BY STEWART SLATER
Britain likes its Royals the way the Victorians liked their children – seen and not heard. Their job description is to turn up, look presentable, read the verbiage they have been handed (which we generally ignore) and pop out some children in their downtime.
Given this, it is hard to imagine the Princess of Wales ever having much trouble in her annual appraisal. She has, since joining the firm, been a model employee, solidly hitting her performance targets every quarter. Her palpable need to be seen to be doing the right thing may reveal that she feels she is not, perhaps, a natural talent, but her approach appears to bear fruit.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The problem with high performers, however, as every manager knows, is that they come to realise that they are high performers and decide that they would like to be treated as such. Not for them the hum-drum realities of everyday life. They are beyond that. They get to decide what they do.
It is hard not to feel that we have reached this stage with Kate. No longer, we learned over the weekend, will she release details of the clothes she wears at engagements. A harmless custom it may seem, one, indeed, which gives joy to many, but one which the Princess apparently finds “enormously difficult” as “she wants the focus to be on the really important issues, the people and the causes she is spotlighting”. It must, therefore, join the Groom of the Stool in the repository of royal habits past.
It is not that taking the time to instruct an Assistant Deputy Under-Secretary to check the labels on the royal garments and knock out a quick email is a distraction from the top-tier Princessing she might otherwise do, but that the information itself would distract the people from the serious message she wants to convey. The phones need to be confiscated so the children concentrate on the lesson.
Much is made of the Royals’ desire to modernise their institution and such discussions generally focus on removing some of the flummery and increasing transparency, as Kate won great praise for doing over her illness. But her new approach reveals one of the key aspects of the modern world – our desire to control how others see us. Think, for example, of the periodic eruptions when a female journalist takes umbrage at someone reacting to her as a female, and not as a journalist. Or the effort people take to “curate” their social media.
At its heart, this reflects the shrunken view of humanity we have adopted. We have come to think of ourselves as having one true or authentic (the exact terminology depends on the self-help grifter you choose to consult) self which we get to decide, and anything else is, in some way, not “us”. Kate’s true self is “doer of good deeds”, not “clotheshorse” and to treat her as the latter is to treat her as someone she is not.
This is, of course, wrong. We are multi-faceted creatures fulfilling multiple roles at the same time. We live in a “both/and” not an “either/or” world. At the same time as I write this, I am my mother’s son. The editor of this esteemed periodical will respond to me in one way, she in another. And she has every right to do so. Insisting that she regard me purely as a producer of finely honed prose would be odd and would miss an important part of what makes me “me”.
Kate certainly does good work for her charities, but she is not just a charity-worker. She is a daughter, wife, mother, sister and, no doubt, a friend. The people with whom she has those relationships will, we can be sure, treat her as daughter, wife, mother etc., not as a charity worker. She is also a woman who wears nice clothes, and some people will wish to respond to her as such. As she should hope – promoting British business has long been seen as a core regal function (Henry II granted the first Royal Warrant in 1155), something that should not be lost on a daughter of “trade”… Wanting to be known only on one’s own terms is, in reality, wanting not to be known.
Once they have divested themselves of the more burdensome duties, high performers often seek to acquire new ones more in keeping with their self-image. Perhaps they demand to be given a bigger account to manage, perhaps a bigger division to run. Maybe they will insist their employer fund their new idea.
Thus, no sooner had Kate laid down the burden of shallow clotheshorse than she took up that of public intellectual, sharing her views on modern society. No longer just a doer of good deeds, but a thinker of great thoughts. Modern society is, apparently, “complex”. People feel “isolated and vulnerable during difficult times”. We must “reset, restore and rebalance”.
Words we dismiss as foolish when spoken in Montecito, but are expected to take as wise when uttered in Windsor…
Praise for their insight is something royals have long sought. Some of them have even deserved it – Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is never far from my hand, James VI and I’s Basilikon Doron is one of the classic statements of the Divine Right of Kings, Christina of Sweden had a prolonged correspondence with Descartes, whom she moved to Stockholm so he could teach her in person (he died four months later from cold).
Others have, perhaps, laboured in vain. As Kate was slipping out of her clothes (horse role), it was announced that Amazon was making a series inspired by her father-in-law’s book Harmony, influenced by the Traditionalist ideas of the French thinker René Guénon. He believed that humanity had an overwhelming need to commune with the divine (so far, so Californian), saw the Enlightenment as a disaster and argued that true happiness required sloughing it off and returning to a pre-modern, caste-based society. An attractive idea, perhaps, to a hereditary monarch who is also the hereditary head of a church (priests were Guénon’s top caste); at best wacky, at worst unpleasant to those who would find themselves at the bottom of the new order. Or, indeed, to those relying on modern medicine…
Kate’s first foray into public thinking was more modern and more mainstream. Her call to “develop and nurture a set of social and emotional skills” catnip to a country which has five times more life coaches than ambulance drivers. Those who have not yet done so need not fear – “it is never too late”. She may have turned her back on the nation’s fashion designers, but she hasn’t on its self-help authors.
Successful royal intellectuals have pursued their interests in private – neither the Meditations (Greek title: To myself) nor the Basilikon Doron were written for mass publication. Kate and the King show the risks of doing so in public. If they stick to the mainstream, they risk being seen as mistaking banality for profundity (“Modern society is complex.” Really? What we think is clever tells others how clever we really are…), if they promote something unusual, they risk being seen as a bit odd (“Is this “sacred geometry” in the room with us now?”). As any manager knows, the fact that an employee performs well in one area is no guarantee they will perform well in another. Few of us are as good as we think we are, you can be anything you want to be only being true in the movies. If we must, then, have a therapeutic monarchy for our therapeutic age, perhaps it could focus on that earliest piece of self-help, the motto of the Oracle at Delphi – Know Yourself.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.