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Prince William is set to have a private meeting with Prime Minister Keir Starmer today amid a busy day for the Prince of Wales, who is also leading the nation in commemorations for Holocaust Memorial Day
Prince William is set to hold a meeting with the Prime Minister Keir Starmer amid a busy day for the Prince of Wales.
It has been confirmed that William will sit down for a meeting later today with Mr Starmer as part of the royal tradition that sees the heir to the throne have an annual meeting with British PM. However, the meeting will be strictly private with anything discussed remaining a closely-guarded secret.
It comes on the same day that William is leading the nation in commemorations for Holocaust Memorial Day – and it has been confirmed he will also be joined by wife Kate. The Prince of Wales is set to give a reading at a special service in London attended by survivors and guests from around the world who have spent their lives fighting extremism.
As part of this year’s event marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp complex, and the 30th anniversary of the genocide in Bosnia, the prince’s speech will be in line with the theme “for a better future”.
Ceremonies held across the world will remember the six million Jewish men, women, and children who were murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of other people killed under Nazi persecution, and those killed in other genocides such as in Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Cambodia. . A royal source said: “As part of an unending commitment to remember those who perished and suffered from the horrors of the past, the Prince of Wales is honoured to take part in such an important commemoration.”
In 2020, Prince William and wife Kate – when they were styled the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge – joined Holocaust survivors at Westminster’s Central Hall to mark the 75 year anniversary. During the poignant commemorative ceremony, William read an extract from a letter written by a friend of his great-grandmother, Princess Alice, which described her efforts to save Jews in Athens.
At the same time Kate published photographs of Holocaust survivors in a contribution to an exhibition marking 75 years since the end of the genocide. At the time she said her subjects were “two of the most life-affirming people that I have had the privilege to meet”.
A year later the moving portraits were part of an exhibition at The Imperial War Museum London, featuring 50 contemporary portraits of Holocaust survivors and their families.
Today, the King is visiting for the first time the Auschwitz-Birkenau site in Poland as part of a one day visit to the country. The Mirror last month revealed Charles will become the first British monarch to visit the Polish death camp, after the Prince and Princess of Wales made an emotional pilgrimage in 2017 to the Stutthof camp in northern Poland, where 65,000 people died during Germany’s occupation.
William and Kate described their experience as “shattering” and said the site is a “terrible reminder of the cost of war”. The late Queen Elizbeth II in 2005 made her last official foreign trip to Germany where she also made her first-ever visit to a concentration camp, stopping to lay a wreath at Bergen-Belsen and to meet with Holocaust survivors.
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