Meghan Markle’s secret parting gift to Kate Middleton

One particular opportunity the Duchess of Sussex offered up years ago has been a game changer for the Princess of Wales.

COMMENT

There’s an epic, deliciously ridiculous story to be written about royal gift-giving. Henry III was presented with a polar bear, which was kept at the Tower and would be taken for swims in the Thames; he and Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were all given elephants that were lackadaisically plonked in London parks; and King Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales were sent a mahogany toilet mirror by the people of Canada for their wedding.

(Australia? We posted the ‘happy’ couple 20 handcrafted silver platters, which I’m guessing no one wanted in the divorce and are now scattered through Home Counties Oxfam charity shops in the £1 bins.)

And for years it looked like there was no part in this particular tale for Kate, the Princess of Wales and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, two women brought together by marriage, circumstance and a higher power with a4 sense of humour.

According to Finding Freedom, in January 2017, Meghan gave Kate a Smythson notebook for her birthday and to ‘help break the ice’.

Nice and all but songs are not written about such munificence.

Kate and Meghan during the women's singles final on day twelve of the 2019 Wimbledon Championships. Picture: Ben Curtis / POOL / AFPE

But, this week it became clear that Meghan, did in fact, leave her sister-in-law (and William, the Prince of Wales) a genuinely life-changing gift when the cataclysm of Megxit hit the monarchy like a category five hurricane full of sharks. (Royal Sharknado is the sequel our beleaguered, troubled world needs oh-so-badly right now.)

For proof of this priceless pressie let us mosey on over to Instagram Reels where the @princeandprincessofwales account has been chug-chug-chugging along, putting out content like a hashtagging sweatshop about William’s recent trip to Singapore for the Earthshot Prize.

Based on the powerful fact that I can use the calculator app on my phone (and people say journalism is dying) I can tell you that Reels of the prince’s Southeast Asian foray last week have racked up more than 15 million views.

Throw in Kate’s debut trip also last week as the newly installed Colonel-in-Chief of the Queen’s Dragoon Guards, and that number is close to 17 million views at the time of writing.

That’s more than four times the combined circulation (3.6 million copies) of the UK’s top ten newspapers, combined.

And for this incredible feat, for this degree of exposure and Insta success, William and Kate have one person to thank, one person they should be sending an extravagant arrangement of rare hothouse orchids or a bottle of the 2010 Chateau Latour or the deeds to one of those rocky Cornish outcrops they own: The Duchess of Sussex.

The only reason that William and Kate have found their feet and are currently killing it in the land of the influencer is because the duchess showed them the way.

When Meghan pitched up to do some high-level duchess-ing, when she came the HRH of Hugs in 2018, she brought with her not only a trite copy of Oh The Places You’ll Go and enough echinacea to knock out a horse, but an innate understanding of the power of, and natural talent for, this newfangled thingame called social media.

When it came time for the former Suits actress to shutter her Instagram account in January 2018, she had around two million followers.

Meghan Markle knew the power of social media and harnessed it. Picture: Instagram

In 2019 she and Harry split off their charity endeavours and office from the Waleses (or as they were formerly known, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge) and that meant hiring their own staff, including a social media manager in the form of the savvy David Watkins.

The newly enshrined @SussexRoyal, from its very first post, was an entirely different beast from the dry toast posts coming from the other royal accounts. From day dot, there was the signature Sussex blue and a personal touch, their first offering signed “Harry & Meghan”.

On that very day, the Sussexes hit the one million follower mark in under six hours, setting a new world record for the time.

Then came the big bang of Megxit in January 2020, thus necessitating the Sussexes shuttering a few months later of their Buckingham Palace office. Watkins, unlike some other Sussex staffers, did not suddenly themselves scrolling through LinkedIn but was absorbed by Operation Wales.

Transformative and game-changing doesn’t even begin to cut it.

The last few years has seen an extraordinary shift in William and Kate’s posts, from polite posed shots to their YouTube and Instagram accounts this week posting what just might be the first video ever of a future King and Queen in their cossies and swimming. (Though what I would give for some Cinema Pathé footage of Queen Alexandra paddling about in a neck-to-knee number in the waters of Norfolk …)

What has quietly been going on in Kensington Palace is nothing short of a revolutionary paradigm shift in the way that prince and princess communicate with the world.

For decades, if not nearly a century, a working member of the royal family would put on a nice hat, head out to do some good work (as Queen Mary said of being a member of the royal family, “We are never tired and we all love hospitals”) and then the press would duly write some words about said wondrous royal benediction.

The arrival of radio and TV didn’t change this model much, except that occasionally the Windsors would attempt to do something normal and middle-class for the odd Sunday night special or 6pm nightly news spot like barbecuing sausages.

The arrival of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube might have presented the Crown Inc. with an unprecedented means of directly speaking to the masses but they never quite seemed comfortable with it or in any way seemed to twig the potential.

The royals no longer just don hats to open hospitals … although they still do that. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

The dawn of social media saw the various royal outposts, King Charles and Queen Camilla’s Clarence House, the Waleses’ Kensington Palace and Her late Majesty’s Monarchy HQ aka Buckingham Palace, all dutifully start to put out updates about tree-plantings and ribbon cuttings and the occasional sweet photo.

And then came Meghan who was to Instagram what Stradivarius was to violins. The duchess created a new, largely visual, vocabulary to connect with The People, creating a sense of intimacy and personal connection that worked like an absolute charm.

While the Sussexes’ royal journey might have come to a dramatic, chippy close in 2020, what the duchess had set in train was a new social media compact with Brits (and the world) that the Waleses’ adopted with gusto.

Today, it’s become their calling card.

The perfect example of just how significantly things have changed, let’s go back to 2016 when they marked five years of wedded bliss and sharing a Netflix login by putting out an official portrait. Looking at it now, it just seems ridiculous and laughable. Here are William and Kate looking like two Conservative Party candidates who are campaigning on a platform of raising the legal drinking age and instituting hessian underwear. They look so staid, so fuddy-duddy and so anally-retentive that Freud would have not known where to start.

Lovely thank you card received from TRH The Duke & Duchess of Cambridge for their 5th Wedding anniversary pic.twitter.com/YXKpytnZvC

— 📸 Paul Ratcliffe 📸 (@RoyaltybyPaul) May 25, 2016

Only five years later, when they marked their tenth anniversary in 2021, the couple instead hired renowned videographer Will Warr to shoot a high-sheen, atmospheric home movie of them with all the production values of an HBO series and which looked more like a commercial for a mid-priced family sedan than dry royal missive. We had gone from Kate done up in a suit so painfully prim that Margaret Thatcher would have approved of it, to her in jeans running around their Norfolk garden.

The numbers prove this has worked like a charm. Back in 2019, when @SussexRoyal was setting the pace, the Waleses’ Instagram account had seven million followers. Now they have just shy of 15 million followers on Instagram and 654,000 on YouTube.

Viva la revolution!

These days, swiftly on the heels of each and every Wales outing, comes a peppy post and generally a video too about whatever they have been up to.

This isn’t some ‘ooh how naiiice’ accoutrement but is a fundamental part of the survival plan of the monarchy. The crown will only last if it is seen as an institution that is relevant and useful to modern Britain (and the Commonwealth) and for that to happen, people need to know what they are doing and how they are helping.

Now, not only the Prince and Princess of Wales but also the King and Queen can do that by pumping out posts and videos detailing their good works with all the enthusiasm and digital nous of a minor Jenner.

Think of this as the direct-to-consumer model of monarchy.

And this just might be Meghan’s greatest royal legacy. I somehow doubt William and Kate would be enjoying their current social media success if it wasn’t for the Duchess of Sussex showing them the way.

The Smythson notebook was sweet but this? The Duchess of Sussex might ultimately end up having helped save the royal day.

Daniela Elser is writer, editor and royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.