Viral Glastonbury festival photo sparks Prince Louis fears

There are a few sure things in the royal writing caper.

King Charles will turn up somewhere rural in a five-figure suit with his sausagey fingers and get excited about hedgerows, Queen Camilla will always have a slightly wistful look in her eye like she’s imagining that pint of Gordon’s waiting for her at home, and Kate, the Princess of Wales will manage to spend an indecent amount of money on some dress that looks like an aide magicked it up using only a trusty Singer and some late 80s TraveLodge curtains.

Also, Prince Louis. Full stop.

Put that kid in public, maybe in the vicinity of a military parade or out on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, and the five-year-old will guarantee Fleet Street’s photo editors a cheeky, charming shot.

The last year has proven that Louis is a walking, monkeying, cute front page.

But we have to stop.

Over the weekend, the Glastonbury festival turned hundreds of acres of Somerset into a muddy bog, with 200,000 people pretending they were having a good time paying to experience the same grim conditions as the battle of Bosworth Field. (Only difference: Guns N Roses wasn’t struggling through a set in the background as Henry Tudor walloped the Yorkist forces).

And there at the famed festival, and soon slapped all over Twitter, was a flag recreating that moment during last year’s Platinum Jubilee when Louis’ reaction to the RAF fly-past seemingly delighted the late Queen. (Pause for feelings).

Oh, it’s an adorable image, and you would have to be Cruella de Ville sans dalmatians not to be thoroughly charmed and delighted by it.

But I actually think, looking at that Glasto flag, that we have reached a tipping point – Louis has gone from royal kidlet to pop culture caricature; from child to entertaining character.

Except he’s a boy, not a perpetual meme.

If the royal family and the world wants to break the century’s long curse of the spare, then right now, this right here is the moment to do it.

For Louis’ parents William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales, the where-do-you-even-start challenge is how to bring up their two spares – Louis and his sister Princess Charlotte – such that they aren’t condemned to the fate of their spare forebears.

Princess Margaret whiled away her years lacking any real purpose and racking up empty bottles of Famous Grouse. Prince Andrew ended up with a raging ego, a sense of entitlement larger than Yankee Stadium and, best case, pathologically bad taste in friends.

And Prince Harry – well, where do we even start?

Never has the fate of those born so close to, and yet so far away from, the throne been more of a live issue thanks to the Duke of Sussex and his splenetic, on-screen outbursts.

Harry is a man whose entire adult life seems to have been shaped by two things: The tragic loss of his mother when he was only 12, and his status as a chromosomal back-up plan for the monarchy.

One of the key points that his memoir, the brutally titled Spare of course, makes is that a sense of inferiority was drummed into him repeatedly throughout his childhood and teenage years.

“I was the shadow, the support, the Plan B,” Harry writes.

“I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy. I was summoned to provide back-up, distraction, diversion and, if necessary, a spare part. Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow.

“This was all made explicitly clear to me from the start of life’s journey and regularly reinforced thereafter.”

For William and Kate, the huge challenge that they are facing right now is how to prevent this ever happening again – how do they ensure that Charlotte and Louis don’t feel like walking organ donors or human adjuncts?

And for the Prince and Princess of Wales, even if they manage to raise their children with scrupulous, rigid equality and with keen, independent senses of self, there are still huge practical issues that no one has even started to address.

Most glaringly, there is no job description or formal role for the spare.

George, even today at only nine years old, has his whole life laid out for him. Eton, university of some stripe, maybe a horsey gap year, a bit of a military stint (cue the handsome uniform PR shots) and then his royal career will slowly subsume everything else.

He will take on patronages, learn how to run an investiture and pick up the finer points of knighting someone without lopping off a bit of an ear.

The prince’s religion, his day job and where he will live are all etched in good hardy Balmoral stone, consigning him to a fate he has absolutely no say over. He will never have the agency, choices and freedoms of the 4,596,999 other primary school children currently enrolled in the UK.

Meanwhile, Charlotte and Louis are facing lives which will largely be defined by what they are not – not future monarchs, not the first born, not the child whose face will one day be on every pound coin in existence.

Moreover, by the time they are adults, the only remaining working members of the royal family will be their parents and maybe their great-uncle and great-aunt Edward and Sophie, the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh.

That could well mean that the Wales siblings will have no choice but to go into the family business – only they will be left to pick up the lesser, B-grade engagements and patronages, all the while adhering to the number one rule – never outshining the heir.

In the years to come, Charlotte and Louis will be expected to pull their weight while simultaneously accepting their supporting cast status in a play that has been running for a thousand years. No matter how hard they work, no matter their commitment, no matter their drive, they will never, ever be number one.

Charlotte and Louis could well be expected to sacrifice many of the freedoms of normal life for the sake of the crown, but will never actually get a go at wearing it.

Factor in too that the roles they will assume are both keenly important and amorphous, with no guidelines or rules except that they could end up getting a pasting should they bugger it up or overstep.

“The child most in danger from life in the gilded cage is Louis,” biographer Tom Quinn recently told the Daily Beast.

“My sources say George is already treated differently, not by his parents, but by other people and that Louis seems to play up to get attention.”

Quinn, who recently published Gilded Youth: An Intimate History of Growing Up in the Royal Family, has said: “Louis already seems remarkably like Harry – the joker – and it may be that he will struggle as much as Harry did to find a role in the royal family”.

Harry, meanwhile, raised a similar concern earlier this year while speaking to the Telegraph’s Bryony Gordon, saying: “And though William and I have talked about it once or twice, and he has made it very clear to me that his kids are not my responsibility, I still feel a responsibility knowing that out of those three children, at least one will end up like me, the spare. And that hurts, that worries me”.

In the shorter term, how the dickens do the Waleses give their kids something of a childhood while also preparing them for the strange, surreal lives that lie ahead for them?

In the last decade there has been a huge readjustment of the governing principles and rules concerning the photographing of royal children which is why we very, very rarely, if ever, see paparazzi photos of the three.

Similarly, there needs to be a wider societal and cultural recalibration and some sort of boundary or two introduced here, some line between the Wales kids’ childhoods and their already nascent public lives and selves.

We owe it to Louis to not make a joke out of him, to not render him a punchline or a cartoonish figure.

And if we fail, 30 years from now, it will be him sitting on a couch and pouring out his hurt feelings to Oprah’s hologram.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.