New Delhi: Most royal families bury this kind of story. Prince Laurent of Belgium chose not to. He has formally recognised a son from a relationship Belgian media whispered about for years but could never quite pin down.
Clément Vandenkerckhove is 26, used to sell cars for a living, and is now legally recognised as Prince Laurent’s son and a prince. The civil registration happened quietly, and the details only came out months later.
In practice, the title doesn’t get him much. No state allowance. No public duties. No place in the line of succession.
His mother is Iris Vandenkerckhove, a singer and television personality whom most Belgians would know by her stage name, Wendy Van Wanten. She and Laurent were seen together at events in the late 1990s, including at Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones’s wedding, though whether they were actually a couple was never confirmed at the time, or for years afterward.
Clément was born in 2000, the same year Laurent is believed to have met Princess Claire, who he would go on to marry in 2003. The couple have three children of their own — Louise, Aymeric, and Nicolas.
Clément’s parentage sat somewhere between rumour and open secret for most of his adult life. Asked about it on television in 2021, he denied it outright. Then, last year, in a Flemish TV documentary, he told a different story. He said he was 16 when his mother finally told him the truth. “Your daddy is a prince. Your daddy is that man,” he recalled her saying.
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A DNA match
The way the father and the son actually met has an odd twist to it. Clément had already crossed paths with Laurent once before, at a shopping centre in 2013, without having any idea of who the man was. It wasn’t until four years after learning the truth that he finally worked up the nerve to call the Prince. Meetings followed, and eventually Laurent suggested a DNA test. It came back a 99.5 per cent match.
Laurent, who is 62 now, addressed all of it in a statement. He and Clément, he said, had “spoken openly and honestly” about the situation in recent years. Beyond that, he asked for discretion and said there would be no further comment.
It’s not all been formal between them. This past summer, Clément posted a Father’s Day photo with Laurent online, saying he was celebrating “two fathers”, a reference to both Laurent and Frans Vancoppenolle, his mother’s husband.
Whether Clément will take on the family name, Saxe-Coburg, is still up in the air. “I might want to do that, but I am proud of the name Vandenkerckhove,” he told Flemish newspaper Het Nieuwsblad, adding that giving it up would feel like turning his back on everything his mother had done for him.
Public money is a simpler question, and the answer is none. Since a 2013 reform, only four members of the Belgian royal family are entitled to public funding: King Philippe, former King Albert II, Prince Laurent, and Princess Astrid. Clément won’t be joining that list.
The royal family has been here before, in a way. Laurent’s own father, King Albert II, spent years denying a strikingly similar story before admitting in 2020 that he had fathered artist Delphine Boël during an affair. Albert abdicated in 2013 as that paternity issue became a royal scandal, and Boël eventually won her royal title in court. She now goes by Delphine de Saxe-Coburg.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)