It’s still a thing. Becoming a teenager. And today Prince George is 13. But he’s launching into this new chapter from a far more secure base than his father had at the same age.
Personally, I can’t think of anything worse than being born into this preordained life in which you have no choice about your “career”, you are constantly set apart from everyone else, and people like me spend their time pontificating about you. Of course it’s a life which comes with enormous privilege, but what a price a young prince must pay.
George, though, is lucky. Luckier than his dad, luckier than his grandfather. He’s entering his notoriously tricky teenage years with the solid grounding of a very happy childhood, brought up by parents who adore one another and their children. Unlike Charles and William, he was not sent away to boarding school when he was eight. Instead he’s enjoyed going to a day school with his sister and brother and the rough and tumble of family life at home.
As it happens, William’s mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, invited me to her home in Kensington Palace just around the time of his 13th birthday. We sat in her living room facing one another on comfy settees, and talked about all that was happening in her troubled and often dramatic life. She’d been officially separated from Charles for more than two years and it was just five months before she went public with her unhappiness in that now discredited Panorama interview with Martin Bashir.
