Despite being workshy, Kate and William remain incredibly popular. Photo / Getty Images
Despite being workshy, Kate and William remain incredibly popular. Photo / Getty Images
Opinion:
In the week before Christmas, there were two seemingly disparate news stories in the UK press. The first dominated headlines: Britain’s nurses launched an unprecedented strike, at a time when they have been forced to turn to food banks and to use ‘warm banks’ – places where people can go who can’t afford heating.
The second, which barely made a blip, was the annual totting up of royal work statistics.
Taking out the top spot, quelle surprise, was Princess Anne on 214 engagements, a woman who seems to be able to get a quick plaque unveiling in before most people have even contemplated a piece of toast in the morning. (Bet she’s a bran woman, myself.)
What concerns us though is the figure that Kate, Princess of Wales managed to clock up – an unimpressive 90.
Putting that number in the shade was the late Queen, who, despite reportedly fighting cancer in her final year and associated mobility problems, racked up 151.
Heck, even the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester (aged 78 and 76 respectively) did better than Kate, hitting 100 and 94.
Hear that clinking noise? That’s the ghost of Kate past. (Dear god, not the cork wedges, no!)
When the part-time Party Pieces photographer made her transition from photographing Peppa Pig party plates part-time to beginning the slow but inexorable journey towards the throne in 2011, what soon dogged both she and husband Prince William for years were accusations that they were “workshy”.
Would it come as a surprise if I told you that it was only in 2017, after six years of marriage, that the couple began full-time royal duties?
That’s because after they wed, Queen Elizabeth gave them dispensation to not take on an official royal workload straight away. The thinking was pretty sound: Give the new Duchess time to find her feet and to acclimatise to HRH-dom rather than, as had previously been standard, chucking a new Windsor wife in at the deep end and waiting to see if she would sink or swim. (Kind of like a modern day witch trial in nude hose.)
So, they lived in Anglesey, Wales where William worked as an RAF search and rescue chopper pilot and Kate did god knows what, while taking on the occasional duchessing duty.
However, even after Kate started becoming a much more ubiquitous presence on the Buckingham Palace balcony, a one-woman Philip Treacy marketing campaign if ever there was one, the numbers hardly reflect a royal really putting her shoulder to the wheel.
Sure, she did have three pregnancies, all bedevilled by the truly horrid hyperemesis gravidarum, and then three lots of maternity leave, but still, even in the years when she was neither knocked up or swaddling mewling newborn HRHs, she was hardly setting the world alight in terms of the volume of royal work she was doing.
This is far from a problem that just concerned Kate.
For example in 2015, when it turned out that the then 95-year-old Duke of Edinburgh had undertaken 250 official engagements. The younger generation? William, Kate and Prince Harry had only done 198 – combined.
That image of the then-Duke and Duchess of Cambridge as being less than enthusiastic about the gladhanding, masses-charming part of the royal gig only became more deeply rooted.
In 2015, a party for BAFTA nominees was held at Kensington Palace. Was the peak film body’s president William or Kate present, even though the shindig was held where they lived? While aides said he had a “prior commitment” a source told Vanity Fair: “There were a few sniffs about William in particular not being at the awards. It’s not like he was too busy: He had just returned from a two-week holiday to Mustique, and the party was at his palace!”
Also that year, the family moved from Wales to Anmer Hall in Norfolk, the 10-bedroom country home given to them by the late Queen (sure beats a hastily wrapped candle as a pressie). There, William began work as an air ambulance pilot.
However, in 2016 it was revealed that the Prince only worked 20-hours-a-week in that gig, with a source telling the Sun that year: “He’s hardly ever on shift … with the Duke it’s more off than on. He had at least four weeks off over Christmas, which has to be staffed the same as normal weeks.”
Speaking to the Sun at that time, a royal source said: “It was the talk of Sandringham over Christmas that he does nothing. He wanted to move to Norfolk to give him the life of the gentleman country farmer, like his friends. Everything has been set up – his pilot job, his duties, his home – so he can do this.
“Shooting, fishing, house parties at weekends and a very private life with his family away from the cameras are the order of the day.
“All his friends live this country lifestyle and so, now, does he.”
The same year, again, he came under heavy fire in the UK press for waiting six weeks into the year to getting around to undertaking a single official duty.
At the time, the Daily Mail’s Amanda Platell called him “the most reluctant – and truculent – of royals” while a headline in the Mirror asked, “What is the point of workshy Prince William?” At one point the Sun ran a headline: “Throne Idle.”
Clearly not a man willing to pay much heed to whatever Fleet Street is saying, after that scandal, he managed to get two more engagements in before he and Kate popped off for a break in the French Alps for a clearly much-needed rest.
So did William or Kate learn?
Prince William, Princess Kate and their children George, Charlotte and Louis pose for their annual Christmas card. Photo / Matt Porteous
Fast forward to Commonwealth Day in 2017 when the royal family gathered inside Westminster Abbey. The Prince was not there, instead partying in Verbier during which he was caught daggily dancing with an Australian blonde at a nightclub, while Kate was believed to be at home.
In amongst all of this, let it be noted that about $7.3 million worth of public money via the sovereign grant was used to renovate the four-storey ‘apartment’ (all 22 main rooms of it) that the family had run of at Kensington Palace which largely sat empty.
(Also, if Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex had been guilty of even a single one of these infractions or mistakes, there would be so many spittle-flecked, outraged columns written that Britain would immediately run out of paper and such would be the fury on Twitter their servers would combust.)
Now come July 2017, the announcement was made – the duo was finally succumbing to fate and would move to London to take on full-time royal roles.
Since then, the picture has dramatically changed.
Over the last five years, the pair have taken on new patronages and established legacy-defining, generational-change-creating projects in the form of the Earthshot Prize and the Early Years Foundation.
They have also increasingly been pushed on to the world stage with the couple not putting a foot wrong during their most complex tour to date, heading to Pakistan in 2019. Even this month, US President Joe Biden made time to meet with the Prince when both found themselves in Boston.
The duo have managed to build entirely new reputations as sturdy and focused, committed to their causes and the organisations they work with, along with being willing to break new working royal ground. For example, in 2019 they filmed a Christmas special with beloved British cook Mary Berry, in Apple’s Time To Walk series the Prince opened up about his mental health, and Kate spoke of the challenges of motherhood on the Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast.
That commitment has translated into pretty glowing polling with William and Kate taking out the number one and number two spots as the most popular members of the royal family in a YouGov poll as of this month.
Gone is the image of them as an indolent duo more interested in rustling up a jug of Pimms to share with Bunter and Araminta after a smashing game of tennis; now they seem like the couple who curl up in bed at night with his ‘n’ hers UN reports to read, matching highlighters in hand.
But numbers like December’s working stats pose a threat to that hard-won image, especially at the moment. The UK is in the midst of a once-in-a-generation cost-of-living crisis. As the population struggles simply to pay their bills, the royals simply cannot afford for there even to be a hint that they aren’t dutifully plugging away.
They need to earn all those sovereign grant millions – before the masses get the urge to go all Robespierre on them. (Especially when you consider that, according to my calculations, William and Kate currently pull in the same amount of money, courtesy of profits from the Duchy of Cornwall, in about 12 hours as a British nurse earns in an entire year.)
Against this political, social and PR backdrop, even a hint of the return of the dreaded ‘w’ label – workshy – is a dangerous business indeed.
And if the Waleses really want to get even a taste of the sort of hard work millions of Brits do every day, I bet there are quite a few hospitals or food banks that are in desperate need of a helping hand right about now.
Daniela Elser is a writer and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
