Is Prince William Really Lazy? What He's Doing Right and Wrong

The Prince of Wales recently flew to Istanbul to watch his beloved Aston Villa (a football club, for the unacquainted Americans) lift the Europa League trophy. He wept with strangers, got roughed up affectionately by his oldest mates, and looked, by every account, like the happiest man in Europe. A perfectly ordinary thing for a 43-year-old football fan to do.

Except William is not an ordinary man. And within days, the Daily Mail had turned his night on the terraces into a question mark over his fitness for the crown. The piece, by Barbara Davies, is well written and well reported, and Tom Sykes of The Royalist (the most comprehensive royal newsletter out there right now) did the best job of unpicking it, identifying it correctly as a "hit job dressed up as a hagiography." The engagement tallies, the sly references to foreign trips declined: all of it adds up to a broadside aimed squarely at William's work ethic.

Here is the charge, in numbers. The Court Circular, the official daily log of royal duties, shows Charles racked up 601 engagements in 2011 as Prince of Wales, and 532 last year while undergoing cancer treatment. William, in the same period, managed 202. On paper, damning.

But the number is one of the great cons of British public life. And the people who will actually decide whether this monarchy survives are not reading it. What the engagement count is really measuring, the productivity research that explains William's method, and the palace insider who told Celebrity Intelligence precisely what he is building... plus the one charge against him that genuinely sticks. Subscribers, read on...

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