For an heir to the throne wanting to secure his future perhaps the first rule should be: do not associate with David Cameron. Last week the foreign secretary had to fly to the Falklands to pose with some kids who didn’t know him as the former salesman for the disgraced Lex Greensill. At least, unlike his old Chinese customers, they didn’t have to pay £12,000 a time.
But now Prince William has signed up for a double act. If, following a Cameron smarm-offensive, he did not actually take dictation, some of the phrasing in a royal Gaza statement vetted by the Foreign Office went well beyond usual indicators of Etonian cloning.
Here’s Cameron, in a December newspaper article: “too many civilians have been killed”. And now William, in the statement issued under a coronetted “W”, shown white on black for impact: “too many have been killed”. Cameron: “Even in the darkest moment, we can change a desperate situation for the better …”
Was Cameron’s piece so brilliant that William, or one of his reportedly crack team, featuring a new hire from the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, struggled to find expressions of concern that might have maintained royal distance from controversial government policy? Assuming, that is, that it wouldn’t have been better for William, with nothing significant to add and nobody expecting his contribution, to have kept quiet. Particularly when MPs were about to debate Gaza.
In the event, the statement contrived to sound both earnest and faintly, like the dinky “W” coronet, preening: “I continue to cling the hope that a brighter future can be found and I refuse to give up on that.” Let us know how you get on. Given that, with only so many hours in the day and so much conflict in the world, William’s staff may now have to ration Gaza hope-clinging so that no other horrendous bloodshed feels unaccountably left out. It was predictable – or should have been – that if William emoted about Gaza, he’d be asked why countless other corpses have failed to prompt similar responses.
Is the regrettable “darkest hour” amendment to Cameron’s version a deliberate echo, failing more recent templates, of the Gary Oldman film in which George VI heroically becomes Churchill’s ally? Either way, with this one statement William invites us to reimagine his father’s famous meddling as a comparatively trivial variation on his mother’s years of silence. At least Charles generally stuck to nature, homeopathy, Shakespeare, architraves. His foreign policy offerings were leaked, not volunteered. Pre-accession, Charles confirmed he wouldn’t interfere as king: “I’m not that stupid.”
The Gaza statement is not the first hint that William, if the crown continues to turn his head, might be more ambitious. After the Dyson report on Martin Bashir’s duplicity prior to Diana’s BBC interview, William successfully decreed, as if bans remained a royal prerogative, that this astonishing programme should never again be aired.
That DNA plus primogeniture are the only reasons for his eminence does not of course disqualify him from influencing national debate, or not so long as hereditaries occupy the House of Lords. There are a host of subjects on which many of us might welcome coronet-surmounted insights refined by years of heiring.
Well, two subjects: his Heads Together charity and the Earthshot prize. Three if I ever want to learn about rhinos. Four if you include his estranged brother’s book, Spare. Especially the bit where adult William, a father of three, throws adult Harry to the floor, ripping his necklace and shouting: “Come on, hit me.” Like any peacemakers, we cling to hope that a brighter future can be found for the brothers, but does the story of this attack, also featuring a broken dog bowl, make that likely?
In the absence of denials, some visible conclusion to this lurid feud might advance William’s ambitions in international conflict resolution. As it is, commentary on the contrast between William’s personal vendetta and his hopes for offshore harmony could become, as his close family recover their health, less muted. In fact, if William’s Gaza intervention achieves nothing else, it could usefully pause a woebegone new line in “Is our dear royal family really big enough?” think pieces.
According to the royal expert Robert Hardman’s sources, William has not read Spare. Not that this may mean much. In his own book, Charles lll: New King. New Court. The Inside Story, Hardman struggles, even as he hails the sovereign as a benevolent prodigy, to make William an heir of interest. He will “dip into books for information, less so for pleasure”. He wants a coronation, only a shorter one. “He’s a box-set guy” who likes superhero films (“especially all things Batman-related”). “He will say: ‘Don’t get me a meeting with an academic.’”
Perhaps out of excessive loyalty his aides appear to have extended this instruction to include anyone who might have explained the still considerable gap between William’s new line in statesmanship and his diplomatic credentials. His and Catherine’s 2022 colonial-style tour of the Caribbean is not forgotten. Likewise his proprietorship of Africa, covetously detailed in Spare. “Africa was his thing, he said.” They couldn’t share the continent, William said, “Because rhinos, elephants, that’s mine!”
True, Cameron, ever one for exploiting contacts, may have urged this overreach on an old acquaintance, possibly using the same technique he employed on behalf of Greensill: “I’m doing you [to paraphrase] a massive favour.” The foreign secretary has form in unhappy royal dealings: that time he said Queen Elizabeth “purred” over the Scottish referendum result. “I later made a heartfelt apology.” Patently, his department did not advise against William’s Middle East deployment. And there would certainly be a logic to it, not necessarily unwelcome to republicans, if having already trashed his country and party, Cameron succeeded, on his return, on screwing the crown up too.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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