More Fast, Less Furious

The Prince of Wales is busy collecting winkles

I must begin with a confession of professional embarrassment. I have, on occasion, been guilty of the very sin I am about to anatomize. The word appears in my own notes from time to time, and I offer no defense except that it is infectious, a journalistic contagion that spreads from outlet to outlet until it becomes received wisdom. I am aware I wrote about this topic On the 24th of June, but here we are again.

The word, of course, is furious.

Prince William, we are told, is furious. He was furious last week. He was furious the week before. If you assembled every story published about the Prince of Wales over the past three years in which an unnamed source described his emotional state, you would find a man in a condition of near-perpetual, white-hot, volcanic fury. You would picture someone pacing the corridors of Kensington Palace at midnight, rattling the wainscoting, frightening the staff.

And yet.

On Thursday, Prince William descended the East Hill funicular railway in Hastings, the steepest in the United Kingdom, I’m told, waved cheerfully at a group of German schoolchildren, crouched down to say hello to a fifteen-month-old who promptly burst into tears, and responded with what I can only describe as warmth and good humor. ‘I know how you feel,’ he told the child. ‘It’s hot down here.’ He then toured black-painted net shops, met local fishermen, climbed aboard a fishing vessel, accepted a silver winkle from a charitable organization founded in 1900, and delivered a joke about his winkle that I will leave to your imagination but which was apparently well-received. He played miniature golf. He missed a hole-in-one. He visited a charity that converts derelict buildings into social housing.

This is not the itinerary of a furious man.

A furious man does not accept a ceremonial mollusc with a grin. A furious man does not joke about displaying said mollusc at the Trooping of the Colour. A furious man certainly does not lose gracefully at a windmill hole on a seaside crazy-golf course. The word the press is reaching for , and consistently failing to find, might be composed. Or purposeful. Or, and I say this with some precision, unconcerned.

Now, I am told by colleagues in the media that ‘unconcerned’ doesn’t sell newspapers. Neither does mildly exasperated, privately disappointed, wearily resigned, or quietly skeptical. The English language offers us a rich vocabulary for human displeasure - irritated, vexed, aggrieved, piqued, displeased, put out, indignant, chafed, rankled- and the tabloid press has surveyed this magnificent landscape and decided, unanimously and apparently irrevocably, to pitch its tent on furious and never leave.

I have a theory about this, and it is not a flattering one for the press.

Furious keeps Harry relevant. If William is furious, it means Harry has gotten to him. It means the wound is fresh, the nerve is live, the drama is ongoing. It gives the Sussex story oxygen. It suggests that somewhere in that Montecito compound, the strategy is working, that the statements, the docuseries, the court cases, the anonymous briefings are landing with force.

But what if they’re not? What if the more accurate headline is that William has, with considerable discipline, simply moved on? That he has looked at the situation, made his assessment, and filed it under not my problem anymore? That is a far less exciting story. That is, in fact, almost no story at all. And so we get furious instead, conjured from unnamed sources whose access to the Prince of Wales’s interior life is, shall we say, speculative.

I will tell you what I know from people who have actually been in proximity to the Prince of Wales in recent months. The word they use is not furious. One of them used the word indifferent. Another said detached. A third, who has known William for some years, said simply: ‘He’s moved on. He’s genuinely moved on.’

And if you think about it, indifference is the more devastating verdict. Furious means Harry still has the power to disturb him. Indifferent means the file is closed, the case is concluded, and William has redirected his considerable energy toward the future he is actually building: his children, his wife’s recovery, his work on homelessness and conservation, his fishermen in Hastings.

The next time you read that William is furious ( sourced, as always, to someone described only as ‘a close friend’ or ‘a palace insider’) I would invite you to picture instead a man riding a funicular railway down a Sussex cliff, clutching a silver winkle, utterly at peace.

There is, of course, one person in this saga who may in fact be furious. Prince Harry arrived in Britain this week having lost his court case on all fourteen counts, having been denied police protection for his family, having watched his wife decline to join him, and having delivered a speech at the Invictus Games mere minutes after a judge dismissed everything he'd spent years fighting for. He then issued a statement calling the verdict 'a complete and obvious whitewash', which is not the language of a man at peace. If the tabloids are genuinely in search of fury, they might consider redirecting their unnamed sources approximately 120 miles away, where a Duke with a £50 million legal bill and a very long flight home is, one imagines, not in the sunniest of moods."