Why Charles Can’t Stop Undermining His Son and Heir

Welcome to the always-free Sunday Newsletter

I highly recommend the fascinating piece by Barbara Davies in the Mail yesterday about the “loyal band of friends” who joined William for the Aston Villa game — and the tiny but hugely revealing window it gives us into the usually hermetically sealed world where “real William” lives.

We saw William weeping, singing and roaring, his bald head being patted jokingly by his old mate Edward van Cutsem, like any middle-aged man who has waited 30 years to watch his club lift a European trophy.

Davies does a peerless, classic Daily Mail job of unpicking it all: the genuine inner circle out in Istanbul — van Cutsem, the King’s godson and a page boy at Charles’ 1981 wedding; Thomas van Straubenzee, godfather to Charlotte and a friend since prep school; Ben “Dawesey” Dawes, who runs a wine business and sent his kids to a state school. Meetings that are “infrequent but cherished,” she writes. Barbecues, beer, a lot of wine. Discreet West London pubs with quiet back rooms, where William is partial to a pint of Stella.

An annual ski trip. And (a detail everyone will savor) the “iffy” Welsh accent William reportedly deploys, in a hat and glasses, to throw strangers off the scent on these nights, where talk of his royal role is banned. The friends, the source says, “have no axes to grind” and “know how to behave.”

On the face of it, a warm and engaging portrait of the real William.

But.

If you’ll allow me to read between the lines, Davies’s 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’t 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.

Senior staff at the paper know which side their bread is buttered; many are close to Tobyn Andreae, the King’s chief communications man and a former Mail man who missed out on the editor-in-chief’s 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 “why royal aides are concerned” about William’s “hidden” blokeish ways. Headlines are written by editors, not journalists, and they reflect a publication’s line.

The stick used to beat William has always been that he is “lazy,” or “workshy.” And, prima facie, the data supports it.

Charles, whatever his critics think of him, absorbed his mother’s first commandment, that royals must be seen to be believed, and turned himself into the most visible monarch in modern history.

The numbers aren’t 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’Donovan, 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.)

And tempted as any normal person would be to discount the last two years, the hardest of William’s life, Charles’s 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’s 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.

William’s court argues that he simply sees the job differently. He disdains performative monarchy — 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.

And the figures speak for themselves: Charles’s never-ending tour, plus the patina of actually being King, have pushed his approval to a record high of around 60 percent — but William and Catherine outstrip him by a mile, in the late seventies.

I was also fascinated by Davies’s account of the row over the Pope’s funeral.

As I exclusively reported at the time, William initially demurred about going, because he wanted to watch an Aston Villa match, to his father’s disgust.

Davies reports growing concern in royal and government circles about his reluctance to travel abroad unless the destination interests him personally.

The Foreign Office, one source tells her, has struggled to get him on a plane — the big overseas trips have all been Earthshot, while he’s 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’s final term at junior school. I’m told he’s resisting unless England reach the quarter-final.

This is the kind of thing that sends Charles absolutely bonkers. He insists personal wishes, and personal family life, come second to duty.

William and Catherine feel the two are indivisible. Catherine’s choice of early childhood as her life’s 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’t 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.

You can see the same instinct in how they live. William reportedly finds the formality of his father’s households “stifling,” and has stripped it back, with “fewer flunkeys wandering around,” in the Mail’s words.

Office staff are kept out of sight; a cook is sometimes redundant because William or Kate just cook themselves.

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.

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.

One parent told me: “They are like caricatures of middle-class parents. I went to the house for a kid’s 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 rosé.”

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.

But, and this is the point, all of that is the small stuff. The dishwashers, the soccer, the engagement counts. It’s the cosy, visible face of the divide. The real war between father and son is uglier, and it’s about two men: Harry, and Andrew.

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’t want to see his brother, doesn’t want to hear from him, and doesn’t want anyone else in the family engaging with him either.

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, “The Wasp,” whose loathing for Harry is mutual.

A friend of the King’s told The Royalist last year that Charles was “delighted” to see Harry. William was not.

For him, Harry’s betrayal, above all the allegation that Catherine asked bigoted questions about a child’s skin color, is a permanent, irreversible sin. And he reads Harry’s possible rehabilitation exactly as he read Andrew’s: as a very bad idea, in support of which he believes Andrew Lownie’s recent exposé has now vindicated him. Once you’re out, you’re out.

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.