Kate and William move could cause ‘serious blowback’ for the monarchy
A new set of numbers have painted the Princess of Wales and her husband in an unflattering light – and it’s bad news for all the Windsors.
COMMENT
Kate, the Princess of Wales might be many things – an abnormally bouncy blow-dry-haver, bearer of cutesy children and eternally sweet public figure – but average? Let’s all now scoff, simultaneously.
Future Queen, great hope of the British monarchy, the mother of a King, Our Kate is anything but regular, no matter how often she is spied using the self-service checkout.
However, one aspect of her extraordinary life stands liable to come back and bite her in her tennis-toned bottom – her workload.
According to the Gert’s Royals website, which is the Encyclopaedia Britannica crossed with the Doomsday Book of royal watching, the 41-year-old has so far this year undertaken 45 solo engagements and 40 joint ones with husband and polo mallet swinger Prince William.
The issue is that with only four working months of the royal year left, that number puts her on track to only just surpass her 2019 total of 120. And, out of this year’s tally, a serious chunk have only been in neighbouring counties or nearby London.
The last time I did a full year of tracking engagements was 2019. And Kate did 120 that year. And as we are just under the 6 month mark and Kate had done 68 engagements Kate will surpass 2019. And the years before that. https://t.co/oPfJZSAavJ
— Gert's Royals (@Gertsroyals) June 15, 2023
Ditto ‘Willy’. He is currently sitting on a total of 94 engagements this year, which means that he might not even break his 2019 tally of 188.
However, circumstances have changed considerably for those crazy kids since then.
For one thing, back then, the Waleses were the parents of a baby, a four-year-old and a six-year-old, tiny humans who required constant supervision lest they fall into the Round Pond or manage to set some Restoration tapestry on fire. (The Koh-i-Noor diamond? Massive choking hazard).
But today all three of the Wales kidlets – Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis – are at school, leaving William and Kate with far more non-peanut butter-smeared time in the day to go out and fly the royal flag all over the UK.
And yet they do not seem to be doing that.
Compounding this puzzler is that while their domestic responsibilities have gotten less intensive in the last few years, their professional ones have only been ratcheted up.
Most obviously, within a day of Her late Majesty’s death, William and Kate were elevated to being the Prince and Princess of Wales, putting them only one step away from having to learn how to get Playdoh out of ermine.
And yet William and Kate are largely still working like it’s 2019 (sung à la Prince).
There have been other changes too in the last four years besides Prince Louis learning the correct way to use a lobster pick and Prince George starting to hold his own playground investitures. (‘I dub thee Duke Hugo of the Swing Set’).
In July 2019, there were 15 working members of the royal family, a troop who would, that year, undertake an impressive 3567 engagements.
Since then, the House of Windsor has suffered through calamity after controversy after PR crisis, and I’d expect that new Palace aides are now routinely handed miniature bottles of Baileys to mix into their morning coffee.
It was in August 2019 that the focus on Prince Andrew’s friendship with sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein fired up, leading to him giving his apocalyptically bad interview in November that year.
Bye bye Andy, who was thus shunted off to mooch around his palatial Windsor home, Royal Lodge, and with nothing better to do than occasionally yell at the gardeners and to share an occasional Twix with his ex-wife and current roommate.
Barely two months after Andrew was permanently sent home from work, Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex then staged their melodramatic exit, proving that the revolution will be Instagrammed. Thus another, two working HRHs bit the dust.
Then came the events of 2021 and 2022, which saw the greatest stalwarts of the Windsor Horse Show, Prince Philip and Her late Majesty, depart the earthly plane.
And so, hey presto, since 2019 the Firm has lost four of their biggest players, and today the ranks of working members of the royal family are so reduced they need to consider advertising on LinkedIn.
There are now only 11 HRHs who still punch in on the royal clock and of those, three are over the age of 86.
The end result?
Last year, Monarchy Inc undertook 30 per cent fewer engagements than pre-pandemic, the fewest notched up in one year since 1983. (Not counting, of course, the Covid and lockdown years).
So precisely when are William and Kate going to step up?
The impression they are giving at the moment is that while they focus on their big-picture projects – Earthshot, Early Years etc – they are less than willing to take on the sort of dullsville outings that have been the meat and three veg of royal life since George V was in short pants.
This month, the Telegraph reported that the 600 charities and organisations that Queen Elizabeth was patron of are currently “in limbo” as Buckingham Palace conducts a review of what the dickens to do with them.
According to the report, “Palace insiders have suggested that the King wants to retain a royal patron for as many charities as possible as he understands the value of a royal connection to such organisations”.
But that thinking unfortunately runs counter to the Waleses’ MO, which has seen them only take on a comparatively tiddly number of patronages.
While Her late Majesty had hundreds to her name – everything from the Ayrshire Cattle Society to The National Horseracing Museum to the European Brass Band Championships – and current Queen Camilla has at least 90, Kate, meanwhile, only has 25.
As Prince of Wales, Charles had more than 400 patronages; William today has 38.
Before anyone puts that down to indolence and, say, the princess wanting to spend her mornings supine on the sofa and buried in the latest Colleen Hoover, this is a conscious move. Both she and William have championed a model whereby they are much more engaged with the charities they work with, rather than turning up every few years to listlessly plant a tree or cut a ribbon.
The prince and princess have, according to the Telegraph, “made it clear that they intend to approach their new roles in their own way, focusing more on creating impact and legacy and less on ribbon-cutting appearances for appearances’ sake”.
Which is all well and good, but how to balance that with the fact that Buckingham Palace surely can’t purge hundreds and hundreds of organisations from their patronage books without suffering from serious blowback?
I suppose what lies at the heart of this situation is the tension between what is best for Team Wales and what is best for Team Crown.
Royalty, so the argument goes, demands sacrifice, and maybe today that doesn’t mean leading one’s thanes into a heroic battle but an occasional away day to Huddersfield to make nice with a few aldermen and to pretend to enjoy planting a tree.
I think in situations like this one, it’s best to ask yourself, WWTLQD? What would the late Queen do?
And I’d wager the answer would be, pretty much every time, choose another finger sandwich, scratch the closest corgi affectionately behind the ears and then get stuck in and get to work.
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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