GREATEST GRANDAD

Behind the scenes, the King is like a big kid, doting on his lovable royal rascals

It was one of the most endearing moments in the entire weekend of celebratory events to mark the Queen's Platinum Jubilee last year.

After two hours of watching a pageant pass by in the street below the stands where he was sitting with his family, young Prince Louis, only just four, had had enough. He wriggled in his seat, he pulled faces and when his mother, the then Duchess of Cambridge, to placate him, he gave her a rude gesture and grabbed her face. His older sister Princess Charlotte told him off and his dad Prince William tried to distract him.

And then the unruly prince looked along the row and spotted his grandfather, the then Prince Charles. Moments later, he’d plonked himself on Grandpa’s knee, where he was bounced up and down and rocked from side to side in time with the music from the parade. Charles kept the bored lad occupied by pointing out what was going on.

It was a particularly poignant and telling moment because it showed Charles is not the formal, stuff y patriarch many people imagine him to be. “When you consider he is said to be a remote parent, to see him do that was charming,” commented a royal observer.

Being a doting grandfather is truly important to Charles, especially as he never had a close relationship with either of his grandfathers. His paternal grandfather, Prince Philip’s father Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, died in 1944, four years before he was born. He was only three when his mother's father, King George VI, died on February 6, 1952. Although he did spend a fair amount of time with his grandpa in the first few years of his life, he doesn't remember him. "I think it's a tragedy that I never really knew my grandfather," he has since said.