For a tour that should have been an unmitigated success, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s visit to the Caribbean has ended up being surprisingly controversial, described as nothing less than ‘a PR disaster’. Even if some of the negative coverage feels confected, especially in light of the exploits of Prince Andrew and Prince Harry, it seems extraordinary that the supposed outrage could not have been anticipated.
It has been an inauspicious curtain-raiser to the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations in June: from the unfortunate images of the Duke and Duchess shaking hands with Jamaican children through a chain-link fence to the protests that have greeted their progress from local republicans.
Yet it has produced two notable news stories. The first is Prince William’s admission that he is unlikely to become head of the Commonwealth, given that he feels intrinsically uncomfortable with ‘telling people what to do’. A speech that he made in which he expressed his ‘profound sorrow’ for slavery may have been well-intentioned and an attempt to fend off the anti-colonialist protests, but it was immediately criticised for being little more than a rehashing of the white saviour narrative, made by one of the most privileged men in the world. It did not help that Keir Starmer said this morning that the Duke ‘could have gone further’ in his remarks and explicitly apologised for Britain’s role in the slave trade.
But the second – and perhaps more epochal – story is that Prince William has turned his back on one of the central tenets of the royal family: the credo ‘never complain, never explain’.
It has been briefed to the press that the tour has ‘brought into sharper focus questions about the past and the future’ as regards the Commonwealth’s relationship with Britain and its monarchy.
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