Who is the best royal of the 21st century - and where do we begin with Harry?

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Windsor Castle. June 21, 2000.
It was hailed as THE party of the century. Hordes of the upper crust, hot and cold running grandees, titled Europeans and old fox hunting muckers gathered for the 'Dance of the Decades', a combined celebration of the Queen Mother's 100th birthday, Princess Margaret's 70th, Princess Anne's 50th, Prince Andrew's 40th and Prince William's 18th.
The royal family that gathered on that night looked profoundly, nearly unthinkably, different from the one of today.
The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret were still gathering for a lunchtime voddy.
Prince William looked like a Disney dreamboat with a luxuriant full head of wavy blonde hair. And Queen Elizabeth had barely recovered from the greatest disaster of her 48 years on the throne.
To celebrate the launch of the new news.com.au app, we're celebrating the people, places and events we'll never forget from the first quarter of the 21st century by asking for Australia's view. Our 25@25 series will finally put to bed the debates you've been having at the pub and around dinner tables for years – and some that are just too much fun not to include.
The monarchy had just - and only just - been pulled back from the precipice after Buckingham Palace's stony-faced handling of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Stunned by her shocking end in Paris and the Palace's frigid response, the people had turned on the crown with a shockingly un-British degree of emotion and on that night in 2000, the shadow of the princess' death still hung over The Firm.
And in Bucklebury, Berkshire, a hockey-loving gel was packing her hipster jeans as she prepared for her gap year, without a clue what fate had in store for her - a crown rather than a lifetime of driving a Volvo station wagon to Asda.
If you zipped back in a time machine to that June night in 2000 and told Queen Elizabeth on her third glass of Pol Roger how the royal family circa 2025 looked, you would have been liable to be sectioned: The next Queen is a middle-class art history graduate, William needs beanies and flat caps to keep the chill out, and Prince Harry now occasionally does bits on late night TV shows, cut irrevocably adrift from his family and doomed to a lifetime of gluten-free mimosa brunches with Kris Jenner.
So, who is your favourite royal from the past 25 years?
Queen Elizabeth II
It would take years, decades, after the turn of the millennium for the late Queen to shake off the perception of her as the cold fish, icily distant monarch who had struggled to connect with her nation at a moment of crisis.
One did occasionally smile and chuckle in public but One was largely known as the monarch whose spectacularly out-of-touch response to Diana's death had taken the monarchy to the brink.
Slowly, the ship began to right itself and it would take the arrival of one fresh-faced Kate Middleton to usher in a new royal chapter.
A key turning point came on July 27, 2012 when billions around the world watched, delegated agog, as she 'met' 007 at the Palace and then 'skydived' into the London Olympics' opening ceremony.
It was a brief, wonderful moment of levity and cheekiness for a woman defined by a certain Easter Island-like blankness and stoicism in public.
Queen Elizabeth II was many people's favourite royal. Picture: Christopher Furlong / POOL / AFP)
As the years passed, the ghost of Diana receded and as the 21st century got under way the late Queen morphed into a genuinely beloved figure, hailed for her implacable, unwavering devotion to duty, her signature Launer handbag in the crook of her arm as she Got On With
It.
Her late Majesty represented a certain dignity, a poise, a steadfastness and a chin-up-chaps-ness in the face of adversity, family crisis and having to have the fluorescent Mr Trump around for tea.
Finally, the world came to respect what she had been doing all along.
Paddington Bear said it best in 2022, doffing his red felt cap during her Platinum Jubilee: 'Thank you, for everything'
Prince Philip
And by Queen Elizabeth's side for 73 years was, of course, her 'strength and stay' Prince Philip.
He was an unlikely choice for the young princess back in the 1940s, the penniless son of the deposed Greek King who had grown up being shunted around tiled relatives' houses in Europe and toughened up in a remote Scottish boarding school.
However, from the first moment the young Princess Elizabeth clapped eyes on him, he was the only man ever for her.
He had a valiant, courageous war battling the Germans sea and then in 1946 gave up smoking on his wedding day to devote his life to 'Lilibet' and shaking the hands of quaking Lord Lieutenants.
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, made many laugh over the years. Picture: AFP//Victoria Jones
Philip was most famous for his incurable case of foot-in-mouth-itis, managing to wheel out racially offensive quips from Glasgow to the Northern Territory to China, perpetually unperturbed by the diplomatic havoc he left in his wake.
Again, today, Philip's image is one defined by devotion, to his wife and to doing his bit. It was only in 2017 - aged 95-years-old - he retired from royal work, saying 'the world's most experienced plaque-unveiler'.
King Charles
On September 8, 2022 the third Carolean age began when Charles Philip Arthur George acceded to the throne to finally fulfil his lifelong destiny to wear a crown and to install composting bins at the Palace.
But in 2000 he was still the Prince of Wales, a man who was still slowly inching back from the greatest disaster of his personal and royal life, the death of Diana.
It is hard to give anyone not alive at the time the palpable, visceral public tsunami of grief that followed, for years, after the princess' death, that was followed by anger towards Crown Inc and Charles.
Anger at the palace for years of cold-blooded treatment of her and anger at Charles for rejecting her in favour of his frowzy lifelong paramour Camilla.
(It was, of course, much more complicated than that.)
King Charles III waited a long time to take the throne. Picture: BENJAMIN CREMEL / AFP
Back then, Charles' views on the environment were perceived as fringe and a bit of a doolally indulgence while his Prince's Trust charity (now the King's Trust) quietly changed young Britons lives without anyone quite noticing.
He was seen as something of a busted flush, and there was a genuine, ongoing conversation about whether the crown should skip a generation and go straight to William.
Like his mother, the last 25 years have seen Charles work tirelessly to shake off that image and to replace it with one of widespread respect.
Today, the King is a man hailed for his lifelong, dogged commitment to climate action and relentlessly turning lights off, whose nearly 60 years of hard work, public service and dedication are finally being recognised and valued.
Just don't give the man a fountain pen.
Queen Camilla
The King's greatest, formerly unthinkable achievement: Bringing Camilla in from the cold.
The story is not true but telling nonetheless - in the 90s it was claimed that such was public hatred towards Camilla that someone had chucked a bread roll at her in the supermarket.
In 2000, the UK and the world was truly buffeddled - how could Charles have chucked over dazzling, orphan-hugging Diana for Camilla, a woman who permanently looks like she had just come in from doing the horses or field dressing a pheasant?
Diana's labels said 'Versace'; Camilla's said, '100 per cent viscose'.
Back then, the idea that this woman would one day be Queen and crowned alongside Charles at Westminster Abbey would have been ludicrous.
Queen Camilla has sparked many different opinions over the years. Picture:for Ascot Racecourse
However, Camilla has shown us all. Since marrying Charles in 2005, the Queen's main charitable focus has been on fighting domestic and sexual violence, doing everything from persistently giving speeches, filming a moving documentary and spearheading a campaign to provide toiletry bags to rape victims in hospitals.
She is the first royal patron in history of a rape crisis centre.
Also, finally the world is appreciating that she and Charles are a great love story. Their chemistry, the fizz, their devotion to and adoration of one another is abundantly clear.
Prince William
Adios Eton, hello world. In 2000 the prince finished high school and trundled off to enjoy a gap year that included training with the Welsh Guards in Belize, scrubbing toilets in a remote village in Chile while teaching English and 4am starts helping out a British dairy farm.
In 2001 he would finally go to university, at St Andrews in Scotland, and there not only managed to get a very average degree but to woo the woman who has, and will, save the monarchy from themselves and those recessive Hapsburgh genes.
Prince William is a very popular royal. Picture: Manon Cruz / POOL / AFP
As the world watched William grow up, he proceeded to do the unthinkable and actually get a paying job, piloting a search and rescue chopper and then later an air ambulance, responding to unthinkable accidents and quite literally saving lives.
Over the last decade he and Kate, The Princess of Wales, have quietly done away with the nearly century-long model of royalling - of ribbon cuttings and tree-plantings and their presence simply being seen as enough - to replace that with highly dynamic and forward-looking doing.
William is currently in the midst of his decades-long handing out of nearly $100 million to fund innovative solutions to the climate crisis and has relentlessly worked on destigmatising mental health, especially for men.
Kate, The Princess of Wales
It does not bear thinking about: where the royal family would be today if William had ended up with the sort of aristo gal he had dated in his teens who could trace her lineage back to the Norman Conquest and had never eaten a Tesco sausage roll.
Thank god.
There have been plenty of bumps on the road to this point, like Kate's years of being harassed by the press and paparazzi, perpetually mocked as 'Waity Katie' and more recently was alleged to have been the 'royal racist' who commented on her unborn nephew's skin colour.
Kate, Princess of Wales, has been through a lot. Picture: Yui Mok/Pool Photo via AP
Still she persisted and the Princess of Wales has evolved into a widely adored figure who, like William, has locked onto her legacy issue and is indefatigably plugging away, fundamentally changing early childhood in the UK in the hope of dramatically moving the dial on mental health and addiction for future generations.
The Kate of 2025 is a woman who has, like the late Queen, just gotten on with it and in doing so has overturned all scepticism about how a girl pejoratively labelled as 'normal' would do having to carry the weight of a thousand-plus years of royal history on her shoulders.
Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex
Oh Harry. Where do we even begin?
If you plotted his story in a novel it would seem too outlandish - the two tours on the frontline in Afghanistan, the naked billiards, the troubled, sozzled lost boy made good who found love with a stunning American with, of all outrageous things, a career, only to chuck it in and burn every bridge in exchange for psychologically unburdening himself and big fat pay cheques.
Has any figure in the 982 years since William the Conqueror ditched Normandy to go to the UK and to boot out the Anglo-Saxons ever had such a precipitous and stunning change in public opinion as Aitch?
Prince Harry has been in the media a lot over the decades. Picture: HENRY NICHOLLS / AFP
The most recent stats show that 27 per cent of Brits have a positive view of him - and 63 per cent negative.
The figure the Duke of Sussex cuts in 2025 is a man unmoored from his former job, identity and homeland as he fumbles around trying to build a new one.
Photos shared by his wife Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex show a man whose personal life is filled with the joy of fatherhood and family but how will he fill the next 50 or 60 years of his life?
Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex
Imagine going back to the Dance of the Decades in 2000 and telling the Queen Mother and
Margaret that Harry would marry a divorced actress from Los Angeles who had never heard
of the Windsor Horse Show.
But the story of the royal family is one indelibly shaped and changed by the Sussexes' love
story.
In 2016 she and Harry were set up on a blind date and only 18 months later, giddily, the couple announced their engagement to the world.
It was all so fairytale and it was all over so fast. The stardust barely lasted two years and by January 2020, the Sussexes were out, done with following the long established script and playing ball and off to borrow a private jet to point towards California.
Meghan could be one of the most divisive royals. Picture: SUZANNE CORDEIRO / AFP
It is hard to think of a more lightning rod figure than Meghan, a woman who attracts such vehemence of opinion there is a PhD thesis in unpicking it all.
The Duchess of Sussex is a woman who, for better or worse, must be hailed for always following her own star and charting her own path, one that has taken her back to her home state and is unlikely to ever see the Clarence House drinks trolley again.
In 2025, the duchess is a woman busy making her own mark and trying to convince the world of the life changing power of flower sprinkles as her entrepreneurial push with her As Ever brand continues. Next up, the launch of a rosé.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years' experience working with a number of Australia's leading media titles.
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Originally published as Who is the best royal of the 21st century - and where do we begin with Harry?