Penny Junor: Prince William

When Diana had stepped from their car thirty years ago, and stretched out her arms to clasp the dozens of hands reaching for hers, it was obvious that she had something special. She was just twenty-one, and had done nothing like this in her life – she had even been rather shy meeting strangers – but she had an instinctive ability to engage with the public that no amount of training could ever have bettered. At one engagement after another, as the rain soaked her beautiful outfits, she smiled, she laughed, she patted children’s heads or rubbed their cold hands between her own. She bent down to chat to people in wheelchairs, and sat on hospital beds, holding patients’ hands, always managing to find the perfect remark for everyone she met.

Strange as it might sound to today’s readers, such familiarity was new to the Royal Family. Even the walkabout was still quite new. Until the Queen’s visit to Australia and New Zealand in 1970, neither she nor her family wandered over to talk randomly to the crowds that lined the streets. Those crowds received a smile and a royal wave. Theirs was the formality of a bygone age and Diana’s approach struck a chord with the people. The Welsh fell in love with her. The crowds groaned audibly, and embarrassingly, when they saw that Diana was not taking their side of the street, and that they were getting Charles instead. He ended up joking that he was just there to collect flowers for his wife, but it must have hurt.

There was none of that in Canada. William and Kate travelled extensively, visiting seven cities in five provinces, and people were thrilled to see them both. Everywhere they went there were chants of ‘Will and Kate, Will and Kate’; people held up placards with big hearts on them and slogans like ‘Canada loves Will and Kate’ and ‘Will and Kate, You Were Worth The Wait’, and the young screamed when either one of them headed in their direction. People turned out in their thousands, many had come from hundreds of miles away and the wait was really long – five or six hours was not unusual, sometimes for nothing more than a fleeting glimpse of the pair – but no one seemed to mind. They all had mobile phones or cameras and they were just happy to have the picture that showed they were there.

Kate took to it like a duck to water. She might have been Diana’s double, except that she clearly had the confidence of being older and more worldly wise. She had no training either, but she looked as though she had spent a lifetime schmoozing prime ministers and governor generals, and making small talk with strangers. Like Diana, she was full of smiles and easy laughter, she clasped hands, stretched into the crowd to greet the people at the back, bent down for children and wheelchairs, and never seemed to be lost for words or more than momentarily unsure of herself. When the father of a little two-year-old wished her luck starting her own family, she thanked him and said, yes, she hoped to. A throwaway remark was suddenly heavy with meaning when front and centre in the next day’s newspapers.

The media contingent in Wales had been tiny by comparison with the numbers that followed William and Kate around Canada; camera technology was thirty years behind and there was no internet, YouTube or instant messaging. This time, not only was the world’s media picking up every remark and watching every muscle, but every man, woman and child in the crowd could post their own report.

Kate seemed unfazed; and as the days went by, and she saw more of the country and met more of the people, she seemed to be positively enjoying herself. They both did; despite a gruelling schedule, they looked as though they were having fun together, which was not how Charles and Diana had looked in Wales, barely two months after their wedding. The body language just wasn’t there with his parents. These two looked at each other all the time, chatted and whispered to each other, giggled every now and again, and were forever touching. William would give Kate’s hand a reassuring squeeze or he would place a hand on her back, and always seemed to be looking out for her.

She, in turn, seemed to be taking her cues from him and was clearly learning as she went. She looked painfully thin – a more worrying reminder of Diana, and one which is worrying several of their friends – but she certainly understood what the job was all about. She did the formal, ceremonial bit, the frothy Canada Day celebrations, the barbecues and concerts, and was undaunted by cancer wards and potentially difficult conversations. She met young and old, war veterans with tales of conflict and small children who refused to surrender their bouquets. She got it right every time. And she was game for the outdoor activities. She rowed like fury in a dragon-boat race, determined, but failing, to beat her competitive husband, who, as he gave her a consolation hug declared, ‘There’s no chivalry in sport!’ In everything they did there was a feeling of partnership.

One visit not on the itinerary was to the small town of Slave Lake in northern Alberta, which had been devastated by a massive wildfire three weeks earlier. All seven thousand inhabitants had been forced to flee their homes with nothing more than the clothes they stood in. They commiserated with townsfolk who had lost everything and spoke to the rescue workers, including the fire chief Jamie Coutts, whose team had finally put out the fire. Their visit had been a real morale boost, he said. ‘I’m happy for the people of Slave Lake. They got to have a happy day today, lots of smiles, and we haven’t had a lot of those. It’s easy to forget they’re real people,’ he said reflecting on William and Kate. ‘He’s a search and rescue pilot, she sits at home and worries about him when he’s on missions – and that’s a lot like what we did out on the front lines and what our families had to go through.’

Kate won’t worry any less about William’s missions, but she does now have a better understanding of what he does on them. At Dalvay-by-the-Sea in Prince Edward Island, on a day of torrential rain, William took to a Sea King helicopter to learn an emergency landing technique developed by search and rescue services in Canada. It’s called ‘waterbirding’ and involves making a controlled landing on water in the event of engine failure – something he could no doubt take back to RAF Valley with him. He had specifically asked for it to be fitted into their schedule and after sitting alongside the pilot a couple of times, he took the controls himself and gently lowered the aircraft onto the water so many times that Kate must have wondered if he’d ever stop.

On the same theme, the Canadian Coast Guard put on a search and rescue demonstration for them in the harbour at Summerside. From the helicopter deck of a coastguard ship, they watched men being rescued from a capsized boat and winched aboard a Sea King hovering deftly overhead. Even in the calm of the harbour on a summer’s day, the skill was clear to see. It wasn’t hard to imagine how dangerous the whole operation must be on a stormy night twenty miles out over a black and angry sea. Afterwards they met people who had been rescued and owed their lives to the service. Among them was a man William spent a moment or two longer with. He was a lobster fisherman whose boat, a year ago, had capsized several miles out in the early morning. Three of the crew had been saved but his sixty-two-year-old father-in-law had drowned. The dead man’s widow and daughter were there with him and also spoke to William, who was visibly moved by their story.

It was a tour as emotionally varied as it was geographically; and while their welcome was tumultuous everywhere they went, not every Canadian was pleased to see them. There were noisy demonstrations by separatists in Quebec province, where more than 80 per cent of the population speak French. About three hundred protestors carried banners that read ‘Royal Parasites! Go Home!’ and other, less polite messages. They were angry about the cost of the tour – said to be over 1.5 million Canadian dollars. In 1964, protestors had turned their backs on the Queen during her visit and booed her; she has not been back to the province since. And just the year before William and Kate’s visit, Charles and Camilla were held up by scuffles between protestors and the police in Montreal.