There is a strong argument to be made that the royal family has always been in the entertainment business.
What is a politically toothless monarchy after all, having centuries ago relinquished any real power so they could spend their days ogling orange sellers and collecting horses and jetting off to Mustique to hollowly sip whiskey if not a very elaborate bit of state theatre?
In 2021, Kate, the Princess of Wales formalized this connection between Crown Inc. and show biz when she staged, for the very first time, a Christmas carol concert at Westminster Abbey, which has now become an annual event.
This week, the princess appeared in the Court Circular, the official record of royal activities, for the second time since announcing she had finished chemotherapy, with a planning meeting for this year’s carol-belting spectacular. (Someone remember to reserve those storybook reindeer again).
This is not what it looks like.
The most obvious interpretation of this meeting was that it is a nice, clear sign that the princess is on the road back to normal after a year that has up-ended the monarchy and dumped it on its soft head. But I’m not sure that this straightforward reading is correct.
Over the years, we’ve been to normal, bought the T-shirt and Instagrammed it to hell, however, we may never go back there.
In recent days, signs have emerged that Kate and normal might have parted ways for good and what could await us in 2025 is a whole new, updated, rejiggered and reworked normal that looks nothing like old times.
It goes without saying that with this week’s Court Circular news, clearly the princess appears to be on the up and up. Wonderful stuff.
But even if her “bad days”, as she herself put it back in June, are hopefully waning, any assumption that at some point things will click back into the comfortably typical and predictable, into how things were BC – before cancer – could be just magical thinking.
What comes next for the 42-year-old could see her public appearances remain at a fraction of what they used to be, with no foreseeable return to anywhere near the degree of public visibility and level of real world engagements we have been used to.
For more than a decade, the mother-of-three stuck to a pretty standard issue royal template. (Sold in the Buckingham Palace gift shop one aisle over from the reproduced crystal versions of Queen Camilla’s jewelry, truly, and the tea bags).
There were the big tent pole royal events, your Trooping the Colors, your Ascots, interspersed with regular bursts of engagements tied to her own chosen causes, a preschool here, a maternity ward there.
There were tiaras and hats and horses and babies and the military. All the main royal high notes were hit with perfect, repeated pitch. (Sepia glasses at the ready).
Then came cancer’s malignant invasion of her world and this year has seen the princess disappear from public life aside from two occasions – Trooping the Color and Wimbledon – as she underwent treatment.
We understood. We waited. We were patient. Kate needed time and space and the world, aside from the most poisonous corners of Twitter, gave it to her.
Underpinning all of this was the presumption that this was only temporary. She’d be back, like the Terminator of Tunbridge Wells.
But what if we were wrong? Let’s consider what we actually do know about what the next few months hold for Kate, a handful of actual facts so small you could fit in one of her interminable, thankfully now decommissioned, clutch bags. (Shudder).
The princess has indicated that she hopes to attend the Remembrance service at the Cenotaph in November and then her December carol service.
She is also, according to the Telegraph, “expected to hold a small number of other engagements over the coming months” – however, these “will not be announced far in advance, in case she needs to cancel for health reasons.”
What has become apparent this year is a covert redirection of the Prince and Princess of Wales’ energies and a pronounced shift in their communications strategy.
While we have obviously seen much, much less of Kate this year, we have also never had a year where she has so frequently and so directly communicated with us, the rank and file.
In just the last six months, she has recorded two lengthy videos, commissioned a new portrait, penned an unheard of personal statement and put out several cause-related social media messages finished with the flourish of her C sign-off.
This could well be the clearest indication of how things, going forward, could play out.
That is, we could much more regularly see her popping up in feeds and served up by the algorithm, with the princess more frequently speaking directly to the world and harnessing the power of Mark Zuckerberg’s digital demon spawn to promote her causes and to communicate with the world.
In this scenario, there would still be some real world outings in Kate’s program, the sort that require a princess to get a nice blow dry and to bust out only the latest and brightest in burgundy H & M blazers for a visit to a nursery in Newcastle.
But what we could also be seeing, as her in-person engagements drop off, is a marked spike in her social media presence.
We could see far more offerings like not only her cancer-related videos, but also like the nearly two-minute, polished and professional clip put out by Kate’s office last December of she and her three young children visiting a baby bank.
Such a handy twofer. With that video, Kensington Palace was able to simultaneously highlight a deserving organization’s amazing work while indulging in some really top-notch Wales branding. Call it caring done for public, social media consumption.
And the interesting thing is that this brings us back to where we started – the monarchy as theatre. Royalty repackaged into readily digestible entertainment.
All the royal world’s a stage, and the royals are our players – with the occasional walk-on part played by oddly docile reindeers.
