The Crown in Comfortable Clothes

Sometimes the most important thing a monarch-in-waiting can do is simply show up

I’ll confess something I don’t often admit in these dispatches: I have spent the better part of this week writing about things that are, frankly, rather grim. The institution has been tested in ways that would have made even the most stoic of Palace veterans reach for the brandy. So when my producer John suggested I turn my attention to Thursday’s engagement in London, I resisted initially. Surely, I thought, our readers want analysis, not a warm cup of something reassuring.

He was right, and I was wrong.

What William and Catherine did on Thursday was, on its face, unremarkable. A market visit. A brewery. A lifeboat station. The sort of itinerary that gets filed under “working engagement, standard” somewhere in the bowels of Buckingham Palace. And yet I found myself watching the footage rather longer than I needed to for professional purposes, and reading the coverage with something I can only describe as uncomplicated pleasure.

There is a quality to this couple, when they are at ease and operating as a unit, that is genuinely difficult to manufacture and impossible to fake over the course of an entire day in public. At Borough Market, Catherine made her husband a cappuccino at Change Please, a social enterprise that trains people experiencing homelessness in coffee retail, and presented it to him with the easy familiarity of someone who has handed that particular man a great many cups of something over the years. His instinct, immediate and unguarded, was to ask whether it was decaf, and when she conceded it wasn’t, to suggest the stallholders sell it instead. A member of his team, apparently comfortable enough to confirm such things to the press, noted that William is fundamentally a tea man. Catherine, undeterred, carried the coffee around the market herself and eventually had a sip. The barista on duty assessed her technique afterwards with admirable professionalism: she had, he said, got the texture of the milk right on point. That is not a rehearsed exchange. That is a marriage, operating in public, without the seams showing.

The Telegraph headlined their piece “Princess of Ales,” which I thought rather good, and the broader substance justified the wit. At the Southwark Brewing Company, the couple climbed a ladder and pulled on black rubber gloves to tip hops into the brewing kettle. William, sniffing the mixture, observed that it smelled of horse feed. This is not the remark of a man performing enthusiasm. The owner told them they could come back Saturday for a shift, which is the sort of joke that only lands if the offer feels at least partially genuine. At Fabal Beerhall, William declared himself a cider man, specifying that he grew up on it in the West Country. That is Gloucestershire speaking; a boy who spent summers at Highgrove and absorbed something of the countryside into his bones, and who sees no reason to be embarrassed about it now that he is Prince of Wales.

Catherine’s disclosures about her health were, I thought, handled with characteristic quiet courage. When asked about the non-alcoholic options at the brewery, she told the owner that since her diagnosis she had not had much alcohol, that it was something she now had to be considerably more conscious of. She then turned to William and patted his knee: “But you like your cider, don’t you?” There is a whole portrait of a relationship in that gesture, the gentle redirection, the lightness deployed in service of something that is not light at all. She was not asking for sympathy. She was not performing resilience. She was simply moving on, which is the hardest thing of all.

They were praised throughout as naturals, told they would pass trial shifts, offered jobs on market stalls. The Humble Crumble founder declared Catherine’s piping of pink marshmallow fluff to be of a standard that could teach the team. William’s crumble-to-fruit ratio was, apparently, correct. At the Trethowan Brothers cheese stall, one of Borough Market’s anchor tenants since 1998, they sliced unpasteurised cheddar and Gorwydd Caerphilly and were told, simply, that they were big cheese fans. They confirmed this. “That’s lunch taken care of,” they said, and the cheese was bagged for an aide.

William, later, told those gathered on the Bermondsey Beer Mile that pubs are so important, that they are places for people and the community to come together. The Telegraph has been running its Save Our Pubs campaign for some months now, and the timing of this visit was not accidental. That is a piece of deliberate editorial alignment between the Palace and a sympathetic national paper, done in the service of something the Prince clearly believes in, and I have no objection to any part of it.

The RNLI thread running through the day carried its own significance. Their first official joint engagement, in February 2011, was for this same charity, on a cold morning in Anglesey, naming a lifeboat. To return now, in RNLI waterproofs, windswept on the Thames, bringing cake and biscuits bought at Borough Market, is the kind of narrative callback that speaks well of whoever is doing the thinking inside their operation. They also met Bridge Watch, the charity that patrols local bridges to intercept people in crisis and bring them somewhere warm to talk. “It’s about reaching out, is it,” Catherine asked, “and building trusted relationships that they might not have elsewhere in their lives?” The question was not rhetorical. She wanted to understand.

Outside, as the day ended, a small crowd had gathered. One voice called out, asking whether William had been covering for Andrew, which is the sort of thing that happens now and which he absorbed without breaking stride. Others thanked them. A woman wished Catherine a happy Mother’s Day. Another showed her a tattoo of the Princess’s handwriting on her torso, which is an expression of devotion I confess I find slightly startling but which Catherine received with apparent equanimity. She accepted flowers. She posed for photographs. She stood among people who had come specifically to be near her, people who had worried about her, and she met them where they were.

This is what it is supposed to look like. Not every dispatch from these pages can be about crisis and consequence. Sometimes the institution does what it was designed to do, quietly and well, and the most honest thing I can offer you is the acknowledgment that on Thursday, in Southwark and Bermondsey and Westminster, it did exactly that.

The crowds were large. The smiles were real. The crumble-to-fruit ratio was correct.

Some weeks, that is quite enough.