When a man who lost his mother in a car crash when he was just 15 years old says that 2024 has been the hardest year of his life then it’s fair to conclude it must have served up a real horror show.
In the case of the Prince of Wales, who could dispute that? Both his father the King and his hitherto super-fit wife Catherine have spent the entirety of it fighting cancer after receiving shock diagnoses within days of each other in January.
In the case of the Princess, the trauma was compounded by a tidal wave of speculation about her over many weeks as she stepped back from royal duties, culminating in her feeling she had to share details of her condition that she should have had the right to keep private. So no wonder William described the current year as “brutal”, “dreadful” and “the hardest in my life” when asked about it by reporters at the end of a week-long tour of Cape Town. Despite appearances, he admitted he could not be less relaxed but had decided he had to “crack on” and keep going.
That recipe for how to cope with such setbacks would no doubt win an approving smile from his late grandmother, Elizabeth II, who dealt with her own “annus horribilis” in similarly stoical fashion in 1992.
During that year the marriages of three of her children collapsed and a large part of her beloved Windsor Castle was ravaged by fire on her own wedding anniversary.
William’s woes have, if anything, been still more severe as he has had to step up as a husband, father, supportive and loving son and key royal deputy. A few years ago he would have had far more support in keeping the royal show on the road during such a combination of misfortunes. But the premature retirements from royal duties of the Dukes of Sussex and York – one of his own volition, the other as an inevitable consequence of scandal – have left him facing an enormous workload.
The new Queen, already in her mid-seventies and needing to be a key support to the King, has certainly done her bit. The Princess Royal and the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh too.
Yet William has been the mainstay, balancing his time out of the limelight with his wife and children with the need to be the reassuring face of the royal line of succession. That he has carried out these duties without complaint is genuinely impressive.
In recent years he has often been part of a growing discussion about the need for people to pay more attention to their own mental health that has at times seemed to run out of control.
Certainly politicians such as the former Cabinet minister Mel Stride have felt the country was in danger of talking itself into a psychological funk, with ensuing problems being amplified for the economy and society. But this year, William has largely left such therapy-speak to the Californian wing of the family, in the form of Harry and Meghan. Perhaps it has come to seem a self-indulgence amid the battles of his father and wife against one of humanity’s most horrible killer diseases.
By defining the year 2024 as an outlier for misery, as his grandmother did before him in 1992, he also by implication embraces hope for the future. He is telling us that things will not always be this bad, that he chooses to believe this is not a permanent “new normal”.
As William Shakespeare famously noted: “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.”
Queen Elizabeth II came back to this intuition of hope for the future very late in her life, during the Covid lockdowns, giving her subjects much comfort in a special televised message that culminated with: “We will be with our families again. We will be with our friends again. We will meet again.” And that is just what came to pass.
The King and the Princess of Wales are both now embracing front-of-house royal duties once more, including a recent far-flung trip to the Commonwealth summit in the case of the former.
They have fought the dreaded “big C” with a courage and dignity that will have inspired countless thousands of others. But there is no doubt who should be in line for the award for best supporting actor in any end-of-year royal Oscars.
William, Prince of Wales and heir to the throne, has found the reserves of character needed to respond to such testing times on so many fronts.
He will know that his life is hardly likely ever to be without great tests. But when he comes to bid goodbye to 2024 he can bid good riddance to it as well.