A video of Prince William confronting a photographer has revealed a major problem facing the palace as the young prince ages.
In the 90s, there was no bar more exclusive in the world than Club H.
This wasn’t just another exclusive club for overpriced members that would see the It Girls of the decade falling out of their doors, their students punctured and Galliano’s clothes stuck to their underpants.
Rather, Club H’s clientele was made up exclusively of guys with names like Hugh and whose pedigree was such that they could tell you if their families had been on the side of the Cavaliers or the Roundheads during the English Civil War.
Club H was, of course, the creation of none other than Prince Charles, whose biggest claim to dissipate was caught trying to order a brand of cherries in a pub at 14 years old. (For real.)
The idea was simple and clever: I had two teenage children who were inevitably going to experiment with alcohol.
Instead of doing so within the reach of the tabloids, Charles created the boys’ own nightclub in the basement of his Highgrove estate.
Which brings us to the video that has appeared on social media this week, showing Prince William involved in a furious confrontation with a man while filming the prince taking a bike ride with his wife Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge and their children.
The three-minute clip was shot last year near his Norfolk estate, but mysteriously only uploaded to YouTube a few days ago. (The Telegraph reported that Cambridge lawyers had contacted the man who recorded the video after the confrontation.)
Kensington Palace has said the video violated the family’s privacy and the royal suit was reportedly asked on social media to remove it.
What highlights this situation is the delicate balance that the Cambridges have been able to make when it comes to protecting the privacy of their children, a balance, that is, whose days are clearly numbered.
Not to be disastrous, but this video is a kind of omen that should definitely concern William and Kate.
It rewinds in 2013, when Prince George was born, and the relationship between the royal family and Fleet Street was a world far from where it is now.
Months after the baby arrived, the snappers followed Kate as she walked her son with his stroller through Hyde Park or when George was taken out by the family’s nanny, Maria Teresa Turrion Borrallo. From the point of day, he had a target on his small back when it came to the most predatory elements of the press corps.
As Kensington Palace later detailed, in one case, a photographer had settled into a darkened vehicle, “filled with food and drink to make him spend a whole day watching, waiting with hope. “They found him lying in the trunk of the vehicle trying to take pictures with a long lens through a small hole in his skin.”
The “tactics used [to get photos] they are becoming increasingly dangerous, “warned then-Cambridge Communications Secretary Jason Knauf.
So the Palace and the press came to an agreement: the newspapers would not persecute George or the newborn Princess Charlotte and let them grow up in peace, and in return the Cambridge would hand out regular photos of their children’s cute cake.
Think of this as a kind of distension that has been maintained, in general, for most of a decade.
However, this compact could last and will only last a finite time.
On the one hand, while George, Charlotte and Louis are small, it is much easier to close their young lives from the media.
From school to game appointments to tennis lessons at Hurlingham Club, William and Kate (and Mary, of course) are able to guide them around the site in a totally controlled way. The opportunities for children to take pictures are very limited.
All of this will change when they become teenagers who want to do things on their own. Not only that, they will be teenagers surrounded by other children or even adults carrying all their smartphones.
What would Club H have been like if the guys drinking beer had high-resolution cameras in every pocket?
What Charles did when he created Club H was to create a shelter where his children could make the stupid mistakes of adolescence, which are part of growth, away from intrusive public vision.
The advent of smartphones and social media would mean it is a luxury that the young duke and duchess of Camrbidge will never know.
Unlike William and Prince Harry as teenagers, Cambridge children will never be able to enter a single room and know that there are unequivocally no cameras; there will be no really safe space.
The other factor here is how the press will approach George’s teenage years. The unofficial agreement between Kensington Palace and the major publishers was designed to give not only the young prince but his brothers the opportunity to grow away from the dazzle and exposure of daily media attention.
However, at what age will newspapers and magazines begin to see them as fair play?
In July, George will be nine years old, meaning that his parents are only four years away from having a teenager, and with that will come all the headaches of raising a teenager multiplied by 77,000. Most parents worry that their children will place an illicit Bacardi and Coca-Cola as they have no photos of their child making water, he said Bacardi and Coca-Cola were exploding on the internet.
This week, when this video of William appeared, Kensington Palace came into action and it is now impossible to find the video.
But it’s not like the royal family can follow that path every time George goes to a party at 16, he’s filmed firing sambuca shots by a dozen different people and all of these videos are shared on social media before the prince can. realize that the eyebrows have been sung.
At 13, George and his teammates will be old enough to create Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook accounts. Even if he surrounded himself with trusted allies, how long would it have been before some hugely embarrassing photo was stolen from the cloud or someone’s phone called Araminta was hacked?
The sad state of affairs is that no matter how much William and Kate love and want to protect their children, George, Charlotte and Louis are potentially facing the most exposed adolescence of all royal children.
Here is an idea. It has been reported that the Cambridge family could move to Windsor Castle when the Queen dies.
All the Duke and Duchess have to do is find some leftover cell from Oliver Cromwell’s time, line it with lead (or whatever) and put it in a mini fridge with UDL to create a Faraday cage for his children. .
He won’t solve all this, but at least the future King George VII will one day be able to download lime alcopops at an alarming rate and then vomit on Queen Victoria’s favorite roses without ending up being a trend on Twitter.
Daniela Elser is a royal expert and writer with over 15 years of experience working with several of Australia’s leading media titles.