The photographs from Leicester Square last night might look, at first sight, like a pretty standard royal engagement: the Prince and Princess of Wales walking into the Royal Film Performance (BAFTA’s big annual premiere, of which William is president) alongside Tom Cruise, still, one of the biggest movie stars on the planet at the ripe young age of 64.
So here is the Princess of Wales, in classic royal mode, being led up the stairs radiant in purple Jenny Packham, the Queen Mother’s amethyst sautoir around her neck and a pair of Diana’s pearl-drop earrings in her ears, escorted by none other than Tom Cruise as William looks proudly on. And to keep the correctly royal-coded mix of black-tie glamour and grassroots graft, William had been serving popcorn to punters at a community cinema in Acton, West London, earlier that afternoon.
“I just love them,” Cruise said. “They are lovely people and I have great respect for them.”
Cruise is, of course, no stranger to royal-adjacent glamour. He famously dipped his wings at the King in that Coronation Concert video, and the relationship has been, let’s face it, very beneficial for both of them. So one reading is that this was just a totally straightforward royal engagement.
But given the incredibly fraught situation inside the family generated by Harry’s return, nothing is that simple. And if you compare and contrast this appearance with the Duke of Sussex’s fortnight of big “public engagements” (so magnificently announced, recoiling as he does from the concept of being a mere “private individual,” as the King’s Lord Chamberlain had insisted), well, Harry’s events look pretty boring, don’t they?
The big celebrity he was able to land for the inaugural Invictus Spirit Awards last week? James Corden, who opened the evening with a joke about Mounjaro. Corden is a famous name, but his fat jokes are hardly a match for an elegant Tom Cruise, are they? At the WellChild Awards it was Gaby Roslin, a TV and radio personality virtually unknown outside the tiny UK market. Lovely people both, I’m sure, but hardly Top Gun, who seems inexplicably to have shunned “legend of aviation” (AUTHOR SNORTS COFFEE THROUGH NOSE) Harry, alas for Harry.
Even more fascinating, when Harry turned up at Ninestiles school in Birmingham last week to launch an Invictus education program, I’m told by people who were there that the overall impression was of a room full of kids who had only the foggiest idea who this bloke was or what he was doing there, and there is a certain amount of evidence that the underwhelmed kids were muttering the F-word under their breath, out of range of the cameras’ microphones. Harry looked daft, frankly.
Harry and Meghan only have one weapon over William and Catherine, which is the ability to distract. Whenever the Waleses are doing something, the Sussexes can do something else, or create some conflict, which is irresistible to the headlines. But it’s often forgotten that asymmetric warfare doesn’t always disfavor the guys with the airplanes and tanks, and it would be a huge mistake to disregard the massive, structural, systemic advantage William and Catherine have, which is that one day they are going to be King and Queen. That is a significant thing.
