There’s a weird schism when it comes to the royal family and vacations: The royals love to take long breaks from the business of the monarchy…but their vacation homes are pretty nasty.
Sandringham, the Queen’s Norfolk estate where Christmas is spent, looks like the setting for a Gothic horror story, while Balmoral, Her Majesty’s Scottish home, was partly modeled after a Bavarian schloss. All that forbidding gray stone and all those mock medieval towers are enough to give even the bravest of young SARs nightmares for a lifetime.
And yet, when it comes to holidays, the House of Windsor is no match. Princess Margaret used to jet off to Mustique and bask in the Caribbean sun with notorious regularity (you could probably still smell the coconut oil long after she went back to ordering whiskey in some London lounge) while the Queen Mother it was quickly bought. a holiday castle – the castle of Mey – and camped there for generous stays, away from anything so bourgeois as work.
And unfortunately, this royal tradition of holidaying like it’s a competitive sport is one that William and Kate, Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, are happily carrying out. They have taken nearly four months of vacation in the past 18 months and are currently halfway through their roughly two-month annual summer vacation.
While the Duke and Duchess head to the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham this week to wave the Union Jack and show how good they are at cheering, in a normal year, once the final Wimbledon trophy is handed out to the july, it’s time to leave the Ambre Solaire, with the duo not returning to their places until the beginning of autumn.
June was sure to be a busy month for the Cambridges this year given all the platinum jubilee stuff they had to do, but as usual, in July we’ve only seen Kate at a charity polo match and the Royal Box in Wimbledon, barely. a demonstration of real elbow grease. (Doesn’t any sort of “work” that can be done while holding a cold glass of Pimms hardly count as hard graft now?)
August, unusually, will see Kate completely disappear from the radar, usually only reappearing around mid-September.
Likewise, in 2021, Kate’s only official commitments in July involved watching tennis and football, after which she proceeded to take almost nine weeks off, meaning that since the end from June to mid-September his lack of office was essentially. activated
The same schedule also took place for William, apart from two meetings about the Earthshot prize he managed to place and a church service. Wow, but does it manage to do so much?
The couple have been to France twice in the last year or so (for Kate’s brother’s wedding and for a skiing holiday) and Jordan, not to mention spending time in Scotland and Norfolk.
There’s no getting around it: William and Kate have a holiday problem.
And, as we all know, the first step is to admit it.
The point here is that just because they can take months of the year off, and that royals traditionally have, doesn’t mean they have to.
For years, the couple and their team have focused on building the Cambridge brand, theirs as a hard-working, down-to-earth couple. Look at them, out there bravely tackling the most pressing issues of the day, like mental health and climate change, and then back home for bath time!
This is the formula that has been cooked up to try to keep the monarchy still alive. The idea seems to be to let Prince Charles be, well, Prince Charles, talking about hedgerow preservation and giving the occasional speech about the environment and his Aston Martin that runs on white wine (seriously) and the Britons will tolerate it grudgingly.
Meanwhile, alongside all this, we have William and Kate pioneering a much bolder, more engaged and more proactive version of royalty that also includes a cult of personality.
The central element of the birth of Cambridge Inc. it is the relationship and the partner’s willingness to be vulnerable. We’ve heard Kate talk about the loneliness of new motherhood and appear on a parenting podcast, while William has regularly opened up about the emotional toll his years as an air ambulance pilot took on him and his grief over the loss of his mother.
These delicate outings are not one-off, but a core part of their public persona, all about transforming them into the first senior members of the royal family to consider themselves genuinely human and in touch with the real world; who have done more than simply spy on the hoi polloi when they look at the world from the window of a golden carriage. (Of course they have one, but it’s very unwieldy for the school.)
But for all the H&M dresses Kate wears, they’re no ordinary middle-class family, no matter how many Audi vans they add to their fleet and how many times young Prince George is taught how to use the till at Waitrose .
The Duke and Duchess can take large chunks of time off whenever they want because they have full control over their schedules, apart from key events like Trooping the Color and Remembrance Day, which means they can spend a week at the beach , albeit in the Cornish Isles of Scilly, instead of his 19th century mahogany desks whenever the mood strikes.
They also don’t, like the vast majority of the world, have a very limited amount of leave to be a caring husband, and instead get to spend more quality family time, buckets and Harrods sinks in tow, whenever they want. .
But, it’s time for the Cambridges to abandon this royal advantage. They can’t have their nearly one hundred vacation days a year and still try to sell themselves as the Duke and Duchess of Relatability.
Every time William and Kate accidentally remind the world how fundamentally not normal their lives are, all the work they do the rest of the year to sell themselves as the accessible faces of the modern royal family is jeopardized.
There’s also the fact that this bad habit also serves to revive the Lazy Kate narrative that haunted her for years. Before their wedding in 2008, the Daily Mail reported that the Queen thought Kate needed to get a job.
“The Queen has admitted she has no idea what Kate actually does,” a senior aide said at the time, and that Her Majesty “thinks Kate should be working. She believes in a modern monarchy and feels very strongly that the Royals should lead by example.”
A source close to Kate said at the time: “Most are just waiting for William to come home so they can go on another holiday.” (Ouch.)
Then there’s the fact that the duo only began full-time royal duties in 2017. Diana, Princess of Wales, on the other hand, was dragged into the background and sidetracked to charm the masses in regional centers of the cities before they have even achieved everything. the wedding confetti out of her hair.
What anyone worth their salt, Walter Bagehot, knows is that the British monarchy, in the coming years, is under the greatest test since Oliver Cromwell began to have ideas. The next king is a man who is garnering lukewarm support at best, at a time when the royal house has suffered a series of body blows in recent years from which it has yet to recover, thanks to the behavior Prince Andrew’s horrifying and the seismic eruptions of Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
Things aren’t exactly looking good for the Crown, which is why they’re so dependent on William and Kate.
And yet they seem willing to gamble all their hard-earned cash to take time off from their duties with the kind of enthusiasm Margraret probably reserved for the arrival of every new twenty-something bartender at his favorite watering hole of mustique
Of course, the Duke and Duchess should be on holiday, and of course they shouldn’t have to ask their manager for leave (although the image of the 96-year-old Queen spending part of her day brightening green SAR vacation requests is fun) . But these crazy kids have to find some kind of middle ground between the extreme privilege of royalty and the image of them as ordinary, hard-working parents who only have the keys to the Tower of London. (Yes, I know, they don’t actually have them, but they sure could get their hands on them, right?)
Time for William and Kate to channel less Princess Margaret and more Princess Anne. And when it comes to the royal princess, the swimwear industry’s loss has only been the monarchy’s gain…
Daniela Elser is a royal expert and writer with over 15 years’ experience working with several of Australia’s leading media titles.