Second in line to the throne, still at school, and about to hit exactly the age where most of us were mortifying ourselves in relative anonymity.
Prince George continues, quietly and mostly off the front pages these days, to simply get on with being a teenager, or close enough to one, second in line to the throne and still very much a schoolboy juggling exactly the ordinary milestones the rest of us fumbled through decades ago with considerably less scrutiny attached. It is easy, covering this family for a living, to forget occasionally that George is, underneath the constitutional weight everyone insists on attaching to him, simply a kid getting on with school.
I say this as someone who writes about the monarchy’s politics and pageantry for a living, and who therefore has more reason than most to sometimes lose sight of the actual children at the centre of it. George did not choose this. None of the Wales children did. They were born into a role that comes with a level of public interest in their ordinary teenage milestones that most parents would find genuinely alarming applied to their own family, and the Prince and Princess of Wales have, by most credible accounts, worked hard to shield their children’s daily lives from exactly that level of exposure, with real success given how comparatively little we actually know about George’s day-to-day beyond the carefully chosen official photographs.
Royal historian commentary on this family has, in recent years, increasingly framed William and Kate’s approach to raising their children as a deliberate departure from the previous generation, a more grounded, more private, more conventionally-schooled model than some of their own childhoods afforded them. Whatever one’s views on the monarchy as an institution, that specific parenting instinct strikes me as a genuinely sound one, and I say that as someone who has, on more than one occasion, had to gently decline a colleague’s pitch for a story that would have required considerably more intrusion into a thirteen-year-old’s life than any of us would tolerate for our own children.
There will, inevitably, come a point, likely sooner than any of us currently covering this family would like to admit, where George’s public role expands meaningfully beyond the odd carefully staged appearance at his parents’ side. That transition, whenever it properly begins, deserves careful, fair coverage rather than the breathless anticipation some corners of this industry are already, prematurely, gearing up for. He is, for now, still just a boy working through exactly the milestones every other British teenager is working through this year, and I intend to keep treating that distinction with the respect it deserves for as long as I possibly can.
For now, then, very little to report, in the best possible sense. Long may that particular kind of quiet continue, for his sake more than for any headline this column could otherwise be writing.
I think about this a fair amount, actually, the strange asymmetry of writing regularly about someone whose entire adolescence is unfolding under a level of institutional and public attention that would be considered genuinely intrusive applied to almost any other child in the country. The best I can offer, from my small corner of this industry, is restraint where restraint is due, and a willingness to simply let a thirteen-year-old be thirteen for as long as the story allows it, which, mercifully, this week, it does.
More from this author at Isla Campbell, prat.uk.
