The Duchess of Cambridge’s decision to fire her children’s royal career shot is a risky move that could be counterproductive.
Of all the years of meticulous planning that went into the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Lovely Jubbly Knees-Up Extraordinaire, all the preparation that went into the horses, fireworks, puppets, fighter jets, the CGI bear and getting Kate Moss out of the bed before noon. , there was a crucial factor that the courtiers overlooked.
The incredible power of the little kids took sugar.
During Trooping the Color, the palace party and the popular parade, the protagonists of the show were the children of the royal family, especially William and Kate, the children of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince George, the Princess Charlotte and the Prince. Lluís.
Throughout the various events, these three, aided and abetted by their cousins Tindall and Phillips, gave a lively demonstration of monkey business of a caliber that had not been seen since the nights when Princess Margaret achieved the his second bottle of gin and Al Jolson’s third record.
During a podcast appearance this week, Mike Tindall, who is married to Princess Anne’s daughter Zara, revealed that one of the reasons for the royal children’s hyperactive turn was the volume of sweets on offer.
“Louis, I just wanted to have fun. And my two are always naughty, so he’s trying to keep a lid on,” Tindal said.
“Even though there were a lot of sweets behind it, so there was a real level of sugar.”
(Clearly. No four-year-old would be so excited during an event starring Sir Cliff Richard without any stimulants.)
Still, the Jubilee was an unmitigated public relations slam dunk for Buckingham Palace, thanks in large part to the adorable brazen crossings of the Cambridge Three. Hooray! It’s time to dump her and move on.
Except, I think there was also something much darker last weekend.
Because while the monarchy unequivocally won the battle for hearts (if not minds) during the Jubilee, that success was at the expense of George, Charlotte, and Louis.
Look, so far William and Kate have introduced their children to the public and the press with incredible precision and care. The three young HRHs were like white rhinos in the Serengeti, rare and exotic creatures that we would have a fleeting and tempting vision of when Kensington Palace posted photos, taken by Kate, to commemorate their birthdays.
Everything was calculated, weighed and measured, not a little more access to outsiders than was needed to run the informal business between the Palace and the press almost a decade ago when George was a baby.
It all came out the window over the weekend.
It wasn’t a big surprise for the Palace to line up the kids (William made his Trooping carriage procession debut at the age of four), but what was a real shock was the degree to which George, Charlotte, and Louis looked like everything else. everywhere, all of a sudden.
What we were witnessing, one cheeky, cheeky image of Louis after another, was that the Cambridge children were disengaged as working members of the royal family and the initial weapon fired in their careers at the Palace.
Every time they laughed, applauded, greeted, and sang in the eyes of the world and the global media, these children were becoming public property to an unprecedented degree.
Consciously or not, what we were seeing was a rebranding exercise.
On Saturday, it was not only William and Kate who met in Cardiff for an official engagement, but also George and Charlotte.
So far William and Kate have “sold out” as a dynamic duet; during that Welsh getaway and during the Jubilee in general, what we witnessed was the reconfiguration of that double act into an eminently even more marketable family unit.
The whole world has nailed it all. And why not?
Even Prince Charles intervened and took advantage of all this Cambridge sympathy, with his Clarence House social media team putting a picture of him with Louis on his knees, writing “We hope you enjoy watching the #PlatinumJubileePageant as much as we do.! 🤩 ”
There was clearly a strategic element in all this, the Palace playing its three Cambridge ace cards with a sensational effect, the whole Jubilee backed by a certain desperation to wash the bitter taste of Megxit and Prince Andrew from the audience .
What should not be debated is what victory was right; what it certainly is is whether in the long run all this will be counterproductive and very bad.
On the one hand, now that the genius of the Cambridge kids is out of the bottle, it’s impossible to put it back on.
Having made his formal debut as a public figure, to what extent could this change the careful balance of Kensington Palace with the British press? Can William and Kate still occupy the high moral ground and insist on their children’s privacy if they are selectively willing to expose their children when it suits them?
There is also the fact that the global focus on these children has been largely marked and will only get hotter and more intense. (Fleet Street may not publish photos of George, Charlotte, and Louis taken unawares, but magazines and newspapers outside the UK, especially German and Italian tabloids, do not have this compose and often do).
Beyond that, what about the price that George, Charlotte, and Louis could pay as individuals?
The emotional and psychological demands that are made on frontline royal children in the name of the monarchy make me deeply uncomfortable.
Of all the rarities and anachronisms of royalty, one is that there is no other industry where children can get to work at the age of four and the whole world is encouraged.
We have the best in reliable sources on this front. Prince Harry has spoken twice about the acute personal cost of being forced to play a public role as a child when he was forced to walk behind his mother’s coffin when he was just 12 years old. (This is only three years older than George now).
He said in a 2017 Newsweek interview: “My mother had just died, and I had to walk a long way behind her coffin, surrounded by thousands of people watching me while millions more did so on television.
“I don’t think any child should be done under any circumstances. I don’t think it should happen today.”
The saddest thing is that I’m not so sure it wouldn’t happen after the Jubilee events.
What I can’t get my head around here is why William and Kate have accepted this dramatic change in their party line when it comes to their children. As adults, they have both made the conscious decision to devote themselves to the monarchy, but they have often talked about how much they want their children to have as normal a childhood as possible.
So why these kinds of laps?
After all these years of going to school and going to parents’ pub nights and teaching their kids the dark art of using the ATM at Waitrose?
Although we leave aside the question of motivation, there are other possible detrimental consequences to this strategy for the royal family.
Following this proven attempt to trot out tiny HRHs dressed as haunted Victorian dolls to whet the public appetite for the monarchy, they run the risk of looking like mercenaries, essentially willing to use their children to get better public approval ratings.
Possibly sacrificing emotional well-being for the queen and the country? Interestingly, this is exactly what Harry warned the world
I’m not suggesting here that any of this would have been easy for William and Kate, mind you. I have no doubt the pressure on them must be enormous to deploy their children for the royal good and as loving parents who only want the best for them, they must have to make exquisitely difficult decisions.
Here lies the horrible friction for the Duke and Duchess. The main responsibility of their daily work, to safeguard the future of the monarchy, goes completely against their main responsibility as parents, to do everything possible to protect their children.
Next month, the Commonwealth Games will begin in Birmingham with William and Kate likely to show up at their Union Jack making a gesture to the GB team. Will we also see George, Charlotte and Louis?
Mike Tindall said during the Royal Youth podcast, “It’s hard for them. They’re all young. It’s been a long time. But as all parents know, just do what it takes.”
The same seems to be true of waiting kings and queens.
Daniela Elser is a royal expert and writer with over 15 years of experience working with several of Australia’s leading media titles.