Prince William and Kate Middleton decided to step up as the senior members of the royal family as the royal family seems to run out of working royals. They are trying to move the firm in the right direction after the pandemic forced the year to be very difficult.
Queen Elizabeth II has served as the reigning monarch of the UK since 1952 as well as the head of the Commonwealth. Extremely popular for her really long reign in the UK, the Queen is especially known for her interest in the government and political affairs, which are aside from her ceremonial duties and is credited with bringing modernism in many aspects of the monarchy. In September 2015, The Queen surpassed the previous reign record of 63 years and 216 days on the throne set by Queen Victoria who was the present Queen’s great-great-grandmother to become the longest-reigning monarch in British history. The Queen who was formally coronated as Queen Elizabeth II took place on June 2, 1953, in Westminster Abbey. In the initial 10 years of her reign, Queen Elizabeth got into her role as a Queen by building close ties with the Prime Minister of that time Winston Churchill. Weathering a foreign affairs disaster in the Suez Crisis of 1956 and making numerous state trips abroad.
In 1977, Queen Elizabeth celebrated her silver jubilee marking her 25 years on the throne. It proved as a bright spot in the era of economic struggles. Also, the Queen is a vigorous traveler and has a knack for adventure. In her travels, she visited Fiji, Tonga, New Zealand, Australia, Papua New Guinea, the British West Indies, and Canada. Also, the Queen made it a permanent thing for her to travel to different parts of the world every year sometimes to attend official engagements and sometimes for leisure purposes.
The Queen continues to follow her normal routine as she has till now and the entirety of her reign, including her official work, public appearances, and spending time with her beloved dogs and horses. Though there are rumors twirling at various times suggesting that Queen Elizabeth would step aside and will have Prince Charles take over the royal duties and the throne, as she delegated some of her duties and obligations such as the official Remembrance Day ceremony. This fueled the speculations that the Queen is slowly preparing her throne for Prince Charles but till now she remains a consistent, stable presence at the head of Britain’s reigning Royal family.
It is seen that the number of working royals and their official engagements are reducing year by year. The Windsors undertook less than 60% of the engagements they had honored two years back due to the reasons such as covid, Harry, and Meghan Markle turning their backs on Britain, and the elder generation of royals growing old.
The royal family completed 2,065 duties this year and this increase was much more than last year, in fact, it was an increase of a third(35%) from the previous year (2020), but the number was very low as compared to 2019’s number which was 59.5%.
The present prince and future king Prince William is the only royal who completed more dutied (227) in the year 2021 than the 2019’s tally. The analysis done by the Canadian researcher shows that Kate, who is the dutchess of Cambridge is the only royal who attended one less event this year compared to 2020. Also, she is the only one who has the smallest drop in the tally of official duty events compared to two years back.
The reason behind the large drop in the official events duty engagement of the Queen is also because she lost her husband of seven decades, Prince Philip in April who was also experiencing weak health. The Queen’s tally reached 182 engagements in 2021 while the tally was 127 in 2020 and 291 in 2019.
While Prince Charles attended the largest number of engagements over the past few years, but Princess Anne worked the most number of days getting the label of “ Most hard-working royal.” Her total royal engagements tallied to 381. Although her numbers dropped from the pre-pandemic times, which had a decrease of 22% from 486, with Prince Charles’s number of duties falling to 371, it is almost a third.
The drop in royal engagements came because of the difficulty in arranging visits due to the pandemic, but it could also be put on the Queen scaling back her duties while Harry and Meghan turned their backs to Britain and Prince Andrew retiring from his public life due to his disastrous TV interview regarding his friendship with the billionaire pedophile Jeffery Epstein.
