the palace with a conciliatory faction now forming around Theo Rycroft, the incoming deputy private secretary, acting as a counterweight to the hawkish Clive Alderton, \u201cThe Wasp,\u201d whose loathing for Harry is mutual.<\/p>\n
A friend of the King\u2019s told The Royalist last year that Charles was \u201cdelighted\u201d to see Harry. William was not.<\/p>\n
For him, Harry\u2019s betrayal, above all the allegation that Catherine asked bigoted questions about a child\u2019s skin color, is a permanent, irreversible sin. And he reads Harry\u2019s possible rehabilitation exactly as he read Andrew\u2019s: as a very bad idea, in support of which he believes Andrew Lownie\u2019s recent expos\u00e9 has now vindicated him. Once you\u2019re out, you\u2019re out.<\/p>\n
That is the real dynamic now at the center of the monarchy. The King willing to forgive; his heir unwilling to forget. Charles believes the institution is sustained by ceaseless, visible service and a sovereign who forgives in the name of family. William believes it will survive by doing less but better, by ring-fencing a private self, and by drawing absolute, unforgiving lines around who gets to belong.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source theroyalist.substack.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I highly recommend the fascinating piece by Barbara Davies in the Mail yesterday about the \u201cloyal band of friends\u201d who joined William for the Aston Villa game \u2014 and the tiny but hugely revealing window it gives us into the usually hermetically sealed world where \u201creal William\u201d lives. We saw William weeping, singing and roaring, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2439077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2439076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Why-Charles-Cant-Stop-Undermining-His-Son-and-Heir.com2Fpublic2Fimages2F6bd9f58d-1102-4be1-b584-464e1.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2439076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2439076"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2439076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2439078,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2439076\/revisions\/2439078"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2439077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2439076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2439076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2439076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}