The Daily Mail ran a story several days ago with the headline “Is Kate in danger of eclipsing her Prince?” It started out as snarky about the fact that several British newspapers edited Prince William out of the Cambridges’ Christmas card, just focusing on Kate, Charlotte and George. The whole piece turned out to be an interesting read though, although I think royal reporters miss the bigger picture: for the most part, it’s just women who are interested in royalty, and women are always going to be more interested in royal women because of hair, fashion, makeup and girl drama. It’s not rocket science, it’s just gossip. Still, I do think this report is interesting because it makes William sound like a grumpy cold fish. Some highlights:

How William looked in the Christmas card: “Crouching to one side of the shot, his eyes are fixed on George rather than the camera, his bald patch more prominent than ever. Not to put too fine a point on it, the second in line to the throne looks like a spare part; a gatecrasher in this lovely shot. No wonder, then, that two national newspapers gave in to the understandable, if slightly tactless, urge to crop him out of the picture completely and made it a holy trinity of mother and children happily posing together.”

Kate is glamorous: “The more glamorous, the more confident, the more photogenic his wife is, the more uninteresting and colourless — in some eyes, at least — William becomes in comparison. Ironically, it is middle-class Kate who looks as if she’s been touched by royal stardust — and it’s blue-blooded William who resembles a run-of-the-mill Sloane Ranger. Indeed, looking at recent appearances, it is William who seems to be the man who accompanies the increasingly regal Kate, rather than the other way round.”

William is less popular with the public: “William, for all his pragmatism, seems to have let his distaste of publicity grow and fester, hence his sometimes extraordinary complaints about life in the spotlight — including one bizarre statement released by his staff to the effect that photographers who follow his family might be mistaken for terrorists and shot.”

William is a cold fish: “It’s not simply the case that an average-looking, balding man will always be in the shadow of a wife as beautiful as Kate. One only has to look at his younger brother Harry — engaging, effervescent, instinctively charismatic and cheerful — to see that the issue with William is one of temperament. Like his father once was, he is in danger of being viewed as something of a cold fish.”

William’s concern is for Kate, not for himself, says one insider: “He is not an ego maniac. Any unhappiness will be out of spousal concern rather than jealousy… There is still just enough gloss on William as a result of him being Diana’s son, which means that though he’s the less glamorous one, he still exerts a certain pull. And he is good at one-to-one chat; it’s not all platitudes. People like him when they talk to him.”

[From The Daily Mail]

Obviously, I left out some of the flowery prose about how Kate always looks amazing and she never has a hair out of place, because we know that’s obviously untrue. But, what I said still stands: it really wouldn’t matter who William married, his wife would have always outshone him, just for the sheer fact that royal-gossip-consumers are mostly women and we’re more interested in talking about women, hair, fashion, etc. And my guess is that William feels two ways about it: on one side, he’s genuinely grumpy about the fact that more people are interested in Kate than him. On the other side, he’s happy because he still gets his way in almost every situation.

Photos courtesy of Pacific Coast News, Kensington Palace.