Personally, I was surprised to see the number of royals and royal-adjacents “allowed” to go on the Sandringham Christmas walk to church. While I expected King Charles, Camilla and the Wales family, it was interesting to see Charles include all of his nieces and nephews, including the Tindalls, Peter Phillips, the Wessexes and the York princesses and their husbands. My guess is that Charles genuinely wanted to have a big showing for his first Christmas as monarch. My guess is that all of the Windsors know that they’ve lost their brightest stars: the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. It was an all-white royal Christmas and the visuals were painful. So of course the Hector Projectors in the British media have made this into “Who needs Harry and Meghan! The Sussexes are probably so mad that they missed this!!” Please allow the Mail’s Sarah Vine (who is a piece of sh-t) to attempt to brand the Waleses, Charles and Camilla as “the magnificent seven.” Buh-bye Drab Four, now George, Louis and Charlotte have to pick up the slack.

Barely a few months have passed since the Queen died, and already the tectonic plates of the Royal Family have shifted beyond measure. King Charles seems to have slipped almost effortlessly into his new role, and the Queen Consort’s natural warmth and humour — legendary among her close friends but perhaps not always glimpsed in public — have really come to the fore.

The Prince and Princess of Wales, too, have hit their stride, alongside their three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis. It can’t be easy for children so young to find themselves so frequently in the spotlight, and yet their parents seem to strike just the right balance between allowing the public access to them and protecting their privacy — and letting their very different personalities shine through.

Pictures of Louis in shorts made me laugh. Children that age can get obsessed with wearing certain things — I remember my daughter going through a phase where she insisted on nothing but shorts, come rain, wind, sun or snow. Perhaps young Louis is similarly stubborn. The children — not just the Waleses, but other smaller royals, too, including Lena Tindall and Savannah Phillips — were very much front and centre this year. Such a contrast, too, from a few years ago, when all eyes were on Harry and Meghan, the new royal superstars.

Back then, we were fixated on the ‘Fab Four’, with the Duchess of Sussex bringing all the glamour, the then Duchess of Cambridge rather more Home Counties than Hollywood in comparison. Not yesterday. The Princess of Wales looked absolutely stunning in an elegant olive-green coat, topped off with a rather rakish Philip Treacy trilby hat (all the rage at the moment) that made her look both chic and edgy. Her style has evolved rapidly over the past few years, and this was one of her best looks yet: clean and simple, and the perfect expression of her new-found self-assurance.

Harry and Meghan were, of course, conspicuous by their absence, having spent the past few weeks lobbing lumps of dirt across the Atlantic in increasingly desperate attempts to win fans and shame the royals back home. But it mattered not a jot that they weren’t there. In fact, if I’m honest, it was a relief not to see Harry’s scowling face and Meghan’s pained smile. And besides, who needs the Fab Four when you can have the Magnificent Seven: three united generations of royals who genuinely seem to enjoy their roles and appreciate the place they hold in the nation’s hearts?

One can’t help wondering whether Harry, waking up in his cashmere-lined Montecito idyll, might not have felt a small pang of regret at seeing them all together at Sandringham. Part of him might have felt sad, too, that his own two children couldn’t be there, playing alongside their cousins.

If the estranged Duke and Duchess of Sussex seem driven by bitterness and resentment, unable to forgive or forget and determined to cast themselves as victims even as they act as aggressors, then senior royals are clearly equally determined to turn the other cheek.

[From The Daily Mail]

Nothing says “Miserable Prince Harry must be full of regret” like devoting an entire f–king royal-Christmas column to how Harry and Meghan weren’t at Sandringham. I could genuinely feel the panic creeping in as Vine wrote “magnificent seven” and tried to compliment Kate’s Carmen Sandiego look. What’s crazy is that they can’t help but tell on themselves – if they weren’t so busy screaming about the Sussexes’ absence, the all-white visuals would have been okay. Boring but okay. As I said, I was surprised by Charles’s inclusion of his nieces and nephews. Charles’s first Christmas actually got a good turnout. But of course, as you see Charles standing there with his extended family, you do remember… oh, right, his younger son hasn’t spent the last four Christmases in the UK. Oh, right, Charles refuses to protect his younger son’s family.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.