Here are some photos of Prince William at Sandringham on Saturday, where he “hosted” a viewing party for the FA Cup Final. William is president of the Football Association and he watched as Arsenal beat Chelsea (William is an Aston Villa fan). He hosted the viewing party because sports are slowly coming back, but few people can actually be in the stands because of the pandemic. Speaking of, there seemed to be about 25 people – mostly men, but a few women – at this viewing party. No one wore a mask and while they were not sitting in a tight group, I think the men failed at social distancing. They probably think that because it’s open air and they’re dudes, they don’t have to take the virus seriously. They are wrong.
Beyond William’s bloke cosplay, he had another reason for hosting the viewing party – it was all part of his “Heads Up” mental health campaign for men, a campaign which was (at best) rather vague. The Heads Up campaign mostly consisted of William saying “men can talk about mental health” with football stars and then making the football stars do the heavy lifting. Mostly I think the Heads Up campaign was just William furthering his pretend-bloke status, complete with racist, classist “jokes.” People Magazine says that before the match, William “met with his guests, listening to their mental health stories and the frontline workers’ experiences of life during the coronavirus pandemic.” I would be very curious to know how long that meet-and-greet lasted before William just sat down and paid attention to the match. My guess? Ten minutes, max.
The good thing is that the FA Final marked the “culmination” of the Heads Up campaign. Mental health is solved, people! There’s no more work to be done on mental health now that William can’t use “watching a football game” as an “event.” I wonder what hobby he’ll use for “mental health” next. Rose bush-trimming and mental health?
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
Dear lord, how can a viewing party for a football match be the culmination of a mental health campaign? This is so embarrassing! They can’t even bother to disguise their lack of ambition when it comes to one of their supposed core causes.
Oof They wanted to borrow the popularity of the FA Cup to pretend they were “starting a conversation” for the umpteenth time. I guess William is not a flexible thinker and just forced the event to go ahead.
Starting a conversation is only the VERY FIRST STEP in a mental health campaign! It has to be followed up by educating the public and creating/funding projects, i.e. support structures that can actively help and create change. Will has been faffing around with “starting a conversation” for years. The conversation ought to have been started years ago and new steps ought to have been taken – if he was actually serious about men’s mental health, which he clearly isn’t. I guess Head’s Together has now been official abandoned. Shame, shame, shame (me co-playing the bell-ringing septa from Game of Thrones).
I think they’re moving on to partially copying Meghan (again). Meghan wanted long-term relationships with her charities but with one or two big projects each year to draw attention to those charities William and Kate are supposed to move to short term relationships with charities but centered around a big project per charity.
It really is embarrassing. The only thing he has done for this campaign is gone to bars, drank beer and said “we need to talk about mental health in football.”
And YES, we do need to talk about it. But then what’s the next step William?? There is never a next step. Its like Kaiser said last week about him and mental health – there is no there, there.
This whole thing really seems like the palace figured out that they could get him to work if they promised him beer and sports.
Maybe the next step is not calling your brother fragile when he actually talks about his mental health issues.
This whole thing has been a joke.
Most of Will’s patronages involve watching sports or just hanging out with sports players.
Can you imagine sharing your story with someone who “jokes” like William?
Whatever happened to that clip of him trashing the guy he had just spoken with back in 2012, I think? The Daily Mail actually had the video up. Kate and William were doing their multiple events in one day thing before they disappeared again for weeks and William was caught insulting someone as they were leaving.
What? I’ve never heard of this story.
Yes, I remember it well. I think it was an event with film industry types, BAFTA(?), not sure but Will and Kate were caught on film with him insulting one of the organizers as they were leaving (called him a name). The film was then choppily edited to delete that comment.
This was the same event where there’s video of Kate rolling her eyes at a big money donor during a charity dinner event.
Was this before they left for their holiday in France? Because there were supposed to do more events but took off during the time of the Paralympics.
So him and his family are already back from their staycation?the match was over the weekend.
Such a douche.
This guy is who the British want as king?
Charles the tampon and William the douche.
Whether they want him or not is irrelevant. This IS what they are going to get because this is how monarchy works: primogeniture. The Brits have no say in the matter unless they actually get serious about putting the entire institution to a vote.
Is that even discussed seriously, abolishing the monarchy?
No. The British monarchy survives because of the inertia built into a 1000-year old institution, the apathy of the people and the fact that it will be a legal and political mess to entangle the Crown from the State.
I’ve lived in Britain and no one in the social circles I frequented (mainly young people) cares about them – they don’t care for them in a positive manner (which will become a problem for the BRF) but neither do they care to oppose them. Furthermore, I very much doubt that anyone in the political establishment really wants to do the work to get rid of them.
AH, do you think there will be support to cut funding for the RF as the pandemic continues to hurt the economy?
Perhaps – if public pressure becomes too strong for the Tories to ignore, or if the Tories loose power. I find it hard to predict. It will be interesting to see if the economic effects of Brexit + COVID will have any effect on the public funding of the royals. I’m not holding my breath though because people are quite apathetic about the BRF so I doubt that there’ll be any kind of sustained public pressure.
I just wanted to say how much I respect your opinions and insights. Thank you
@Scollins
Isn’t it a little unfair to compare William to Charles? Other than their philandering, I honestly see no other similarities. In fact, I think William has far more in common with Andrew than his father. (Not the paedo tendencies, but more because they both possess strong ‘useless douchbag’ + ‘arrogant tosser’ tendencies.
PWT should have been Andrew’s son, while the relatively harmless York girls should have been Charles’.
I think William is a lot like Edward VIII. They both were pretty bad at the work part of the job and both were born as direct heirs and had a massive sense of entitlement. And while William hasn’t kowtowed to nazis just yet, he’s certainly in the pocket of Tories who under Boris are ok with very shady appointments to the House of Lords with potential, Russian mafia connections.
repeat, sry
Monarchy doesn’t work like that. You get who you’re given unless you want a bloody revolution/civil war or peaceful legislative nightmare that would suck up parliament and the courts time for years
Wow, I am shocked that Heads Up has run its course. I thought that Will and Kate would milk that project for years. All they had to do was say “mental health,” blab a bit, make bad, offensive jokes and call it a day. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you!
That’s it? That’s the end of the campaign? Was anything actually achieved? Or was this whole campaign an excuse for William to hang out with/watch footballers and pass it off as “work”?
Yes. Wills never smiles more or looks more engaged than when he is at a sports event. It appears he wants to whittle down the charities he spends time with and then decided that even that was too boring, so it seems his way forward is to pair his love of sports with his work.
These outdoor events are still corona spreaders. There have been so many reports of people catching it from backyard parties.
This Heads Up campaign basically was nothing more that some PR pics.
The Heads Up campaign was to get people to open up about taking about their mental health because it’s often the hardest part and the first step to getting help. Say want you want, but I thought his documentary last year was great, footballers and normal guys talking about their mental health together. If it stops even one man/boy from committing suicide then it’s a success.
And how many other people did he discourage from talking about mental health when he called his own brother fragile in the media? Because any credibility he had on that issue was shot when he did that to his own sibling.
Yup. Nothing but a backstabbing hypocrite.
Imagine, William comes to me and I have to tell him my mental health struggles.
I MEAN. The basic thing about mental health is how difficult it is to talk about it, to anyone, to loved ones, the people closest to you!!
And in this case, I would have to tell everything to a stranger who I just met?!
C’mon.
And watch him stifle yawn after yawn as he suffers through your ‘boring’ problems. Yeah, not very likely.
When I was finishing my bachelor degree, I had to take one last humanities course. I chose Intro to Western Civilizations, super easy. I had to “immerse myself” in a cultural event for the final project, writing a paper on it. So I, as an Irish American who enjoys the Irish Festivals near me, chose to go to an Irish Festival. I wrote my entire paper on watching Irish dancing, trying different Irish beers, listening to singing and walking around the exhibits….basically everything I would have been doing that day anyway.
That’s exactly what William has done. He arranged a project where he could continue to do what he was going to do anyway and get class credit for it.
I know this is going to anger some people because they don’t like William but in the UK(where I live half the time) this campaign actually has done a lot of good . They made three really inspiring documentaries about mental health for the BBC and ITV
I’m actually really proud that both William and harry and Kate came out and spoke of theirs struggles. We are told to just get over it and move on when we have depression and even with my family I’ve heard more people saying I’m sad and that ok to be sad .
Yeah it’s really cool to call your sibling fragile when they actually talk of mental health issues. That totally doesn’t blow up your entire premise and make you look hypocritical.
what struggles did William and Kate have? People will go on their own for therapy if they so need it and will not go because Kate “tells them to.” William calling Harry “fragile” was unspeakable.
You should not fear angering people here. It is your opinion. But I am legit not buying it, especially because, in William´s case, it os obviously not a concern he has. If he had this concern, he would have not used triggering language suggesting Harry, who actually went into therapy, is mentally ill. and yes, he did that, because the journalist William spoke to confirmed the quote came from his mouth.
So yes. I believe you must talk the talk and walk the walk to have a real impact, but is juts my OP
All of us have had to go through sad and traumatic situations but we don’t dine out on it for the rest of our lives so we can use it to do minimal work whilst living a fabulously rich and entitled life. William and Kate have shown time and time again that they’re only willing to put their names to something but not actually get into the trenches and create change. Sorry, they don’t get a pass.
If this project is finished it proves, to me, they were just piggy backing off of Harry. With Harry gone there is no need for William to pretend to care about mental health.
Look at the press release when campaign first launched last year it was always supposed to end on the day of this year’s FA Cup final 🤦♀️
Yes all mental health issues end once the FA Cup final is done. 🤦♀️
And, they expected him to do all the work.
It’s infuriating. It’s a problem that’s maligned, underfunded, misunderstood, and then you get this guy not taking it seriously either. And it’s not like he’s so busy doing other things.
The Cambridge follow-through is consistently lacking.
What follow through?!?!!?
LOL!
I think it’s just heads up specific campaign that is ending not heads together.
I agree that I had a lot of respect for William, Kate and Harry opening up a national conversation about mental health when Heads Together first launched. But this is why I was so disappointed with the discourse around Harry’s mental health that came from the palace& total lack of care for Meghan. Now I don’t feel they have any credibility on this issue.
Looks exhausting, doesn’t it? Again, zero respect for anything these two put their names to as far as mental health. They haven’t got a clue about mental health after the way the Sussexes were treated. They tried to destroy Meghan and her pregnancy. BooooOOOooo!
Mental health issues last for a lifetime and ending a campaign just because you don’t feel like doing more work on it is pathetic. What they should have done is say there was more to come. But they didn’t because they are lazy. Their PR remains bad on this issue and trying to use a press release as an excuse for a half ass job is only something a courtier or blinded sycophant would say. You can’t defend this laziness. People with mental health issues aren’t reading the fucking press releases. What they see is a campaign ending and no further help in sight.
Exactly. This was for PR only.
Photo ops that’s all’s they do with these charity organizations. The jokes on the people who expect more from these inbreds. Lol
lol at least this “project” got launched unlike the “broken britian” one. Looking at Twitter comments it’s clear that no one was buying his nonsense. The fact that it was only linked to football leagues and not general sports or that it never offered any practical advice was clue that its purely a PR stunt
Maybe giving everyone a laugh at his pretentiousness was his contribution to mental health.
Willyboy is phllip is grandfather all over!!! Diana would be so shocked if she knew that is the man she birthed!!
What an embarassment, acting like a star, he should be ashamed, yes WIlliam its all about you, smh.
We need to vote on the better fix: Watching football to solve mental health or taking a five question struggle survey to heal Broken Britain.