You would think that when two future kings, one future queen, and an additional prince and princess go on holiday, we would be talking about the pinnacle of luxury. Say, plush private jets, long stretches of sandy white beaches somewhere balmy and liveried footmen standing stiffly attendant, ankle deep in sand while the impish heir to the throne buried his sister up to her neck. But those bloody Cambridges – always dashing a girl’s fanciful daydreams. On Friday, William and Kate, Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, like clockwork, put out a new photo of their eldest son and future sceptre-owner Prince George to mark his ninth birthday. The image shows the kid grinning wildly, dressed in the sort of blue polo shirt parents the world over spend an inordinate amount of time getting peanut butter stains out of, and was taken while they were on holiday recently somewhere in the UK and which boasts, cough, a nice long, windy and grey beach. Still, even without a pina colada or gilt-edged bucket and spade in sight, the shot offers us a tantalising glimpse into the Cambridges’ most private of private lives, a life that runs counter to one of the key narratives that George’s uncle, Prince Harry, has been peddling from his California bolthole. Looking at the image of George, to me, the most striking thing about this new photo is the sheer, unadulterated and natural joy on the boy’s face. His mother might have been forcing him to pose when he would have rather been reading Harry Potter or playing Minecraft or learning about the divine right of kings, but no matter. The kid looks incredibly happy.The same goes for the new pictures we got earlier this year for his sister Princess Charlotte’s birthday in May, showing her smiling merrily in a field of flowers and the ones we got in April for Prince Louis’ fourth birthday. A beach again with a cricket ball as a prop and showing the youngest child, in one image, positively beaming. While obviously these are fleeting moments captured by an adoring mother, kids are just not good at faking it.But all of this happiness, this natural comfort with themselves and their life runs stands in opposition to one of the most stinging criticisms that Harry has hurled at Buckingham Palace, which is that to grow up in the confines of the royal family is to essentially suffer. During he and wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s devastating Oprah Winfrey interview last year he grimly told the talk show legend that he had been “trapped within the system, like the rest of my family are”. Not only that, “my father and my brother, they are trapped. They don’t get to leave. And I have huge compassion for that.” (Patronising much?)Harry doubled-down on painting royal life as a miserable one when he appeared on Dax Shepherd’s podcast in May last year, and talked about the “pain and suffering” of his upbringing, saying that it had been like “a mixture between The Truman Show and being in a zoo”.The royal seemed to be on a roll because when his mental health TV series The Me You Can’t See debuted a month later, he accused his family of “total neglect”.“I felt completely helpless,” the royal said. “I thought my family would help. But every single ask, request, warning, whatever it is, just got met with total silence”.This is the point where I make clear that, yes, I absolutely think Harry had a truly rotten time of it as a child and young adult. He deserves compassion and understanding and hopefully has found the love and security that was so badly lacking. But his experiences do not mean that those left behind, ensconced in the Palace life, now face the same fate. What Harry has not ever distinguished between is how much of his unhappy younger years can be blamed on the institution and how much was actually down to the two messed up individuals who raised him? From nearly birth, Harry’s parents’ marriage was in a state of permanent disintegration and they were locked in a tabloid war of attrition. From what we now know, Harry (and William) were not children who ever really experienced a happy, peaceful home life. Then of course came Diana, Princess of Wales’ shocking death when he was on the cusp of adolescence and two decades of anguish. However, what this new George shot does is really drive home that the version of the royal family that Harry has repeatedly talked about, one that was inherently dysfunctional and in which his emotional and psychological needs were never, ever met is … gone. In recent years, we have seen the Cambridge family eating a pub lunch, George and Charlotte shopping at a Smiggle store with Kate, and the duchess giving her three kids packed lunches to eat on the grass at the polo, not a quail’s egg or gooseberry in sight. More recently, we have also watched William, Kate and their kids at various Jubilee events and the parents with their eldest son at Wimbledon only this month. On every occasion what has been striking is how normal, warm and affectionate the lot of them are. BBC footage of the duke greeting his son at the tennis championship showed William happily reaching down to hug and kiss his son. This sort of tactile, open and caring approach is a completely new way of raising tiny HRHs. Diana might have been adamant about giving her sons a ‘normal’ upbringing but her notionof normal was not exactly what you or I might recognise. She grew up in one of the oldest aristocratic families in the UK, in one of the largest private houses and her childhood was an emotional wasteland of isolation and total indifference. Her parents’ divorce saw her maternal grandmother cruelly give evidence during the custody case against her mother Frances Shand-Kydd to help ensure she lost access to her four children.Talking about their childhood in 2020, her brother Earl Spencer told the Times: “Diana used to wait on the doorstep for [our mother], but she never came. She could hear me crying down the corridor but was too scared of the dark to come to me.”Charles did not fare much better. As a toddler, he and his sister Princess Anne had been left with nannies and their grandparents for months on end as their parents went overseas. When Diana first met the Prince of Wales when she was only 16-years-old, her first reaction on seeing him was “God, what a sad man!” as she later told Andrew Morton. As an adult, Charles would talk to biographer Jonathan Dimbleby and say he essentially felt neglected and abandoned by his own parents. And it was into this morass, two parents with their own bleak childhoods, trapped in a bleak marriage, that William and Harry were born. Is it any wonder then that the boys then had such unhappy childhoods themselves? But here’s where things happily veer off course because perhaps the greatest thing that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have achieved is creating a genuinely loving, stable and warm home for their children. What this week’s new George photo really underscores is that the image of royalty that Harry has been telling the world about, one characterised by a horrible sort of repression and quashing of feeling, is long gone. Let me reiterate, I’m not discounting Harry’s experience – the poor man has truly had decades of pain. However, the royal family as a mercenary institution hell bent on survival no matter the tender souls it crushes along the way just does not ring true any more. Only last month, at a roundtable meeting that included two government ministers where Kate presented research done by her Centre for Early Childhood, the duchess urged that children need to be taught how “to manage their emotions and feelings at a young age.” What all of this translates to is that it looks very like the duke and duchess are raising their children as people first, and members of the royal family second. This week the Queen travelled north to Scotland to begin her summer holidays at Balmoral and the Cambridges will be trundling along to join her at some stage too. While to grow up as a member of the royal family these days might mean hugs and feelings and abundant love, there are some things that have never and will never change. Hope you like flyfishing in nippy rivers and long, long walks on the midge-infested moors George: You’ve got decades of it ahead of you. 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.
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