The Princess of Wales stepped out yesterday for her Business Taskforce on Early Childhood. She “gave a speech” in which she yammered about how businesses should give their employees more time off to go on yachting and skiing holidays with their children. Some would call Kate out of touch, but I found her speech so revealing of her narrow worldview and utter inexperience in the professional sphere. Tom Sykes reacted to Kate’s speech differently though – he saw “a tantalizing glimpse of Queen Catherine.” After repeatedly ranting about the Duchess of Sussex in multiple Substack posts over a week and a half, Sykes is now attempting to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

As amazing as it was to hear a member of the royal family essentially declare that love is all you need today, what was perhaps even more remarkable about a speech and solo appearance by Catherine, the Princess of Wales, was the obvious signpost it laid down for how she and William intend to reign as king and queen. It might even suggest to some that the moment is coming faster than King Charles’s office cares to admit.

Delivered at the Future Workforce Summit in London, this was Catherine’s most significant solo speech and cemented, for me, the feeling that a substantial transfer of power is underway inside the House of Windsor.

“Love is the first and most essential bond,” she told a room of Britain’s most powerful business leaders, telling them to “Imagine a world built on valuing tenderness.” All that was missing was a, “Wooohooo-oo-oo.”

Opening the summit, organized to encourage big businesses to invest in early childhood, the Princess said: “A loving home ultimately teaches us how to love and how to care, but every environment has the potential to shape our hearts. Every one of you interacts with your own environment: a home, a family, a business, a workforce, a community. These are the ecosystems that you yourselves help to weave. Imagine a world where each of these environments was built on valuing time and tenderness just as much as productivity and success. As business leaders, you will face the daily challenge of finding the balance between profitability and having a positive impact. But the two are not, and should not be incompatible.”

These are not the usual sentiments of a royal keynote at a corporate summit in the Salesforce Tower, and that is precisely the point. As unexpected as these words were coming from a senior royal, what I thought was truly striking about the Princess’s speech was the unmistakable shift in tone and pace it signals is coming to the royal family.

Anyone with two eyes can see that the sands of the monarchy are shifting. King Charles is fighting cancer and, much as the palace doesn’t like me to talk about it, is visibly older, more frail, and stepping back for longer periods. The tempo of royal work is changing, and the center of power is moving/has moved to the Waleses.

I think it is rather brilliant that she strode into the lair of an American tech giant and told CEOs that they had the equation wrong. She essentially argued that the raw materials of productivity begin not in data, but in affection; that better workers are built, quite literally, in the cradle. Her speech was actually a good answer to the endless question of what the royals are for: there is no way a politician could have said this stuff.

Throughout this year, I’ve reported on the rebalancing inside the family, in the face of considerable headwinds and cack-handed attempts at intimidation from the palace. The truth is that Britain has spent the past year watching Charles’s illness while their domestic media, stuck in a transactional relationship with the palace, has gaslit them into believing that he is fine.

Privately, few within the palace deny that the monarchy has entered its era of transition; indeed, many insiders’ days are now filled with little other than contemplating the inevitable question of what comes next. What happened at the summit today was a good glimpse of what that “next” may look like.

[From The Royalist Substack]

Over the weekend, Kate released her dumb “Autumn” video, as part of her Mother Nature video quartet celebrating the seasons. Even conservative British commentators asked themselves and their audiences: would the reaction to these videos be different if Meghan was the one saying these words and doing these things? And even they admitted that if Meghan did it, the British media would rip her apart. It’s the exact same sh-t with Kate’s Business Taskforce – if Meghan lectured business leaders about how they need to give employees more time off for family vacations, the reaction would not be “how regal!”

While I agree that King Charles is increasingly frail, this is completely false: Charles is “stepping back for longer periods.” He is not. Charles is frail and in poor health, and he’s still outworking William and Kate combined. William and Kate are the ones “stepping back for longer periods” and shrugging off work commitments to go on a million vacations. In that sense, Kate IS showing everyone what she’ll do as queen: barely work.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.