Queen Camilla puts Meghan in checkmate with huge milestone
The Queen has just announced a huge milestone, one that the Duchess of Sussex has yet to pass.
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Pop quiz. What do Princess Eugenie, Prince William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales, and Queen Camilla have in common?
I’ll give you a hint: It has nothing to do with the fact they are all titled, have the front door keys to some of the world’s most expensive central London real estate or are annually obligated to pretend to like haggis and Princess Michael of Kent’s latest potboiler romance.
The answer: They all have relatively successful podcasting outings under the belts.
Eugenie has co-hosted two series of Floodlight, put out by the Anti-Slavery Collective which she co-founded.
William has appeared on footballer Peter Crouch’s podcast, on Apple’s Time to Walk and, along with Kate and Princess Anne, last year recorded an episode of Mike Tindall’s The Good, The Bad and The Rugby.
(And thus we now all know that Kate is the very first Princess of Wales to have played beer pong.)
On Tuesday came great news for Camilla fans (stop snickering) with the announcement that her Queen’s Reading Room podcast’s second series is set to launch next week.
Which may or may not be a sore point in the environs of Montecito nearly a year after Prince Harry and Meghan made the “mutual decision” to split from Spotify after having only managed to make one, single, lone series in two and a half years and with a whole audio arm of their Archewell mothership.
Blimey.
Consider: On one hand we have a woman who is more than au fait with an orthopaedic shoe and who has probably been using the same stick of Revlon’s Peachy Keen lippie boot from a Wilshire Boots in 2004 and a woman who has never had a full-time, paying job is up to series two of her podcast.
And on the other hand, a duchess with a degree from one of the best universities in the United States, who is one of the most famous women on the planet, and has a staff dedicated to making podcasts has yet to do the same?
There is an interesting intersection point when it comes to Camilla and Meghan’s podcasts.
In mid-December 2020, Spotify got out their newly-acquired, box-fresh gold-plated horn to announce they had signed a deal with the Sussexes with a reported $30 million ($USD20 million) attached.
Meanwhile, a few weeks later and somewhere in the mists of wintery Scotland, Camilla, in an attempt to jolly up a miserable locked-down nation, took to toInstagram to bang on about her favourite books.
This grew into her Reading Room initiative which is now its own charity and which runs, amongst other things, a large-scale summer festival. (Glasto for the glasses set?)
Last year, came the first Reading Room podcast series, featuring the Queen, which reportedly managed to make it into the top one percent of podcasts globally at that time.
The Sussex podcast story has proven to be a less cheering one.
In the space of two and a half years, Archewell Audio released all of 12 episodes of the duchess’ Archetypes series, which launched at number one in the charts in the US and the UK, though subsequent episodes failed to perform as well.
In June last year the alterna-royals parted ways with the streaming giant with them only having reportedly only been paid part of the contract’s value because they had not “met the productivity benchmarks” and being labelled “f**king grifters” by one Spotify exec.
In February this year it was announced that the duchess had signed with women-led podcasting company Lemonada Media and that she has a “dynamic” new podcast that is “well in the works”.
No further details or information has come out and most recently Meghan was reportedly filming her new lifestyle show for Netflix at a rented property near Santa Barbara.
Which leaves us here: The duchess has been making a show which will teach viewers how to make a rustic galette (I’m assuming) while the Queen has quietly been rolling out a whole new series of her show.
For about the 7523th time, this is not how I or anyone even armed with a crystal ball and a time machine, would have ever predicted things would go.
Camilla is hosting massive palace events around sexual assault and doing more podcasts and Meghan is, I don’t know, wielding a dough scraper or demonstrating the easiest way to whip up a remoulade while the cameras roll.
However, what might things have looked like if the duchess had vaguely followed her step-mother-in-law’s lead?
And no, I don’t mean she should take up smoking in the bath with all of her dogs while listening to Country Hour.
The big lesson that Camilla could have taught not only Meghan but Harry too is that patience, hardwork and ignoring the yapping voices of Fleet Street can and will pay off.
For the last 19-years the now 76-year-old has gotten up day after day and Gotten On With Things with a certain British stoicism.
Consider, in 2005 when she married Charles, at age 57 she took on her first actual proper job of her life. (Well she did very briefly work at society decorator Colefax and Fowler in the late 60s while a young debutante but was sacked for coming in late after a dance.)
When the King acceded to the throne in September 2022, at a time when most of her cronies were scaling back their schedules and spending more time with the latest PD James, Her Majesty was just entering the busiest, most demanding and pressured phase of her life.
Earlier this month, during a reception she hosted at Buckingham Palace to support sexual abuse survivors she relaunched the wash bag scheme she had first started in 2013 to provide toiletries to people after having to do rape kits.
Really, the Camilla story is one about the power of dogged grafting and the necessity of the sustenance only provided by a well-stocked biscuit tin.
The Sussexes’ story is far less parabolically rosy.
Having freed themselves from the palace groupthink only 20 months after their wedding their commercial endeavours have been a bit hit-and-miss and even now, their public approval ratings in the US are not exactly anything to write home about.
Polling done by Redfield & Wilson for Newsweek earlier this month found that Meghan has a net approval rating of plus 12 (the same as King Charles’) but far off Kate’s plus 32 and William’s plus 28.
When it comes to Camilla and Meghan, they are two women who could not be more diametrically different in terms of education, life experience, and professional achievements. (The Queen has scattered crumbs of all three; Meghan has shedloads.)
The only commonality between them is that they both fell for, and wed, royal blokes.
Even so, only one of them can now casually drop into conversations at drinks parties that they have a second season of their podcast coming out while clutching a mushroom vol-au-vent.
The other, sadly, now has something in common with Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York whose Tea Talks podcast has yet to make it past the one-series-and-done hurdle.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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