Is the decline in royal work affecting their popularity?
Royal engagements are half what they were in 2018. Worryingly, public opinion is also softening.
Gonna be honest — I had several ideas for this week’s newsletter but hadn’t settled on one idea until I saw a new YouGov poll. The topline numbers looked good for the royal family: 63% of Britons had a favourable opinion of King Charles III and the royal family as a whole.
I enjoy seeing the nitty-gritty of polling data and how polls are compiled, so I read the related long chart-filled article, which presented a more nuanced picture of the perception of the royals, including showing a distinct softening in popularity since the beginning of 2023. Then I clicked on the “full results” link to see the cross-tabs (the data broken down by respondent criteria such as how they voted in the 2024 general election and Brexit, their gender, age, region, etc., and then by their response: very or fairly positive / negative etc.). Parts of that granular data was downright bad.
As I was digesting the not-great news contained within that YouGov poll, I realized that my own royal work Excel sheets contained even more concerning data: working royals are doing half the number of engagements they used to do before the pandemic. Are those two sets of not-great data related?
It’s been a while since I updated my royal work analysis in this newsletter, aside from a small segment on the impact that Princess Anne’s hospitalization and concussion in June would have on the royal family’s work life. The end of August means that the royals are on holiday, with most senior royals at Balmoral Castle for their traditional summer vacation in the Scottish Highlands. The end of August also means that two-thirds of the year is behind us and the trends that began in January have settled into the reality that this will be a year in which three of the most senior members of the House of Windsor have been away from public view for significant chunks of the year:
King Charles III because of his prostate and then cancer diagnosis
Kate, Princess of Wales, because of her own surgery and later, the discovery of cancer
Prince William, looking after his family
So while Charles and Anne would normally vie for the title of hardest working royal, that award is all but guaranteed to the Princess Royal this year. In addition, Kate has only done two official engagements in the summer (Trooping the Colour and Wimbledon) while William’s tally is down around 30 percent from last year.
The reality of 2024 for the House of Windsor is that its roster of working royals will undertake the fewest number of engagements in recent years, except for the pandemic years of 2020-21. By the last days in August, they’ve barely broken the 1,100 engagement mark, down 23 percent from the same eight months last year.
The 2024 work data looks even lower when compared to amount of royal engagements undertaken by all working royals in the pre-pandemic years. In 2018, the 15 royals working on behalf of the House of Windsor did nearly 2,400 engagements in the first eight months of the year, which is double what the current roster of 11 working royals has done so far this year.
No single year in the 2020s has come near the pre-pandemic level of royal work, with the busiest year, 2022, still down 27% from the 2018 level (comparing total working royal data for each year).
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