Award ceremonies can be anodyne – but Prince William’s Bafta moment broke through | Zoe Williams

Award ceremonies can be anodyne – but Prince William’s Bafta moment broke through Zoe Williams It used to be accepted fact that nothing political or controversial would be mentioned within spitting distance of a podium. In the last few weeks that silent agreement has ended T he rule on a red carpet or a parti-coloured podium is that none of the victors say anything about politics. None of the surrounding players – the losers, the judges, the spouses, the hangers-on – should say anything either, because it draws attention to the vast lacuna where normal opinions should be. Some people, such as the Olympic committee, have explicit strictures, while other bodies merely create the expectation that nothing will be said, and can I just remind everyone that many years passed when this was no big deal. Politics was 9-to-5 work, and sports and showbiz were weekend-casual work, and nobody expected the two to intersect. It’s 2026, however, and the outside world intrudes on everything. Prince William said at Sunday night’s Bafta ceremony that he hadn’t seen the winning film, Hamnet, explaining : “I need to be in quite a calm state and I am not at the moment. I will save it.” Look, you could get on your high horse and say: “Mate, you’re the president of Bafta, could you not have found a moment of peace in which to watch the film that was likely to win everything?” Or you could speculate on what, between the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and the rising swell of voices wanting to know who knew what, when, could have caused William’s disquiet. Or you could say: “Actually, Hamnet would be the perfect film for your troubled mind, being immensely soporific and yet quite forgiving; you can sleep through a large chunk of it and still know exactly what’s about to happen”. But on balance, William made the right call: there are so many events he could legitimately ignore, being from a dynasty whose highest creed is ignoring things, but if we accept that he couldn’t ignore this one t...