Prince William is back at work and facing a new normal

Prince William, the heir to the British throne, stepped back onto the public stage on Wednesday and tried to convey a rock-solid sense of normalcy, three days after announcing that his father, King Charles III, had been struck by cancer.

But when William held an honors ceremony at Windsor Castle and attended a charity fundraiser in London, a shadow of uncertainty hung over the 41-year-old prince. No one, except Charles and his wife, Queen Camilla, faces more lingering disruption from the king's cancer diagnosis than his eldest son.

The advocacy work, family life and privacy zone that William has created for himself are very different from those of his father when he was Prince of Wales. Whether William will be able to maintain these qualities while filling in for his father during his treatment is uncertain at best.

“William, compared to his father, has focused less on the day-to-day routine work of the monarchy, focusing instead on bigger, glitzier assignments,” said Ed Owens, a royal historian. “But now he is expected to attend many of these more mundane public outings.”

It's not just about managing an agenda: William's professional focus, say members of his staff, has been on putting his energy into a number of high-impact social issues – most recently climate change and homelessness – to which he believes he can contribute can deliver. a tangible difference.

The scope of William's ambition is evident in an impending commotion in his office at Kensington Palace. He and his wife Catherine are expected to appoint a CEO for the first time. The use of a corporate title instead of the traditional title of private secretary, says a person with knowledge of the office, is intended to attract candidates with business credentials and enhance the professional character of the office.

One of the prince's major projects is a five-year program that aims to end homelessness in six towns and cities in Britain. Although Charles had a similar attachment to domestic issues such as organic farming and architecture, he pursued them on a more ad hoc basis. Much of his time, like that of other royals of his generation, was taken up with ribbon cuttings and other ceremonial duties.

Now some of that burden will fall on his son.

“William was trying to test the limits of what he could do as heir, what he couldn't do as king,” says Peter Hunt, a former royal correspondent for the BBC. “The tension is how to continue his own activities and at the same time support the monarch. William will feel that at an earlier stage than his father.”

A spokesman for William, Lee Thompson, said Kensington Palace was in discussions with Buckingham Palace about how to divide the king's public duties (William's events on Wednesday were in his diary before the announcement of his father's illness) .

In the meantime, Mr Thompson said, William will continue to drop off and pick up his children from their school in Berkshire, west of London. That is another break with the more distant parenting style of the royal family in previous generations.

It's a ritual that William and Catherine usually share, but which he took on as a single parent when she was unexpectedly admitted to hospital last month (he had suspended his public engagements until Wednesday to care for her).

The zeal with which William has thrown a cloak of privacy around his family was dramatized by his wife's medical treatment. Kensington Palace offered little information about her condition, other than that she was undergoing abdominal surgery. There were no photos of the couple's children – George, Charlotte and Louis – visiting their mother in hospital. There was also no footage of her going home almost two weeks later.

The contrast with Charles was striking. Buckingham Palace announced that he would undergo a procedure for an enlarged prostate. Camilla was photographed visiting her husband, and the couple left the hospital together, waving to the cameras as they walked to their car.

Some of those differences can be explained by history. Although Charles has taken his share of the pieces from the British tabloids, he has continued to work with those newspapers in what is essentially a transactional relationship.

However, William still bears the scars of the brutal reporting on his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, which ended with her death in a car crash in Paris in 1997, pursued by the paparazzi. In 2021, the prince bitterly criticized the BBC for a sensational interview broadcast with Diana in 1995 in which she discussed the marital infidelity of her ex-husband, Charles.

The BBC apologized for the report after an external investigation found that its correspondent, Martin Bashir, had used deceptive methods to obtain the interview and that BBC management had covered it up.

“It brings indescribable sadness to know that the BBC's failures contributed significantly to the fear, paranoia and isolation I remember from those last years with her,” William said in a video statement.

The prince's younger brother Harry has claimed William was not above spreading dirt about family members to the tabloids. William has also not hesitated to hire lawyers to go after the press, winning a “huge sum of money” from Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper group in 2020 to settle claims that journalists had hacked into his mobile phone, according to a legal file submitted by Harry.

Not surprisingly, William's emotional scars extend to his brother. The two fell out after Harry and his wife Meghan moved to California in 2020, and there are no signs of reconciliation. Harry flew to London this week to visit his father, but the brothers did not meet, according to a person familiar with their schedules.

As the ranks of the royal family have thinned, William's family has come to the fore at events such as Queen Elizabeth II's funeral and Charles' coronation. That inevitably caused the camera glare. The couple's five-year-old son, Prince Louis, has become a modern-day version of a young Harry, writhing and making faces on solemn occasions.

Certainly a charming image for the newspaper, but also a reminder that William and Catherine still have a young family.

Charles had to wait decades before becoming king. As his health deteriorates, his eldest son may face the opposite problem: having to get a job before he has a chance to explore his social and philanthropic ambitions, and exposing his children – especially his eldest son and heir, George – to unwanted attention.

“That will be quite a problem for him,” Mr Hunt said. “George is only ten. You can imagine William saying to himself, 'How can I create a buffer for him?'”