Kate Middleton shuts down Prince Harry with one sentence
Kate Middleton managed to out do Prince Harry without even trying when she answered a very pertinent question.
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It’s a rare event that can get the royal family, en masse and looking pleased-as-heavily-laced punch, out and about. You know, like when Harrods has a two-for-one sale on decent Bordeaux or it’s the will-reading of a loaded German Grand Duke cousin or, of course, the Chelsea Flower Show, the apogee of HRH-attracting engagements.
With the annual garden-a-thon back, the preview day managed to draw more HRHs than to a free lunch at Wiltons, including King Charles and Queen Camilla, Princess Alexandra, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester and Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. (Fun fact: There is still a photo of Queen Victoria, given to the Wiltons by Her Majesty, in the downstairs’ loo.)
A surprise addition to the titled throng at the flower show was Kate, the Princess of Wales who turned up dressed like she was popping back to the 1950s to run a cricket tea in the Home Counties. (I despair sometimes.)
But still she had small children to charm and a point to make about how good nature is for small people; small children who ask uncomfortable questions like what being a bona fide princess means.
Asked by one child what the royal family does (an excellent, pertinent point Republic head Graham Smith has been charging about the UK demanding) the princess replied: “You have to work hard, but you know the best thing about it is meeting kiddies like you.”
She also added: “They help support all the different people in the country, showcase all the amazing work being done and look after everyone.”
Saron Fikremariam, 11, later told reporters: “I asked her what’s the first thing she is going to do when she becomes Queen and she said she is going to help kids.”
(And here I was thinking the first thing that Kate was going to do when she got a crown was push the PM to introduce tax breaks on wrap dresses and turn the Buckingham Palace basement into an outpost of her and Prince William’s 20-something haunt Bouji’s.)
But still, the point Kate was making was this: If you are so lucky to have a title and the Keeper of the Privy Purse on speed dial, your job is to highlight other people’s achievements and to help those less fortunate which is absolutely everyone aside from oddball billionaires with a Freudian thing for rockets.
And that right there is a lesson that Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and possible owner of California’s most well-used Xbox should be paying attention to.
He might have traded ever having to go to the Chelsea Flower Show and having to pretend to care about dahlias for weeknight nigiri sessions with rom-com royalty in Montecito, but Kate’s message still applies to him.
When Harry published his tell-all Spare, there were only three words on the cover and two of those were his royal title.
When his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex picked up her award for being a top notch feminist last week it was with her married name slapped all over everything. (How bloody powerful would it have been if she had fronted up as Meghan Markle?)
My point is, the Sussexes still clearly want to be known by their royal titles and defined by their adjacency to the throne, a fact that may or may not have something to do with the sound of cash registers ringing in the background.
Therefore, so long as they are self-identifying as royal then does it not also hold they should be holding themselves to the same standards of service and do-goodery?
Except the Sussexes’ circa 2023 seem much better at, and more interested in, promoting themselves or fighting their own pet fights than setting the charity world on fire.
In the last six months, Archewell Foundation has been tootling away in the background doing impressive work but Harry and Meghan themselves have only appeared themselves, in photos and video, on four occasions.
That only just beats the number of awards – three – that the couple have individually or together collected in the same time frame. (There was the RFK Ripple of Hope Award, Meghan’s Woman of Vision award and this week she will collect a Gracie Award for her podcast Archetypes.)
Those numbers just don’t quite add up.
In 2021, the Sussexes infamously put out a statement pointing out that “service is universal” which it definitely is. But you have to actually do the service and all the boring bits that entails and not just talk about it.
When the duke and duchess threw off the royal bridle the world was their charitable oyster. They could go anywhere, do anything and be as loud and as passionate as their values and Wi-Fi dictated. While the pandemic may very well have clipped their wings, still, they have had carte blanche to be as audacious, creative and ambitious in their humanitarian work as they fancy.
Except, unlike Harry’s near-sainted mother Diana, Princess of Wales who travelled to former war zones, walked through a landmine strewn field – twice – and very publicly hugged AIDS sufferers at a time of incredible fear and prejudice, the Sussexes aren’t shattering any taboos or shaking things up with delicious brazenness.
They are not delivering a masterclass in modern philanthropy or letting all their untapped potential shine.
Instead Harry and Meghan’s Archewell Foundation seems to put out statements on their website like a regional netball team posting match updates, making about the same amount of noise in the press.
Go through the Archewell Foundation’s news section, a soporific exercise if ever there was one, and you will see that so far this year the Foundation has helped beautify a charity health centre, put out a few updates about charities that the Sussexes’ have supported since their palace days, helped clean-up up a stretch of the Los Angeles river, talked about their “support” of organisations helping in earthquake-stricken Turkey (no monetary value given) and Meghan has contributed a cake recipe to a charity cookbook.
There is not a single outing in all of this that is not simply a Stateside version of what the royal family has been doing back in Blighty.
The duke and duchess have themselves only appeared either in a video or in photos in conjunction with their charity work on four occasions in the last six months: A piece Harry co-wrote about his conservation trip to Africa; a video he did promoting nominations for the WellChild Awards; photos of Meghan visiting an organisation that helps pregnant women facing homelessness released on International Women’s Day and their joint outing in May when they took a snapper with them to photograph them talking to a local youth group for Mental Health Awareness Month. (Which coincidentally was nearly identical to what Kate was doing back in the UK.)
That’s hardly the sort of charity workload that will be shaking any paradigms or changing the world any time soon.
Now of course, Harry and Meghan may very well be working all the hours of the day behind the scenes but has the world seen the fruits of this labour? Do they seem poised to dazzle and set the humanitarian world on its head?
Exactly.
Circa 2023, Archewell is not some world-beating, rule-breaking charity but seems more like a colour-by-numbers exercise which is largely indistinguishable from the 1001 other well-meaning celebrity-run foundations.
Since the publication of Spare in January, by far and away the biggest waves that the Sussexes have made were not the result of them, say, visiting a refugee camp in Lebanon or travelling to a Pacific Island only years away from being swamped by rising sea levels. No, it came when they put out what looks like an over-egged statement about a ‘paparazzi chase.’
Here’s the thing: They might have oodles and oodles of free time going forward given that no new Netflix or Spotify or Penguin Random House projects have been announced for the couple.
And if they need any suggestions, all they have to do is just buzz his aunt Sophie, the Duchess of Edinburgh who has, in the last few years, managed to visit more former war zones to address sexual violence in conflict than collect awards for the same.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles
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