Word missing in George clip changes everything

Overnight in London, eight-year-old Prince George enjoyed another one: Access to the Royal Box at Wimbledon. The only young’uns ever allowed to seat their titled derrières on the famous Lloyd Loom chairs for an afternoon of ‘Good showing!’ and hearty clapping are the youngest members of the House of Windsor.

For George, getting the prime spot on centre court to watch Novak Djokovic and Nick Kyrgios duke it out marks another first on the ever-growing list of debut events as the boy is introduced to public life, one awkward tiny suit wearing appearance after another.

In the last year, he has joined his parents at the Euro 2020 finals, taken part in his first official visit to Wales, and been a part of the carriage procession for Trooping the Colour.

At first glance, the year four boy’s Wimbledon turn is a sad facsimile of his own father’s when a young Prince William made his first appearance at the legendary sporting event in 1991. (The only saving grace? The style of double breasted suit William was required to wear has happily gone the way of the fax machine.)

This situation would all be a bit of a depressing one where we could haul out something like “the more that changes, the more that stays the same” … except for one thing. A video in fact.

Coming it under a minute and popping up on Twitter, the video, which appears to have come from the BBC broadcast of the event shows Kate, Duchess of Cambridge and George arriving via their usual hulking black Range Rover. (Does the royal family buy them by the dozen?)

First Kate shakes hands with one of the military personnel who serve as stewards during the tournament, saying “Very nice to see you again” before introducing her son with, “This is George.” Then the duchess moves towards Wimbledon chairman Ian Hewitt, again presenting her firstborn with, “This is George.”

All hail Just George!

Where oh where has the kid’s title gone?

The situation is curiously reminiscent of that in 2020 when his uncle Prince Harry undertook one of his final events as frontline working member of the royal family at popping up at a sustainable tourism conference in Edinburgh. There host Ayesha Hazarika told delegates before he took to the stage, “He’s made it clear that we are all just to call him Harry.”

But the introduction of Just George is not a slip up or can simply be put down to the fact that the boy is barely out of short pants.

What has emerged out of Kensington Palace in recent months is a clearly discernible shift and one that has seen the Cambridge family’s titles start to disappear.

To understand why this is happening you need to rewind a few months back, in the wake of William and Kate’s debacle of a Caribbean tour.

Rather than returning to the UK basking in the glow of the adoration of the Commonwealth and with pleasant new tans, they landed back in London chastened and having notched up the biggest and most public fail of their careers.

From take off, the eight day trip did not go to plan. Before they had even landed at their first stop, Belize, it emerged that they had cancelled the first event on their itinerary, visiting a cacao farm, because they would face protests over the ownership of the land.

Rather than engage with the protesters, red pens came out, scratching the outing. It made the couple look evasive and uncomfortable in the face of criticism and that moment set the tone for the tour.

Faced with the issues of slavery reparations and simmering anger over the royal family’s colonial past, William and Kate looked woefully out of their depth.

As they flew back to the UK, the duke put out a highly unusual statement saying that overseas tours were an “opportunity to reflect” and that he and his wife saw their jobs as serving the people “in whatever way they think best, by using the platform we are lucky to have”.

Since then, various reports have emerged suggesting that some very serious soul-searching has been going on inside the Cambridge office of the sort that might involve a whiteboard and more than one family-sized pack of Waitrose shortbread.

One of things on the chopping block? Their titles. Not forever mind you or in ever setting but a broader repositioning of the duo. Adios staid formality and welcome to the Just William and Kate era!

A royal source told the Mirror in May: “When the team arrived back in London the couple had a debrief with aides.

“The general consensus was that the tour seemed out of date, out of touch, too formal and stuffy.

“So now it’s more ‘Wills and Kate’ instead of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge … ‘Just call me Wills’ type of thing.

“They want to try to avoid the bows and curtsies in public, be more approachable, less formal, less stuffy, and break away with a lot of the tradition and focus on a modern monarchy.”

That goal – of creating a “modern monarchy” – is one that William and Kate have been plugging away on for a while but what their Caribbean tour did was add a certain urgency to the project.

You can see signs of the evolution in the Cambridges’ official Twitter account.

In the past, the posts were only very rarely signed by the couple and read as if their pluckiest intern had been left in charge of their social media channels for the day.

However, in recent months we have started seeing far more tweets that finish with ‘W and K’. For example when they made a rare political statement when Russia invaded Ukraine, fishing with: “Today we stand with the President and all of Ukraine’s people as they bravely fight for that future W & C.”

In only the last week, the couple paid tribute to Dame Deborah James after losing her cancer battle, posting “Deborah was an inspirational and unfalteringly brave woman whose legacy will live on. W & C.”

When Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was murdered last week, we got: “I won’t forget the warmth and generosity he extended to me during my visit to Japan in 2015. My thoughts are with his family and the people of Japan. W.”

To some this might all seem like a very minor tweaking to the royal status quo but to me this points to a much more interesting and far-reaching paradigm shift.

William and Kate would seem to be acutely aware that the survival of the monarchy does not rest on how many doll-like dresses the duchess can humanly wear or how many billions of dollars of tourism revenue they are responsible for or even how enthusiastically they can sell their ‘normal family’ schtick to the people.

The British royal family receives about $151 million annually and what the Cambridges are trying to do is create an institution that is a good return on investment for UK taxpayers.

That means ensuring that the royal family is seen as a genuinely useful addition to contemporary society, one which makes a palpable difference. Nothing would bring about the demise of the Crown faster than if the Windsors were generally viewed as a bunch of overprivileged toffs who enjoy all the fringe benefits of royalty and in return will deign to open a bridge every now and then.

You would not think it to look at the Cambridges sometimes, two adults whose knees have not been seen in public since One Direction started going through puberty, but William and Kate are shaping up to be the most radically subversive members of the royal family in centuries.

It’s not that they will ‘do’ more charity and willingly hug the public more frequently but they are masterminding a repositioning of what sort of relationship the people can expect to both have with the king and queen and with the monarchy as a whole.

For one thing, they are both seemingly willing to genuinely share who they are with the world such as William’s Time To Walk podcast appearance or the November video of him opening up to frontline workers about the personal “stresses and strains” that he experienced during his time as an air ambulance pilot.

Can you imagine the Queen agreeing to a heartfelt interview where she talked about her greatest childhood trauma? (Which would be the ending of National Velvet, of course.)

For the duke and duchess, the goal would seem to be to take their roles as king and queen-in-waiting and shift the dial away from imperious personages looking down at the masses but two people who are willing to talk about their sadness and joy in between doing the school run.

A more cynical mind might put this all down as masterful marketing cooked up in some Palace back room, and maybe it is the case, but the optimist in me hopes that this is driven by a desire to bring authenticity and humanness to their roles.

Moreover, in the Cambridges’ hands, the much vaunted service and duty that are part and parcel of royal public life looks a lot less like dabbling around the edges but a willingness to dive headfirst into some of the most pressing and consequential issues our time like the climate change and mental health crises.

And it is this monarchy that George will one day inherit, a monarchy that will likely bear very little similarity with the one his Gan Gan presided over for decades on end.

Sure, there will always be the pomp and circumstance of big days like Trooping the Colour and the immutable roster of sombre events of state he will have to take part in, like the ceremony at the Cenotaph for Remembrance Day, but in the months in between those outings, in the hundreds of other days George will have at his disposal, it will be another question entirely.

If William and Kate’s project right now continues on the same trajectory, the monarchy their son will oversee will be much more of a living and breathing concern than a moribund hangover of a long gone Britain.

And after all of that, if a hardworking king or queen might fancy a day out at Wimbledon in the Royal Box every so often then, well that seems more than reasonable. More shampoo anyone?

Daniela Elser is a royal expert and a writer with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles

Originally published as Word missing in Prince George Wimbledon video shows Will and Kate’s agenda