Young Prince William's Life After The Divorce Of Diana & Charles | Our

Back in Britain, after the holidays, it's business as usual for the royal firm. But beneath the public show of family unity, there lies the trauma of a very public and painful separation. Prince Charles admitted adultery with Camilla Parker Bowles, and in retaliation, Diana is said to have manipulated the press. The boys were caught in the middle. The children were Diana's most potent weapon, and when their marriage started to break down, which was actually much earlier on than we all imagined, she used them against him, and so if Charles wanted to have lunch outside in the garden at Highgrove, she'd have them having lunch in the nursery. They were her weapon, that's all she had to fight with, so they unfortunately got stuck in the middle of that. It was at this time, when Diana was at an all-time low, that she turned to royal journalist Richard Kaye to put her side of the story. They were photographed in her car in a London park, and he has since been seen as a close confidant of the princess. I think it's too pat to say she puts on these shows for the lenses. I don't honestly think it's either fair or true any longer, and there may have been a time in the early days when Diana was only too happy to be seen in certain situations, as indeed Charles was, but Diana's love for the cameras and the press has long since passed. She no longer much tolerates the presence of cameras in her company. Indeed it was the press that named several men who were said to have had romantic links with Diana. The whole messy saga culminated with the appearance of Prince Charles in a television program, in which he attempted to explain his actions to a critical public. Anybody who goes on television and admits to adultery with another man's wife, a friend's wife, and says that he never loved his children's mother, is not really a very good father. Whether Charles thought about his children before he did that, whether he thought about the Parker Bowles children before he did that, I do not know. His own father Philip, who's accused occasionally of being tyrannical, and is in many ways overbearing, was appalled by that, and so was his mother the Queen. I think it was like watching the Prince of Wales commit suicide in public. I think it was one of the crassest things that anybody, let alone our future king, has ever done, is to go on television and say that you've been having an affair with another woman, a married woman. Normally it's the sort of thing that if that happens, tragic as it is, you try to keep quiet about it. You do not go on television before maybe a hundred million people in the world saw him saying, I've been making love to somebody else's wife. I think William will always carry the scars of such a public breakup. I think that's what was perhaps more hurtful than anything. He could be driving up the M4 motorway coming home from school and there's a huge billboard advertising his mother's unhappiness. They have gone to enormous lengths, Charles and Diana, to try and protect the boys from the publicity which has sort of wrapped them in a shroud really over the last three years. Diana goes to great lengths to avoid seeing the newspapers. They have monitored television programmes but naturally as William gets older, he's in his 14th year, he has a radio, he can listen to the news and at Eton it's going to be wholly different from his prep school where such things could be monitored. Since the separation, what has emerged is that the different worlds of their parents have become even more exaggerated. This is the children's holiday with Diana last year, a public beach in Spain and the opportunity for William to fulfil every boy's ambition of riding on a jet ski. I think she's a wonderful mother. I think whatever else you can say about her, she's a wonderful mother and she has tried very hard to show William and Harry that there is another life out there and I think she's done it very well and she knows that she's going to have to let go, that the older they get, the more they're going to be with their father, especially William. Why the Prince of Wales hasn't taken the boys to a McDonald's or Thorpe Park is a very good question. I don't think he probably knows what a McDonald's is. Prince Charles's style as a parent is strikingly different to Diana's. Publicly at least, he's less demonstrative and the activities he shares with his sons reflect the pursuits of a traditional country landowner. Polo is his favoured sport along with hunting, shooting and fishing and when they're with Prince Charles at Balmoral or Sandringham, the boys are always conventionally and formally dressed. The media thinks Charles is a wimp, would love William to prefer his mother but that doesn't really seem to be the case. Whenever he is photographed on holiday with his father, he always looks like he's having the time of his life and if you look at some of the Christmas cards that Charles has been sending over the last two years, a picture of Charles in poppy fields with his arms around both his, they're both the princes, they all look really genuinely happy. It's in this setting that Charles has introduced somebody who's come to be seen as a surrogate mother to the princes. Tiggy Legg-Burke shares Charles's passion for country pursuits in a way that Diana never did. It's a rather curious arrangement and it has prompted some observations over the years but Tiggy is though, to be fair to her, she's become a friend to these boys as well. I mean William is very fond of her, she's very fond of the boys. They're clearly going to have to make a choice between their father's world and their mother's world. Their mother we know doesn't like horses, she doesn't like the countryside very much. Their father we know has already taught them to shoot rabbits and start killing birds. His father, who's the president of the World Wildlife Foundation, slaughters more birds than anybody else in Britain. It depends which road they go down. It seems to me if they go down their father's road it's the recipe for disaster. Their only hope they have is to go down their mother's road and try and share her canny sense of public opinion and her knack for adopting a stance that people think is in tune with the times. That's what the royals have signally failed to do over the last five to ten years. So as William approaches manhood, the public trauma of his parents' separation is an inescapable factor in his life. But close family members think he's strong enough not to have been deeply damaged by it, as William's older cousin explains. Well it would seem that he has come through with flying colours and the devotion he's received from both his parents and the example they've offered him and the love and all the, it would seem that the negative aspects of coming from a broken home have not been at all evident and he survived uninterrupted.