Kate the Princess of Wales now calling the shots and being listened to by The Firm

As the wife of one future king and mother of another, the Princess of Wales has long been one of the most pivotal members of the royal family. Yet the coronation of King Charles III appears to have strengthened Kate’s role within “The Firm” in ways many would never have imagined. For years the mother of three, 41, was treated by the palace powers-that-be as Prince William’s “plus one” — a royal WAG (wife and girlfriend), largely to be seen but not heard. The accession, however, appears to have changed all that. Now elevated to a queen-in-waiting, it seems the Princess of Wales is calling the shots and finally being listened to. Take the prominent placement of her parents Michael and Carole Middleton, her sister Pippa and brother James in Westminster Abbeyon Saturday. The slimmed-down guest list meant many of the King’s closest friends missed out on a coveted invitation, including Lady Pamela Hicks, who is one of only two surviving bridesmaids from the late Queen and Prince Philip’s wedding in 1947. There was only room for two members of the King’s maternal grandmother’s family, Sir Simon and Lady Caroline Bowes Lyon, and only one representative of the Mountbatten clan, Countess Mountbatten. Yet the inclusion of all four Middletons (albeit without allowing Pippa, 39, and James, 36, to bring their spouses), and seating them just six rows behind the royals left little doubt over the Princess of Wales’ growing influence. It is understood that Kate requested extra invitations for members of her team — and was given them, despite the pressure on numbers. That never used to happen, apparently. The change is not just down to the Princess’ advancement up the palace pecking order, but also a reflection of the central role she is playing in helping to modernise the monarchy. Or perhaps that should be “Middletonise”. By her own admission, Kate enjoyed a “very happy childhood”, describing herself as coming “from a very strong family” with parents who were “hugely dedicated to us”. She is trying to recreate that for her own children, Prince George, nine, Princess Charlotte, eight, and Prince Louis, five. Family first That hands-on approach to royal parenting, combined with a willingness to put her adorable brood front and centre of major royal occasions, is helping to make the monarchy more relatable than it has ever been. Gone are the days of heirs and spares being brought up on the nursery floor: on Monday they were out with the Scouts, digging holes, drilling in screws and eating hamburgers. Kate’s maternal approach, especially on walkabouts — as evidenced by her comforting a crying child in Windsor on Sunday — could not come at a better time with young people increasingly asking themselves whether the institution is relevant to them. The latest YouGov polling shows attitudes differ dramatically by age, with young Britons far less likely to support keeping the royals than their elders. While backing for the Crown stands at 79 per cent to 15 per cent among the over-65s, the youngest Britons are split with only 36 per cent wanting to keep the monarchy compared to 40 per cent who want to have an elected head of state. It is therefore the younger generation who are key to maintaining popular support, and the Princess who, along with her husband, is carefully preparing them for their future role. Little wonder then that the Middletons were given such good seats — Kate couldn’t do it without their help and guidance. Another reason why the Princess of Wales is being taken more seriously is because of the positive influence she has on Prince William. Both he and the King have short tempers, and just as the Queen helps to soothe and calm her husband — think Fountainpengate — Kate has a similar effect on the heir to the throne, 40. Citing the example of the Oprah Winfrey interview, when the Duchess of Sussex alleged that a member of the royal family had speculated about the colour of her unborn son’s skin, an insider revealed: “The way the princess handled it all was really quite impressive. “Meghan had also thrown her under a bus over the bridesmaids dress row but her attitude was very much, ‘I think that’s the least of our worries’. She can keep a cool head when all about her are losing theirs.” Which perhaps explains why it was Kate who tried to broker peace between Prince William and Prince Harry at the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral a month later, albeit unsuccessfully. She is thought to have had a similarly sanguine reaction to Spare, in which her brother-in-law suggested she had encouraged him to dress as a nazi to a fancy dress party, been “reluctant” to lend Meghan her lip gloss and baulked at the idea of discussing her pregnancy hormones. “Of course she’ll know what’s been said but she won’t have read any of the coverage,” added the source. “She tries to stay well away from all that stuff.” A level-headed conflict avoider who never puts a foot wrong? With comparisons to Queen Elizabeth II unavoidable, it is hardly surprising that the Princess of Wales is quietly emerging as the power behind the throne. All about the Waleses But as Kate cements herself as pillar of strength at the palace and the unqualified success of the coronation weekend, an awkward truth has now started to occupy the minds of the image-makers in the royal household. Assuming the King and Queen enjoy the sort of robust health of their predecessors, there may not be another major royal occasion for 20 years or more. In the past, the monarchy has been able to rely on births, marriages, jubilees and coronations to top up their popularity every decade or so, but we are now entering potentially the longest period in our history without any of them. The Prince and Princess of Wales are not expected to have any more children. Prince George is only nine, meaning it might be two decades or more before he is ready to marry. Courtiers are already talking about “the long haul” of a reign uninterrupted by setpiece events. Trooping the Colour might be a welcome opportunity to polish the armour once a year, but it certainly does not attract a TV audience measured in the billions, nor does it merit a street party. And as they ponder the question of how to keep the country, and the rest of the world, interested and engaged in the royal family, one name looms large in their conversations: Prince William. The Prince of Wales and his family will be crucial to the success or otherwise of the next chapter in the history of the monarchy. The King and Queen will be 75 and 76 this year, meaning they will increasingly rely on the Waleses to do the heavy lifting, particularly when it comes to long-haul foreign tours. It will mean a significant step up in their workload. William and Kate have not carried out a major foreign tour since March 2022 and are not expected to do the next one until next spring — a gap of two years. If they are to follow the example of the King when he was Prince of Wales, they will be expected to complete at least two big tours a year. Last year the Prince of Wales carried out 126 official engagements in total, compared with the Princess Royal’s 214 and the King’s 181, meaning there is plenty of scope for increasing his workload. The good news is that William and Kate have a good springboard from which to launch the next phase of their royal life. Crowds have mobbed them wherever they have popped up over the coronation weekend. The Prince made a pitch-perfect speech in praise of his father at the Coronation Concert on Sunday night. They have three children who have rapidly become the nation’s darlings. “All of the focus had been on the coronation, but there is an opportunity now to really think about the longer term,” said one royal source. “On the domestic front, the Prince and Princess want to make sure they leave a legacy wherever they visit, and internationally there has been a real evolution of the Prince as an international statesman.” Flying the flag Aides of the Prince point to his visit to Poland in March, when he came within a few miles of the Ukrainian border and thanked British soldiers for “defending our freedoms”, as evidence of his willingness to engage with geopolitical events, and say we will see more of this in the future. The Prince clearly realises that his job is to make the monarchy relevant to younger people, who are unlikely to engage with an institution if it sits on its hands over issues that are important to them, like the war in Ukraine. To that end he has beefed up his social media operation, posting slick videos on Instagram that rack up millions of views. Within hours of the end of the Coronation Concert the Prince and Princess of Wales’ Instagram account had posted a snappily edited highlights package with slow-motion shots of the Wales family arriving, together with clips of the Prince making his speech, interspersed with flag-waving crowd shots. It is well on the way to passing 10 million views, while a behind-the-scenes video shot on Coronation day has already racked up more than 20 million views. They kept it up with another glossy package on Monday after their outing for The Big Help Out. The Waleses can feel rightly pleased with their thoroughly modern approach to appealing to the masses, but there could yet be tension between them and the King over some of the more traditional ways of representing the royal family. The Prince and Princess are fiercely protective of their family time, driving their children to school every day and minimising the amount of time they spend apart from them. Kensington Palace talks of “quality not quantity” in royal engagements, suggesting the couple will not be upping their workload significantly. Nor are they willing to commit at this stage to doing the same number of foreign tours that the King has been used to carrying out. One royal source said there was no “tick box” method of determining overseas visits and that the couple would not necessarily follow the “template” set down by the King but were “very keen to do things their own way”. That could cause problems if the Foreign Office is unable to fill the number of overseas tour slots it wants to cover off. An ally of the King also suggested that he would want William and Kate to be “the international arm of his deployment” and would “expect them to get out and cover the ground abroad”. However, recent events have sparked some debate over the purpose of foreign tours and what they should look like. While the royal family still get a fanatical welcome in many countries — such as Germany, where the King made his first visit as monarch — they may need to alter the focus of visits to some former colonies. One source who has worked with the King in the past said: “The notion of the travelling royals has changed. “In some places they have become a cypher for every bad thing the country has done in the past, and they are getting caught up in protests about slavery, or about the way Indigenous populations have been treated. “If tours end up drawing more negative attention than positive, why are they doing them? At the moment the palaces don’t know the answer.” This is less of a problem for the King, because there is a certain excitement, as well as deference, that comes with state visits. But Prince William is not a head of state, and so prime ministers and republicans in Commonwealth realms feel freer to use his presence to vent their grievances. When the Prince and Princess visited the Caribbean in 2022, they faced demands in the Bahamas to issue “a full and formal apology for (the royal family’s) crimes against humanity”, while the Jamaican Prime Minister told them the country would be “moving on” to become a republic and in Belize they were confronted with protests about a land dispute involving a charity of which the Prince is patron. They have not carried out an overseas tour since. The Foreign Office and the royal household are still puzzling over what they can do to avoid a repeat. “It’s certainly not going to be just going down a street and waving,” said one source. Keeping the royal family relevant in the modern world, then, is a long game that will require careful planning. Prince William will no doubt have his own thoughts on how things should be done — but having sworn in front of the watching world to be his father’s “liege man of life and limb”, he might just have to do as he is told.

Kate the Princess of Wales now calling the shots and being listened to by The Firm

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