Damning Kate Middleton detail revealed in royal engagements for 2023
The Princess of Wales can often be seen to do no wrong but new royal family data has revealed some damning new information.
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All year I wait. All year. All for this one glorious day that should be marked by the State trumpeters – brr brr BRRR! The day when Princess Anne, steadfast royal trooper, sunglasses icon and woman who looks like she runs up her own using remainder-bin sofa fabric, gets her moment in the sun.
Thus here we are, when Anne is crowned, as she pretty much is every year, as the hardest working member of the royal family having notched up 457 engagements in 2023.
Redoubtable, steadfast, and dedicated to the perpetual slog demanded of second-tier royalty, the Princess Royal is the antimatter to Prince Harry’s spare, a woman who considers emotions to be things best had in private, in another room and only very occasionally.
However, the example of Anne is very bad news if your name happens to be Kate, the Princess of Wales.
See, Anne attracts the sort of adjectives normally reserved for army battalions or thoroughbreds – loyal, indefatigable, good handling in tight corners – and her work ethic is of a sort rarely seen since the advent of the steam engine.
Problem is, her niece-in-law cannot boast about any such thing.
Kate, according to working statistics reported by the Telegraph, only managed to rack up one quarter of Anne’s engagements, only 123 of them, making her the eighth-hardest working member of Crown Inc this year.
No gold stars or blue ribbons or shiny cups for the Princess of Wales here, no siree.
The numbers paint a highly unfavourable picture of the perma-blow dried princess.
Take, for example, that the 79-year-old Duke of Gloucester managed to squeeze in nearly 40 more engagements in 2023 than her, equalling Prince William, the Prince of Wales with 172 official events.
Or the names that Kate managed to surpass in terms of inclusions in the Court Circular, the official record of royal work, were the 88-year-old Duke of Kent and the 86-year-old Princess Alexandra, among others. (Somehow Prince Andrew got two engagements, most likely connected with King Charles’ coronation, thus proving he has finally managed to circumvent the ankle monitor Queen Camilla personally installed.)
As Anne might say here, the princess has excellent forequarters and is a decent 16 hands … hang on, wrong conversation. What we can surmise is that it seems unlikely the Princess Royal would be all that impressed by Kate’s comparatively feeble engagement count.
Appearances matter. In horses, princesses, and army divisions.
In the Princess of Wales’ defence here, this is a bit of a case of comparing apples and oranges with William and Kate’s approach to their royal good works following a different template entirely to that of the Aunty Anne. The 73-year-old hews to the model studiously followed by her mother the late Queen and her late grandmother the Queen Mother and her great great grandmother Queen Mary before that.
As Mary said of being a working member of the royal family, “We are never tired and we all love hospitals.” So there.
Which is to say, One gets up every day, puts on a nice hat, collects One’s Cornelia James gloves and then proceeds to shake hands, cut ribbons and visit lifeboat stations across every square inch of soil that falls under the British crown. Wash. And repeat. For the rest of your life.
This style of work requires a large application of sturdy shoe leather and an unflagging willingness to make small talk. It is also one that William and Kate have largely rejected.
Their approach has taken shape post-pandemic with them now applying their energies, time and money to supporting signature causes close to their hearts, specifically, the climate crisis, mental health, homelessness and early years development.
The prince and princess have their flagship initiatives, Earthshot, Heads Together, Homewards and Shaping Us, all of which see the couple out flying the flag and promoting with marquee events (the Earthshot Awards and the Shaping Us national symposium) and the occasional stunt (William working in a food truck to make burgers, him selling the Big Issue), all backed up by glossy, professional social media videos that would a Kardashian jealous.
By contrast, the Princess Anne blueprint, if you will, is to turn up and congratulate other people for running Meals on Wheels or feeding the needy or trying to fix some entrenched societal ill; the Wales version is to roll up one’s sleeves, wrangle a stray aughties pop icon or breakfast TV host to lend their celebrity, and then set about helping people fix these problems themselves.
Think of it as the Wales Way, the new doctrine of doing good where the members of the royal family are fully engaged actors fighting the various good fights rather than just playing occasional walk-on parts.
What sits underneath this shift, from the Queen Mary Mould to the Way O’ the Waleses is an implicit understanding that for the monarchy to continue chug-chugging along – for the British people to not rise up and start signing change.org petitions about a republic, for the masses to not, metaphorically speaking, start knocking up guillotines in the Mall – the monarchy needs to show a net benefit for the country.
However, where the Wales Way comes unstuck is when you add in Operation: Normal Parents, that is their commitment to giving their three kids, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, as regular childhoods as possible and them being as hands-on as possible. Laudable aims, of course, but all of that peanut butter sandwich-making and Bluey-watching means that William and Kate regularly take most, if not all, the school holidays off work.
Talk about flexible working hours.
While ensuring that the next generation of HRHs are balanced, happy and aren’t going to grow up to huffily move to the West Coast to make inspirational podcasts and their own yoghurt is crucial, that is now coming at the expense of the Wales’ work.
And this is where things get a bit dicey given that William and Kate – and the monarchy as a whole – cannot afford for the great British public to have anything less than a shimmering, glowing view of them. The Palace cannot afford to go back to the days, early in the Wales’ marriage when they were seen as shirking their duty and failing to shoulder their share of the royal workload and burden.
Because William and Kate are it. They are not just the Palace’s trump cards but the only cards they have left to play after the Great Schism saw Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex huff off to California to up their vitamin D and emote for a living.
We are now stuck in a fallow period where the next round of working members of the royal family – George, Charlotte and Louis – are more than a decade, or a decade and a half until they could theoretically take up full-time royal work.
William and Kate only switched from representing the crown part-time to permanent staffers in 2017. If the prince and princess afforded their youngest son, Louis the same latitude, that would mean he would not take up full-time duties until 2053. He could probably go to his first ribbon cutting in his hover-Bentley. Or maybe by then all engagements will be virtual?
While King Charles and Queen Camilla are proving more popular than many would have predicted, and seem to be earning a certain grudging respect, they are never going to generate the mass jubilance and support required to keep the monarchy afloat. Only the Waleses can do that therefore they cannot risk even a hint of a blemish.
(What’s that? Omid Scobie’s Endgame race claims? That’s a whole other mess.)
With such a huge responsibility and weight bearing down on William and Kate, there is no wiggle room. The prince and princess need to stay in the public’s good graces and good books.
For now though, please join me in raising a glass. To the princess who has set out to visit every one of the more than 200 lighthouses on the British coastline; who is quietly on a mission to restore all the historic war graves in the UK; to the woman who, and this is true, has been known to do the horses in a ball gown after coming home from an evening do.
Cin cin!
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.
Originally published as Damning Kate Middleton detail revealed in royal engagements for 2023
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