Daniela Elser: real photo exposes the new fight of Duchess Kate

COMMENTARY

A quick raise of hands, please: Who thinks a 38-year-old is still young?

It’s a question I’ve been pondering after spending too much time looking at the newly released photos of the Queen and her extended family. Taken at Windsor Castle, they mark the end of the three-day royal train journey of appreciation to the nation of William and Kate, Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

These shots have angered royal observers because they are the first images of the 94-year-old monarch with her family since before the Covid pandemic began.

Since each royal household will spend the festive season in their own vast manor houses, this is the closest the world will get to a shot of joyous festive union from the Windsor family for quite some time. (Perhaps the fact that Philip was not in the photo can be attributed to the fact that they simply couldn’t find him in the thousand-odd rooms of the castle …)

As far as official real snapshots go, it’s pretty bland. No caresses, lots of grinning smiles, fancy coats, and a kind of better-behaved stiffness reminiscent of school picture day.

That is until you realize this about taking: this is it.

After the Prince Andrew debacle and after Megxit, this is the royal family now and they are a pale, stale, aging bunch. These are the only high-level RHS left and their job is to ensure the monarchy endures into the 21st century. (The Queen’s cousins ​​Princess Alexandra, the Duke of Kent, and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, are also official members of the royal family, but does anyone really care?)

Forget about thriving, they just need to survive.

And based on these new images, so devoid of any kind of dynamism, so lifeless and nondescript, I would suggest that it will be an uphill battle, both in practice and in image.

Currently, the average age of a working HRH is just under 68, which is two years older than retirement age in Great Britain. At 38 years old, William and Kate are the representative young guns of the royal battalion.

When Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex left Westminster Abbey in early March this year to begin their new celebrity-adjacent lives in the United States, they left with them the most electrifying “hire” of the royal family from the first cast of Lady Diana Spencer. his famous deer eyes towards the Prince of Wales.

Then-Meghan Markle, actress, blogger and activist, brought with her an innate life-giving force that energized the royal family brand. By lending his youthful verve and California freshness to the Windsor house, he made the very idea of ​​a hereditary monarchy seem not only interesting but relevant to younger generations.

It was an image upgrade for the palace that they would never have managed to achieve on their own and the Duchess of Sussex’s arrival on the balcony of Buckingham Palace was such an exquisite branding stroke that it would make both Saatchis cry with joy. .

And now? The excitement is gone and in the void created by their departure, the inherent awkwardness of the remaining royal “troops” has become excruciatingly obvious.

This situation has been dramatically aggravated by the pandemic. Gone are the glamorous tours, state dinners and diplomatic receptions this year that would have allowed the Queen and Kate to accumulate priceless diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds and create some of that quintessential royal stardust.

Without pomp, without all the frivolity and decadence and all the gold; Without the grand military displays and the spectacle that stops the moments of majesty and the trumpets and the liveried lackey, the House of Windsor has been stripped away and revealed as just a bunch of aging aristocrats.

The magic is gone. And that is a very dangerous place for the palace.

This is all even worse news for William and Kate because it will largely fall on their shoulders covered by Marks and Spencer to have to try to find a way to fix this looming disaster and try to relive some of the glare.

Prince Charles may have long been an advocate for a more economical and slimmer version of the monarchy, which has meant that William’s cousins, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, essentially stepped out of the box and out of the picture. official real life, but the wisdom of that model seems more and more. trembling.

The current active members of the royal family make more than 2000 commitments each year and have 2,862 official sponsorships. In 10 years from now, when Charles and Camilla are 80 years old (and he’s most likely on the throne), the burden of fulfilling this workload will fall on just four people: the Cambridges and Sophie and Edward. .

Kate might have taken a lot of hits from the press for her supposed laziness in the early years of her marriage, but fate will have it, she now faces decades of arduous service.

The biggest consequence of this aging royal workforce is that it’s terrible for your brand.

The photos taken this week in Windsor practically reek of impassive reliability, which is an admirable quality when running an institution with a thousand-year history and it comes to longevity. But it is also very, very sad.

That’s important because, along with all that duty and responsibility, the royal family also needs to cultivate and maintain the public’s attention. For them to survive as an institution, we, the people of the Commonwealth and the United Kingdom, must want them to remain in their palaces and for that we must have a certain level of interest in them.

One of the few things that the most recent season of The Crown got right was the unrivaled and unprecedented reaction that Diana, Princess of Wales elicited, wherever she went in the world. When she married Charles, she dazzled, dazzled, and wowed audiences, and in turn, the world became deeply involved in the royal family.

We care about them.

So let me ask you: How much are the British, and we the Commonwealth, concerned about the SARs in this week’s Windsor photos?

I would bet that the biggest threat to the monarchy is not a great republican wave, but a much more insidious and progressive passivity and indifference towards most of them.

The palace needs the public to accept the concept of monarchy, which is why any growing disinterest is so dangerous for them.

And this is where things get particularly difficult for Kate, because it will be up to her and William to revive our sagging interest in the royal family, a challenge that will only get much steeper when the beloved Queen passes away and the King Carlos III takes the throne.

You could also face the possibility of having to put three children “to work” much sooner than you’d like. Normally, royal children are introduced to royal work life very gradually, slowly building their own solo commitments. William didn’t make his first official independent outing until he was 23, a luxury his son, Prince George, may not enjoy.

To shore up public support for the royal family, they will need all hands on the royal deck and the palace will have to display its most seductive and lovable assets, namely the Cambridge Three.

For Kate, who from day one has tried to instill as much normality as possible in her family’s life, it would surely not be an exciting prospect.

The 38-year-old has barely been wrong since she joined the royal family nearly a decade ago, but sometimes I wonder if the greatest legacy of this era will be that Kate and Meghan’s stories will inadvertently nullify a time. and for everyone, any fairy tale notion of what it means to be a princess (or duchess).

Ask the real women left standing in the winter cold for a photo this week.