Meanwhile, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are back home, unpacking the crumpled sheets and contemplating a Caribbean tour that will make history – for all the wrong reasons.
Rather than being a merry celebration of the Queen’s platinum jubilee, the eight-day trip to three countries somehow fell into turmoil; one with far-reaching implications for the future of the Royal Family and particularly their role throughout the Commonwealth.
In my column last Friday I wrote about the looming catastrophe – and for a royalist like me, it was as painful to write as it was to watch. What on earth were William and Kate thinking? Or rather, what did her entourage of supposedly experienced helpers and advisors think?
In a part of the world once dominated by British rule, it’s no secret that sensitivity to issues of republicanism, slavery and the possibility of reparations has risen recently. The Windrush scandal that surfaced in 2017 is another fresh wound that needs to be treated with care. So how do you deal with all this with empathy and sensitivity?
Certainly not through a trip back to the future in a colonial era, Pathe News role-style, with William in the tropical dress of his old regiment, rolling across a field in a jeep with his medals on his chest, his hat-hatted wife to his side and a ceremonial sword in his hand. Dear God, it couldn’t have been more colonial if he wore a pith helmet and drove a tank through the streets of Kingston.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge smile at a parade in Kingston for service personnel from across the Caribbean who have recently completed officer training
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left the Bahamas, marking the end of their Caribbean tour on March 26
Every time he tried to help, he only made things worse. At an official dinner, the prince wrung his hands and expressed his “deep regret” at the “abhorrent” slavery, echoing his father in saying it “stains” British history.
Unfortunately, he did not mention the over £100m in aid we have given to the countries of the Caribbean Commonwealth over the years, nor did he discuss how Britain led the world in the abolition of slavery.
How I wish, just once, someone would do it. Instead, it was the full royal grove — and when it wasn’t the full grove, it was the embarrassing photo opportunity.
Those set pieces included the bongo-bashing in Trench Town, which saw the Bob Marley statue pose, and yes, the now-infamous clasping The Hands of Children Through A Chain Link Fence, with each bad-taste scenario embracing the previous one in a Daisy chain of more and more transcended shudder.
By Sunday, William had addressed some of those issues in a thoughtful statement, acknowledging the protests and controversy the pair have faced.
“Travelling abroad is an opportunity for reflection. You’re learning so much,” he said.
It hinted that he will one day be a thoughtful, modernizing king – but what will be left of his kingdom by then?
Surely the stark truth these days is that the only way to truly modernize a monarchy is to abolish it? Like his father Prince Charles before him, Prince William can be as heartbreaking and emotional as he wants when he discusses the horrors of slavery, but both men will one day be kings – a belief system based on the notion that their bloodline is superior to any other in the Commonwealth.
Prince William is damned by his very existence, cursed by the status that gives him his voice and puts him at the center of things in the first place. He has said his family wants to “serve the Commonwealth family”, but what does that even mean anymore? Nothing very much.
The Duke of Cambridge shakes hands with the public during a visit to a fish fry in Abaco
Royal aides have complained that much of the criticism and coverage is unfair, that it was just a few isolated moments in a largely successful tour – but don’t they get it? In the age of Twitter and Instagram and TikTok, only moments count. And what is a royal tour, first and foremost, if not a symbolic succession of photo opportunities and strategic meet’n’greets?
Without those images beamed around the world, a royal tour would be meaningless, and if it’s meaningless, then it’s worthless.
One has to assume that it’s the drumming, handshaking, clam-eating, booty-shaking that gives these tours any enduring value at all.
Because the photographs are not the icing on the cake, they are the cake itself. Everything is magnified, everything counts. And despite all the protests, the lasting legacy of this doomed tour will be the chain link fence image, pretended by all to be innocent but indelibly laden with the negative connotations of a bygone era.
Terribly unfair, but terribly true.
All of this comes at a difficult time for the royal family, who find themselves under siege on many fronts.
Prince Andrew has fallen from grace, Prince Harry seems determined to deepen the enduring rift, the Queen is frail and not everyone is excited about the prospect of King Charles and Queen Camilla.
In all honesty, we could do without William and Kate slipping on constitutional bananas on the other side of the world, but it’s too late now.
The Duchess of Cambridge speaks to a child in the Bahamas
Worse, this is taking place in a world where history itself is seething through a revisionism; one that finds royals on the wrong side of the divide, down there at the bottom of the basket between colonialism’s dirty laundry and the stains of the past.
It will take much more to reverse this than Kate showing up in a pretty yellow dress to honor the Jamaican flag while rattling her locally made bracelets.
But I’m not fooling William and Kate.
Unlike the Sussexes, they stayed in office to do their duty, with all the good and bad that that entails. It is simply their misfortune to have been plunged into high-ranking royal offices overseas at a time when the sins of the past are now shaping the tottering trajectory of the future.
Indeed, in Belize, Jamaica and the Bahamas, the couple was shown a lot of love by the crowd. Yet even from four thousand miles away they still looked like well-carved dinosaurs from the Age of Reverence; white, ultra-privileged royalty who bravely watch the locals gamble for their entertainment. It does not look good.
What this trip has shown is that the days of the great overseas royal visit are certainly numbered. The mere notion that the royal family, in all their finery and jewels, should venture off to distant lands to meet people they expect to bow and curtsy, or at least pay homage to them, is becoming increasingly absurd.
Is it the beginning of the end of the monarchy? Not quite, but it points the way to a difficult future in the post-Queen world. One in which the new generation of Windsors must struggle to remain viable amid the increasingly vocal social and racial politics of modernity.