King Charles Reportedly Has a ‘Deal’ With William and Kate About ‘Stealing the Limelight’
See a photo of Prince William and Kate Middleton greeting crowds or hear them on a podcast? Apparently, the Prince and Princess of Wales’s appearances are all part of a carefully planned “arrangement” with King Charles III. The king reportedly has a “deal” with his oldest son and daughter-in-law to prevent them from “‘stealing his limelight.”
William and Kate’s ‘working arrangement’ with King Charles has them getting about 40 percent of the ‘limelight’
“They worked out a kind of accommodation of how much limelight each is going to be allowed,” Clive Irving, a royal author and expert, told Express. “Because Charles is always very jealous of the other people stealing his limelight.”
“He’s worked out a deal now whereby William and Kate can have an allotted percentage of the limelight,” Irving continued. As for how much of the “limelight” King Charles is willing to give to William and Kate, the Last Queen author estimated “maybe 40 percent [for William and Catherine] and [King Charles] keeps 60 percent. That seems to be the working arrangement.”
Meanwhile, Express reported that William and Kate’s percentage should be higher. The reason is their high ranking among British royals per YouGov polling. William, they noted, came in first place, with Princess Anne in second and his wife, Kate, in third.
‘Loads of publicity’ for William and Kate has previously been a problem for King Charles
Prince Harry claimed in Spare that King Charles and Queen Camilla “didn’t want Willy and Kate getting loads of publicity.” Furthermore, they didn’t appreciate it when the couple drew “attention away from them or their causes.”
“They’d openly scolded Willy about it many times,” Harry said of his father and stepmother. He went on, recalling how King Charles’s press team once “berated Willy’s” when they discovered Kate was scheduled to visit a tennis club the same day the king had an appearance.
“Told that it was too late to cancel the visit, Pa’s press officer warned: Just make sure the Duchess doesn’t hold a tennis racquet in any of the photos. Such a winning, fetching photo would undoubtedly wipe Pa and Camilla off the front pages. And that, in the end, couldn’t be tolerated.”
Harry also expressed his dislike of William’s 2015 “work-shy” nickname in British tabloids. He called it “grossly unfair” because King Charles “controlled the purse strings.”
The king didn’t want Meghan Markle ‘stealing the limelight’ from him like William and Kate
Elsewhere in Spare, Harry shared how the idea of his wife, Meghan Markle, “grabbing the limelight” from King Charles resulted in a memorable conversation of “petty jealousies.”
Revisiting the “cloudy, blustery day” in 2017 when he asked Queen Elizabeth II for permission to propose, Harry recalled how his father had a question for him.
The king, then the Prince of Wales, asked if Meghan wanted to “keep on acting,” to which Harry replied she’d likely want to be “doing the job” with him as a working royal. To this, Harry recalled his father claiming: “There’s not enough money to go around.’”
“Was Pa, with all his millions from the hugely lucrative Duchy of Cornwall, trying to say that our captivity was starting to cost him a bit too much?” Harry continued before noting that what his father was trying to say became “suddenly clear.”
“Pa might have dreaded the rising cost of maintaining us,” he explained, “but what he really couldn’t stomach was someone new dominating the monarchy, grabbing the limelight, someone shiny and new coming in and overshadowing him. And Camilla. He’d lived through that before, and had no interest in living through it again.”
