Prince William agreed to go on The Graham Norton Show because he is being drawn into a battle with Prince Harry for public attention following his estranged brother’s shock return to the UK, a PR expert has said.
The Prince of Wales’s unprecedented chat show appearance seems to be a response to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex‘s repeated high-profile media appearances dating back to the notorious interview with Oprah Winfrey over five years ago.
PR guru Mark Borkowski told the Daily Mail that he believes William is now abandoning decades of royal tradition as a riposte to Harry and Meghan’s domination of news coverage since their dramatic move back to Britain in August.
Mr Borkowski said that William’s appearance on the BBC One show, ostensibly to discuss the Earthshot Prize, shows ‘just how angry he is about his brother’.
‘When the late Queen was alive, she maintained the Royal mystique by staying above all this kind of stuff, just releasing the odd cleverly worded statement here and there,’ Mr Borkowski said. But that has now changed, he believes: ‘It looks petulant, it looks like sibling rivalry, Cain and Abel.’
And the PR expert, who has decades of advising both top brands and VIPs about how to present themselves, thinks William is making ‘a mistake’ by sinking to his brother’s level.
He went on: ‘It’s playing Harry at his own game and the Royals should be above that – it’s a misstep.
‘As soon as you start talking about a PR war, you know you’ve lost. As simple as that.
PR guru Mark Borkowski said that Prince William’s appearance on The Graham Norton Show, ostensibly to discuss the Earthshot Prize, shows ‘just how angry he is about his brother’
Mr Borkowski has said that William is now abandoning decades of royal tradition as a riposte to Harry and Meghan’s domination of news coverage (Pictured on a visit to Nottingham earlier this month)
‘Sometimes in a war, the greatest impact is when you ignore something. Just stay above it all.
‘And I think that’s always previously been the strength of the Royal Family: say nothing, don’t complain, just carry on and do what you need to do.’
Mr Borkowski said that Harry appears ‘desperate’ to be welcomed back into the fold now he is back in Britain, but added that he too is getting his media strategy wrong – and that if he had been better advised, ‘we all might have been looking at Harry and Meghan in a totally different way’.
He added: ‘Harry’s just not very bright and it shows that he and Meghan haven’t got much wisdom at the core of their comms.
‘Their whole strategy of coming back to the UK has been “noise, noise, noise”. But they’re still playing the same song.
‘And the way for the royals, William or whoever, to counter that is just to rise above it.’
Instances of this ‘noise’ include changing their children’s school in their first week, complaining that a foreign photographer had been stalking them and an explosive GQ interview.
William used his appearance on the show to emphasise his relatability – talking about his love of Celebrity Traitors, his thwarted ambition to be a DJ and his love for Aston Villa.
William on the BBC One show with fellow guests Cate Blanchett, Hannah Waddingham, Robert Irwin and Jorja Smith
The much talked about Oprah Winfrey interview in 2021 was one example of how the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have courted high-profile media appearances
William’s appearance on the show, flanked by actors Cate Blanchett and Hannah Waddingham and conservationist Robert Irwin, came just two days after a bombshell GQ interview with Harry.
Harry used that platform to reopen old wounds with his family, apparently blaming William for their rift, declaring that ‘some people don’t want it to work out’.
When Harry and Meghan carried out their controversial pseudo-royal walkabout in Nottingham last week, it received global coverage with the BBC news website alone reporting the visit with a live blog of the kind normally reserved for major news.
Other royal engagements on the same day – many of which had been planned for weeks – received a fraction of the coverage Harry and Meghan’s unofficial appearance received.
Those overshadowed events included William welcoming Crown Prince Hussein and Princess Rajwa of Jordan at Windsor, King Charles hosting a party of scientists and business leaders at St James’s Palace and Princess Anne visiting a tech centre in Exeter before attending a naval dinner in Portsmouth.
Daily Mail readers backed William’s decision to appear on The Graham Norton Show, with 71 per cent of them agreeing with the statement that it made the royals ‘more relatable’ in our online poll.
In his first ever appearance on a chat show, William largely discussed his work on the Earthshot Prize, which he set up in 2020, but he also gave glimpses into his private life.
As he took to Graham’s sofa he spoke about The Celebrity Traitors, saying: ‘I love it, the family love it. Charlotte and Louis are obsessed with it. It’s really good telly.’
He humorously added: ‘I saw Ross Kemp the day after the first episode and I couldn’t help but try – in the most appropriate way – to touch him to see what reaction I got from him. Turns out he was really jumpy!’
William spoke about what he would be if he were not set to be king, and said that he would have been a police officer or a DJ.
Kensington Palace was contacted for comment.
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