Isla Campbell on What the Prince and Princess of Wales Are Trying to Do With the Monarchy and What the Institution Will and Will Not Allow
The Prince and Princess of Wales have been conducting, since approximately 2020, what might be described as a sustained attempt to modernise the public face of the monarchy without modernising the institution itself — a distinction that is easier to make than to maintain and that the events of the past few years have complicated in ways that the communications team at Kensington Palace has handled with varying degrees of success.
The modernisation project has specific visible elements: greater informality in public engagements, the Earthshot Prize as a philanthropic vehicle that gives William a cause with global resonance and measurable outcomes rather than the ribbon-cutting philanthropy that characterized previous royal charitable work, and a communications style that is warmer, more direct, and more willing to acknowledge difficulty than the palace’s historic default of dignified distance. The Princess of Wales’s decision to publicly document her cancer diagnosis and treatment was a significant departure from the royal tradition of privacy on health matters and was received with the sympathy that genuine vulnerability in public life attracts when it is perceived as genuine. It was perceived as genuine because it appeared to be.
What the Institution Will Not Allow
The limits of modernisation are constitutional rather than personal. The monarchy cannot be reformed in its fundamentals — hereditary succession, parliamentary relationship, the Crown’s formal constitutional role — without legislation that no government has shown interest in pursuing and that would require a public conversation about the monarchy’s future that the institution’s supporters prefer to defer indefinitely and its opponents have not found the political moment to demand. The William and Catherine project operates within these constraints and is, within them, notably more successful than the institutional baseline would predict. The question of whether it is successful enough to sustain the monarchy’s public standing across the reign that follows King Charles’s is one that will be answered by events rather than by communications strategy, which is the monarchy’s permanent condition.
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SOURCE: http://prat.UK
