The Queen and the Prince of Wales were determined that Prince William should grow into his future role, not be pushed into it. Through his four years at St Andrew’s University and the next four in the Forces – first, the Army (Blues and Royals), a short spell with the Royal Navy and then a formal transfer to the Royal Air Force – the Prince was largely left alone to lay the foundations for his royal future. There would be the occasional public/private overseas tour. One such was his 2005 visit to watch the British Lions rugby tour, while also attending commemorations to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. As ever, it was all closely discussed with the Queen.
There was a change of pace, though, after switching his commission to the RAF to pursue a new career as a pilot. Realising her grandsons’ need for an independent presence in this formative stage of their royal careers, the Queen appointed one of Britain’s most experienced diplomats to help both Prince William and Prince Harry map out their international future. In 2009, Sir David Manning, previously Britain’s Ambassador to Washington, was appointed as senior adviser to the Princes, a role that continues to this day.
For his first official overseas tour, in January 2010, Prince William was asked by the Queen to open the new Supreme Court in Wellington on her behalf. New Zealand’s Prime Minister at the time was John Key. Now Sir John, he explains that she had thought about opening it herself. Her decision not to was nothing to do with long-haul travel, but because she felt that the time had come to promote the younger generation. ‘She could have come to open the Supreme Court because she came a year later to Australia,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t that she couldn’t have handled the flight. She really wanted to introduce the young royals to the Commonwealth. She had a very deliberate plan.’
The following year, Prince William was swift to return after a series of disasters across the continent. In New Zealand, the earthquake that hit Christchurch in February 2011 was one of the worst peacetime tragedies in the country’s history, traumatising the handsome, rugby-mad city for years to come. It happened three months after the Pike River mining disaster, which killed twenty-nine. In Australia, too, the state of Victoria had suffered catastrophic flooding, the worst in living memory. The Queen wanted Prince William to extend her condolences to all of them. A few weeks before his wedding to Catherine Middleton – and his elevation to Duke of Cambridge – he arrived in New Zealand with a tiny entourage, including Sir David Manning, to undertake a tour that would require great sensitivity. Sir John Key recalls touring the devastated communities of South Island with him.
‘We stayed at this hotel on the west coast and had dinner that night,’ says Sir John. ‘William had been there for a day at most. He looked exhausted and I said “You should go to bed”. This hotel was right on the ocean and he had the room next to mine. In the morning, I was writing my speech on my balcony and he said to me from his balcony: “Do you think I could go for a walk – on my own?” I said: “Go that way”. And he climbed down and off he went. That’s the nice thing about New Zealand – you could do that.’ The Duke was also astonished to see that Key was writing his own speech. He had assumed that politicians had people to do that sort of stuff for them.
It was a tour that would reinforce the same lasting affection for the ‘Down Under’ can-do resilience that the Prince shares with his father.
He would be back again three years later, by now as Duke of Cambridge, with both his wife and his son, Prince George. He was no longer a trainee but a fully-fledged royal ambassador. Sir Simon Fraser, then head of the Diplomatic Service, singles out two royal tours from that period. ‘The most interesting and dramatic visit in my time was the Queen’s state visit to Ireland but the other one that really struck me was when Prince William and Kate went quite early to the Far East. It really impacted. It was something which really made a big difference,’ he says. Britain had just launched a new marketing push to coincide with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and London 2012. ‘We’d been running this thing called the “Great” campaign on the back of the Olympics. I thought that the contextualising of the campaign, the economic diplomacy and linking the royal visit to that was a very co-ordinated approach to the projection of the country. But these things have to be constantly reinvigorated and reinvented.’
The Duke of Cambridge’s diplomatic skills would certainly be put to the test in 2015 during that trip to China, the most high-profile royal visit since the Queen’s state visit almost thirty years before. In the intervening years, there had been bilateral strains over the Hong Kong handover and the Prince of Wales’s well-documented admiration for the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama – very much persona non grata in Beijing. The Duke had his own issues with China in relation to endangered wildlife. Yet he knew that he was there to build bridges and not to lecture. As a result, his visit achieved a modest but undeniable hardening in Chinese policy against ivory imports. The fact that the Duke was invited to a Cabinet meeting with President Xi was similarly significant. Just six weeks earlier, the Foreign Office minister, Hugo Swire, had not even managed to secure a meeting with the chief executive of Hong Kong. Yet here was the Duke of Cambridge being granted a degree of access to the very top that was denied to many Western heads of state. If the Chinese leadership was happier meeting the heir to a hereditary monarchy than a democratically elected politician, Britain would simply play to its strengths. The Prince held court with twenty-five Chinese ministers for forty-five minutes. To make things even harder, the first five minutes were broadcast live on television.
Like his father and his grandmother, the Duke is now adept at sensitive diplomatic missions on the big stage. In June 2018, he became the first member of the Royal Family to pay an official visit to Israel. He is well aware, like his father, that the role of Head of the Commonwealth is not hereditary and must be earned. He has been keen to play his part in its affairs, taking a central role in the 2018 London CHOGM and holding several private one-on-one audiences with heads of government.
The Foreign Office has also deployed both the Duke and the Duchess of Cambridge as a sort of Brexit balm following the 2016 referendum vote to leave the European Union. ‘Them going to Europe has been a deliberate policy of saying: “We still want the closest possible ties with you”,’ says a senior Foreign Office figure. ‘Brexit has come at a time when the UK is very divided. At least we have one focus of national unity. The fact we have a Royal Family which is popular is an extraordinary asset. It can reaffirm links and bonds and friendship in a non-political way. So, in a way, the monarchy has found itself with a new relevance.’
No one seriously believes that Britain’s tricky recalibration of its relationship with Europe will be swayed one way or the other by a few royal visits. The point is to keep the diplomatic mood-music warm, to underline the fact that the UK has not fundamentally changed, that certain pre-EU institutions will be unchanged in a post-EU Britain. It is a bilateral channel that operates at the highest level, but in a completely different atmosphere. It is why the Duke of Cambridge had a meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel when he visited Germany in 2016, just weeks after the referendum upheavals, as he attended the seventieth anniversary of North Rhine-Westphalia. There was an even more important lunch the following year as the Duke returned with his family for a ‘Brexit balm’ tour of Poland and Germany. ‘William is now able to go and play that role of serious interlocutor. He did it with President Hollande in Paris. He did it with Hillary Clinton and with the Obamas. He did it in Poland and he did it with Angela Merkel,’ says a senior Foreign Office mandarin. ‘Merkel had just come from the G20 summit which she had been hosting and which had been very demanding but she was charming and was keen to see William and Catherine.’ The Duke, it seems, was careful to avoid offering an opinion. ‘It was more interrogative on his side. But he is able to get across the message that the UK wants to stay friends, that there are good relations. I’ve seen a lot ministers in ministerial meetings and he is pretty good in comparison.’
/> Even Palace veterans were not expecting the sort of reaction that greeted the Cambridges in Germany. ‘I was surprised by the levels of enthusiasm. Heidelberg had the sort of crowds we saw just after their wedding,’ says one senior Palace aide. ‘Back then, they were a sexy young couple. Now he’s losing his hair, he’s got three young children and yet the buzz is the same. What’s the basis for that? Who knows? But it’s there and it’s very important.’
Such trips are also planned with an eye looking far beyond today’s political cycle. So, in Poland, the British side was particularly keen on the Duke walking with Lech Walesa through the gates of the Gdansk shipyard, the birthplace of Poland’s Solidarnosc movement. Walesa’s place in world history is already assured, as the Nobel Prize-winning leader of the first independent trade union behind the Iron Curtain. Yet moments like this may, one day, help forge a connection with a generation as yet unborn. ‘In fifty years, people in Poland will say of Prince William: “He met Walesa”,’ says Sir David Manning. It was one of the reasons why the Duke and his team were also keen to meet survivors of the concentration camp at Stutthof. It is a source of astonishment to large parts of today’s world that the Queen once worked with Winston Churchill – a figure as remote to younger generations as Queen Victoria. Half a century from now there will be few, if any, public figures still in office who can say that they knew Angela Merkel, Lech Walesa, President Xi or President Obama or that they met Holocaust survivors in a concentration camp. Yet, an elderly King William V will be able to speak of these encounters with fondness and authority. That is the sort of continuity that royalty can provide.
THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF SUSSEX
If carving out a relevant modern role has been a challenge for the Duke of Cambridge, it has been even more of one for his younger brother. ‘The future is on tramlines for William and we know what has to happen,’ says a senior member of the Royal Household. ‘It’s different for Harry. He has much more scope but there can be no entitlement and that is difficult. What is the point of a twenty-first-century Prince? Why have we got you? What are you supposed to be doing? He knows those are the questions.’ As a result, the Prince has become perhaps the most internationally-focussed member of the Royal Family -and not merely in his choice of bride.
After leaving Eton in 2003, Prince Harry took a ‘gap’ year which followed a similar pattern to that of Prince William, with ranch-style work in Australia and Africa. It took him to the southern African hill kingdom of Lesotho and a meeting with Prince Seeiso, younger brother of King Letsie III, the Ampleforth-educated monarch whose boisterous coronation‡ had been attended by the Prince of Wales in 1997. Seeiso and Harry, though eighteen years apart in age, were younger royal brothers who had both lost their mothers and were keen to establish something to honour their memories. Aside from having the highest lowest point of any nation on Earth, Lesotho’s other claim to a superlative was a grim one: one of the highest HIV/Aids infection rates in the world. It had left many children orphaned. The two Princes created the Sentebale charity – meaning ‘forget me not’ – to offer them a home, an education and hope. It has remained a core concern of Prince Harry ever since.
By the time it was up and running, Prince Harry had been through Sandhurst and was a second lieutenant in the Blues and Royals. Having risen to the top of the Combined Cadet Force at Eton, the Prince quickly proved a natural fit as a cavalry officer. His hopes of serving in Iraq in 2006 were frustrated by senior officers’ concerns that he would be singled out by the enemy and would thus be a threat to his own men. His persistence was rewarded, though, in 2007 when he was sent on his first tour of Afghanistan, serving as a forward air controller in Helmand Province. It was only a media leak that forced an early return after ten weeks. He would then retrain as an Army Air Corps helicopter pilot and proved to be one of the best in his intake, earning himself a place on the prized training course to fly the Apache attack helicopter. Friends say it was a turning point. ‘Two things have made a key difference to him,’ says a senior member of the Royal Household. ‘One was when it turned out that he was an outstanding helicopter pilot. Being the pilot of an Apache – the top of the tree – was a very big thing. The other was finding he had this ability to mobilise people.’
He was back in Afghanistan in the autumn of 2012, fresh from representing the Queen at the closing ceremony of the London Olympics. This time he was at the helm of an Apache. Death threats from the Taliban did not prevent him from completing his tour, after which he qualified as an Apache commander in 2013 – a year that would be something of a turning point in many ways. By now, British casualties in Afghanistan had far exceeded those in the Falklands. The Prince was well aware that substantial numbers of wounded and damaged servicemen and women were in need of long-term support and new ways of delivering it. That same year, he joined a team of them on a trek to the South Pole with the charity Walking With the Wounded.
As he switched from the Army Air Corps to a staff officer role in London, he was well placed to work on a big new idea. It was in 2013 that he travelled to the USA to look at America’s tournament for wounded Forces personnel. ‘Harry went out to the Warrior Games and, when they finished, he just said: “We’re going to have these in Britain”,’ recalls a member of his team. ‘Then he spent nine months doing little else – boring things like sitting on committees and raising money and dealing with the Ministry of Defence. It was an extraordinary moment for him.’
The Invictus Games were an instant success. Blessed with a lot of goodwill and perfect timing – Britain was still enjoying the afterglow of London 2012 and a nearly-new Olympic Park – the first games drew 300 competitors from thirteen countries.
Those who have watched the Prince mature from shy teenager into one of Britain’s best-loved public figures believe that his ten years in the Army have been the making of him (as he himself has acknowledged on several occasions) but, in 2015, it was time to move on. He would now carve out a new career, one which would seek to show the point of a twenty-first-century Prince.
Invictus was almost a full-time job in itself. Unlike the Warrior Games, which rotate around different parts of the USA, Prince Harry wanted Invictus to move around the world. The next tournament, in 2016, took place in Florida, with the first lady, Michelle Obama, in a central role and bestowing the imprimatur of the White House. Even the Queen was recruited to help with a promotional video. Substantial international media coverage followed on both sides of the Atlantic. With a tried-and-tested formula, the event grew in size and moved on to Toronto in 2017, while Sydney was selected for 2018. By any standards – even royal ones – it was a major achievement to take a new and untried sporting event from a standing start to being an established, televised international fixture in under five years.
‘Harry has shot the lights out with Invictus,’ says David Cameron. The former US Ambassador to London, Matthew Barzun, agrees: ‘What Prince Harry did with Invictus – I think you could see the best of his mother and his father in his natural connection with people. He is out there in his polo shirt being himself but also speaking out – and it’s political with a lower case “p” – for these people who would otherwise be left behind.’ Barzun remains impressed by Prince Harry’s demeanour at these big occasions and by his ‘modern, not too buttoned up’ approach to the job. He recalls holding a large Invictus event at his official residence, Winfield House, with hundreds of wounded veterans and the Foo Fighters providing the music. ‘I made a gaffe,’ says the ex-Ambassador. ‘In my excitement, I said: “Let’s give a big hand to His Majesty, Prince Harry”. As an American, the word “highness” is so strange, but you’d think I could say it. Anyway, I hand the microphone to Prince Harry just as it’s dawning on me what I just said. He pats me on the shoulder and says: “Thanks for the promotion!” Which I thought was lovely.’
‘He has come into his own in the last few years,’ says Baroness Chalker who sits on the board of that first charity which Prince Harry created, Sentebale, and know
s its Lesotho operations very well. The Prince, she says, is the ideal, hands-on patron. ‘He is brilliant with children, absolutely brilliant.’ Having accompanied their mother on her travels all those years ago, Lady Chalker first met both Princes as children. ‘When I met Prince William a year or two ago, he said: “I remember you”. I said: “Yes sir, you have sat on my knee!” ’ She sees so many parallels with the work of their father and of their late mother. ‘I think they have broken the mould in a very appropriate way,’ says the former minister. ‘I think Diana would be jolly proud. I am sure she is. I mean, she broke the mould in my time when she decided she would go for the banning of landmines.’
The mould-breaking analogy extended very happily to his private life when, in 2017, Prince Harry announced his engagement to Meghan Markle, the first citizen of a foreign nation to become a British princess since the Duke of Kent married Princess Marina of Greece in 1934. The ease with which the star of the US television drama Suits was welcomed into the Royal Family was an illustration of the monarchy moving with the times. Almost a century before, there had been considerable excitement when a royal second son had married a ‘commoner’ for the first time. Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon ended up as Queen because, back then, the Government and the Church of England of the day could not countenance Edward VIII marrying an American divorcee. Nor was Mrs Simpson an actress.
In twenty-first-century Britain, the fact that Ms Markle had been married before was of little more than passing interest. After all, the Prince of Wales was divorced and married to a divorcee. Having an American princess on the Palace balcony (even one who would take British citizenship in due course) could hardly be more timely at a moment when post-referendum Britain was being accused of succumbing to inward nationalistic urges. The monarchy was unquestionably looking outwards and welcoming the world – to the heart of the family. As for Ms Markle’s acting credentials, these seemed a positive bonus, both in terms of handling the limelight and bringing added glamour to the institution. To many members of the public and to media commentators, particularly those from minority backgrounds, the most significant breakthrough was that a member of the Royal Family was marrying someone of mixed race. Ms Markle’s mother was from an African-American family while her father was of Dutch-Irish descent. The future Duchess of Sussex had spoken openly and poignantly of her ethnicity. ‘I wasn’t black enough for the black roles and I wasn’t white enough for the white ones, leaving me somewhere in the middle,’ she had said. As far as the Queen and the Royal Family were concerned, however, the overarching view was quite simple: if Harry is happy, we are happy. The Queen gladly made small but telling indulgences not granted to previous royal brides-to-be, like inviting Ms Markle to join the Royal Family for Christmas and, indeed, using the term ‘Ms’ in a royal wedding announcement for the first time. For Prince Harry it also meant a welcome end to years of speculation, such as the excruciating if well-meaning remarks of the Prime Minister of Antigua, Gaston Browne, during the Prince’s 2016 visit. ‘I believe we are expecting a new princess soon,’ the premier told the blushing Prince, long before any whiff of a royal engagement. ‘You are very welcome to come on your honeymoon here.’
Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Page 66
