The year in royal work: Prince William
The King's elder son is the focus of Day 8 of my year-end work analysis
The year in royal work
Day 1: Princess Alexandra and the Duke of Kent
Day 2: The Duchess of Gloucester
Day 3: The Duke of Gloucester
Day 4: Princess Anne
Day 5: Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh
Day 6: Prince Edward
Day 7: Kate, Princess of Wales
HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES
On Saturday, December 7, the heir to the throne popped over to Paris for the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral, five years after the historic site was badly damaged by fire. Prince William was seated in the front row on the main aisle, next to some of Europe’s royals. While in the French capital, he met with U.S. First Lady Jill Biden as well as the incoming president, Donald Trump. It’s the diplomatic part of being Prince of Wales.
Interestingly, for a man who always seeks to be the most dominant figure at any event, it was Donald Trump who went to see Prince William at the British Embassy for the 40-minute meeting, which covered global events, the relationship between their nations, and the health of William’s family.
Trump couldn’t stop gushing about his chat with the Prince of Wales, whom he called “very handsome” and a “good man”: “I asked him about his wife and he said she’s doing well. And I asked him about his father and his father is fighting very hard, and he loves his father and he loves his wife, so it was sad,” Trump told the New York Post. “We had a great talk for half an hour, a little more than half an hour. We had a great, great talk.” The incoming president’s fondness for the royal family bodes well for the United Kingdom, which is concerned about maintaining its good relationship with the United States.
The engagements that Prince William did in Paris helped bump up his December tally to 12 engagements as of the weekend, compared to eight for the same month last year.
It’s one of the few months in which he’s done more engagements than in 2023. In the first half of the year, William dramatically scaled back his workload. His focus was on his family: helping his wife as she dealt with a series of very serious health issues (surgery, then a cancer diagnosis necessitating chemotherapy) and their very young children, whose lives had also been turned upside down by their mother’s illness.
Yet, in the end, he did enough work to land him in seventh spot among working Windsors when ranked by the number of engagements. To date in 2024, he has completed a smidge more than 135 engagements, his lowest number of events since I started my detailed analysis eight years ago. While a decrease was always expected, what surprised me is that he’s only down 26 percent from 2023. I honestly thought it would be a lost more, considering how many weeks went by without Prince William doing any public engagements.
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