It's shocking how much harder the older Royals are working

[tatalan]

The Princess of Wales barely outworked Queen Elizabeth who died in early September after cancelling a series of engagements.

Charles and Anne look to be carrying the monarchy at present. The Earl and Countess of Wessex are grafting hard as well.

What do William and Kate spend their days doing? Surely as young energetic members of the RF, they should be pulling their weight.

Who on earth would want to be in Camilla's position, a job promotion at 75 when most people are thinking of, or actually are, retired - not for me thanks.

She had a good 50+ years of not doing very much though! I was surprised when she actually married Charles as I thought she was content to just be in the background as his partner. Much less work! But that's love for you...

Bless. Poor things! No worries about their energy bills, staff to wait on them, plenty to eat and drink, no waiting in a call queue for a non existent GP appointment, nice clothes to wear. God, it must be so bloody hard for them all. 🙄

Wow, so Kate has about 250 free days per year! I'd love that life!!

I think the concept of a "working royal" will change significantly. 10 years ago there were about 15 of them but by the time William is king, say in 20 years of Charles takes after his parents, it'll be just his family.

Plus what will happen to all the royal patronages when the patrons are gone? William and his children can't take over all of them. And what if Charlotte or Louis decide life as a working royal isn't for them? Something will have to give!

How many "working royals" were there in Queen Victoria's day? Did they patronise charities then?

Phone calls count as engagements?!?

What next? Royals exhausted from heavy day of texting??

And what's his excuse?

Yeah, I mean when you have a child under two, it is nice to spend lots of time with them and I wouldn't begrudge anyone that time, but I think it's fair to say that even with Louis at nursery/pre school this year (and he was) Catherine hasn't exactly smashed it out of the park on the work front. Maybe now she has three school age kids she will step up and find more projects - the next year is probably the first when she has kids at school Monday-Saturday and can fully commit. It's not a life I'd choose and I think it is fair to do a bit less with young kids given how long they will be working (I am working part time myself and will have to work longer to fund it out of choice).

And your point is? We also had children working up chimneys then FFS.

I don’t think any of this can be described as work in the way most people understand it. Having dressers, hairdressers, getting chauffeured to venues or onto private planes. It’s a massive pisstake to describe it as an effort, and the rewards are obscene.

No real excuse for William though - I'd think it would be fair if their hours added up to 1.5 of what the older ones did together.

Saying that, if I were Kate i'd continue to live a life of leisure. I don't think the Brits generally have a problem with it

The RF with help of it's most expensive and most influential PR machine and the press have conditioned the mind of the public so much that what would ordinarily be referred to as leisure and social events are referred to as work. Yet those who slave away in the NHS, bin men, teachers etc are not only paid pittance, they can barely afford childcare much less chauffeurs, nannies, cooks, ladies in waiting, foot men, person assistants, personal shoppers etc. These royals don't even pay tax. They own the largest amount of real estate, get free foreign holidays all expenses paid for their life time. Even the PM who's elected doesn't get 1/4 of what they do. These people see commoners as stupid. We're set to b e taxed higher, higher bills and mortgage, no funds to pay nurses, doctors, LG workers properly but ofcourse we can find money for these who spend their time socialising.
If it was "work" even the Queen would've retired at 70.

True. She's gone from Waity Katie to Sainty Katie. And before I'm jumped on for that, that's her characterisation by the press, not me!

Must be exhausting travelling to/from a venue in absolute comfort, shaking hands and making small talk for an hour or so. Once a week or so.

I don’t think what they do could ever be counted as “work” however it must be exhausting having to make small talk to fawning commoners with whom they have absolutely nothing in common 🤣

Interesting view of what working hard is OP. The RF and their press machine have done a fabulous job in convincing us how lucky we are to have them working so hard for us! You couldn't make it up.

Well said.

Haha! Reminds me of my favourite caption in the Diana biography: “As a busy princess, Diana is visited by her hairdresser two or three times a day.”

I expecting W&K genuinely feel busy – the royal machinery creates busy work around them to create the illusion of work: briefings and palace meetings and photos and phone calls as engagements and changes of clothes – you could fill whole days doing both nothing but also with every slot filled with nonsense. “What’s today, Jeeves?” “Multiple gilets arriving, ma’am, for the ‘casual in the country’ photo call for the annual Christmas card. Then hair and tiaras at 2pm ahead of the briefing for the drinks for the reception for the dinner.” “Ugh, another frantic one!”

Right. She has it made.

Yup.

As usual people just take some random data on face value and do not consider context!!!!!

that screenshot does not offer any details. The people with higher engagement figures may have done mostly phone calls from the comfort of thier own drawing room.

will and Kate are doing more overseas engagements than the older royals so will have more travelling/jet leg time, much more set up and practice etc.

we don’t know if we are comparing apples with apples or apples with pears!! We also don’t know what other non-engagement work everyone is doing.

No not as cut and dried as that. They came to east Lancashire this year and my husband passed them they were going to preston assume to get a train and he was coming from preston at about five pm so that’s not a short day, that will have been a 12 hour day at least, albeit some of it travelling. Perhaps that was an outlier of course but all their engagements aren’t five minutes down the road.

I thought they no longer had live in staff? The older two are at school and I presume Louis is at nursery part time. They don’t need a full time nanny. She probably wants to be there when they get home and when they leave for school.

Haha! Reminds me of my favourite caption in the Diana biography: “As a busy princess, Diana is visited by her hairdresser two or three times a day.”

There is a scene in The Crown where Diana is reeling off who she's permitted to speak to Andrew Morton for her biography and it's along the lines of "my hairdresser, manicurist, masseuse, astrologer, my..." and someone jokingly says "reiki practitioner?" for her to ruefully reply "my acupuncturist"!