Isla Campbell on the seven-second handshake, the planted child with flowers, and the architecture of an event that pretends to have no architecture
I have, in fourteen years of covering the Royal Family for one outlet or another, watched approximately three hundred royal walkabouts. I can now tell you, with some confidence, that the average royal handshake takes between seven and nine seconds. Building on my earlier dispatches at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, I want to write today about the most carefully engineered form of spontaneity in British public life.
The Anatomy of the Walkabout
The royal walkabout looks, to the public watching it on the news at six, like an organic human encounter. The royal walks down a line of cheering well-wishers. The royal stops, occasionally, to shake a hand or accept a posy. The royal exchanges, with each well-wisher, a brief smiling word of which the camera catches none of the audio. The royal moves on. It is, on screen, a portrait of accessible monarchy. It is, in fact, an event that has been engineered to within an inch of its life.
The crowd at a royal walkabout is, I should say, real. The well-wishers have, in the substantial majority of cases, not been planted. They are, in the substantial majority of cases, members of the public who have stood for two or three hours in the cold to be in that line. According to The Evening Standard, recent reporting has documented the substantial public appetite that continues to greet royal engagements, particularly in the regions outside London where royal visits remain comparatively rare.
The Engineering
The engineering is in the route. It is in the timing. It is in the position of the press pen, which is calibrated to give the photographers a clean shot of the royal at a series of pre-determined points, against a series of pre-determined backdrops, in a sequence that will, when edited together, produce the desired five-second clip for the evening news. It is, above all, in the human staffing. There is, on every walkabout, a Buckingham Palace official whose entire job is to keep the royal moving at a pace that is fast enough to cover the route in the allotted time but slow enough to allow each well-wisher their seven-to-nine-second moment.
The official is, in the typical case, a woman in her forties wearing a sensible skirt suit and an earpiece. She does not appear in any photograph. She is, professionally, the most invisible person on the scene. She is also, structurally, the most important person on the scene, because if she does her job badly, the walkabout overruns by twelve minutes and the royal is late for the lunch with the Lord Lieutenant, which is, in royal-engagement terms, a small disaster.
The Planted Child
The planted child is, dear reader, real. It is not a planted child in the sense that the child has been planted by the Palace; the child has been planted by the parents. The parents have been preparing for the walkabout for, in some cases, weeks. The parents have made the child practise the curtsy. The parents have, in extreme cases, sewn the posy themselves the night before. The parents are, when the royal arrives, more nervous than the royal, because the royal does this for a living and the parents are, in their own way, having a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
The royal is, in my experience, very kind to the planted child. This is, in part, training. It is also, I think, the part of the job that the senior royals appear to actually enjoy. According to The Guardian, recent reporting from royal correspondents who have travelled with the King in particular has documented the substantial warmth he shows to children at engagements, in a way that observers describe as distinct from the more formal warmth shown to adults.
The Camera Question
The camera, of course, makes everything stranger. Every walkabout, in 2026, takes place in front of approximately three hundred phone cameras held aloft by the well-wishers themselves, in addition to the dozen professional cameras of the press pen. This means that the royal is, at every moment, performing not just for the person they are speaking to but for the global audience that will, within an hour, be watching the encounter on social media.
I am of the view that the senior royals have, over the past decade, become substantially better at performing for this distributed audience. They have, in particular, learned not to look directly at the cameras, which would break the illusion. They have learned, instead, to maintain eye contact with the well-wisher in front of them, which produces a shot that reads, on social media, as authentic engagement. This is, dear reader, performance of the highest order, and you would not, watching it, know that it was performance at all.
The Modernisation Question
The walkabout, as a form, is younger than people think. It was, in its modern form, substantially invented by the late Queen during her 1970 tour of Australia and New Zealand. Before that, royal engagements were substantially more formal: the royal would arrive, perform a function, leave. The walkabout introduced the element of unstructured human encounter, which is what has, in the half-century since, made the British monarchy substantially more popular than it might otherwise have been.
This is, I think, an under-appreciated point. The substantial public affection for the British monarchy is not, in my view, primarily about the constitution or the pageantry. It is, in significant part, about the walkabout. The walkabout is the moment when the constitutional abstraction becomes a person. It is, in this sense, the most important quarter-hour in the modern royal toolkit.
What Comes Next for the Form
I have written before, in my previous columns on the modern monarchy, that the walkabout is, in some sense, in tension with the modern royal security environment. The walkabout requires, by its nature, that the royal be physically close to a substantial unscreened crowd. This is, in the post-2010 era of substantially expanded security threats, an increasingly uncomfortable proposition for the Royalty and Specialist Protection officers whose job it is to keep the royal alive.
The compromise that has, in recent years, evolved is that the walkabout still happens, but the crowd is, increasingly, behind a barrier. The barrier is, structurally, a substantial change. The walkabout with a barrier is, in some important sense, no longer a walkabout. It is, instead, a meet-and-greet. The handshake still happens. The seven-to-nine seconds still happens. But the spontaneity, the sense that the royal is walking among the public, is substantially attenuated.
This is not, I should say, anyone’s fault. It is the world we are in. But it is, I think, a thing that royal-watchers should notice, because the walkabout-with-barrier is a substantially weaker form than the walkabout-without-barrier, and the public affection that the form generates is correspondingly weaker.
For more of my dispatches on the institutional life of the modern monarchy, you can find me at my page on The London Prat.
For satirical takes on monarchy-as-cultural-question, see Private Eye.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
