Daniela Elser: Kate and William's kids enrolling in ritzy new school is tone deaf

Prince William, Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, during the Platinum Jubilee Pageant on June 5. Photo / AP

OPINION:

In 1969, during a tour of the US, Prince Philip appeared on NBC's Meet the Press and revealed a shocking fact about The Firm: They were in the soup.

"We go into the red next year … we may have to move into smaller premises … we had a small yacht which we had to sell, and I shall have to give up polo fairly soon …" Philip complained.

Back home, his grumbling triggered sensational headlines, the Prime Minister raised the issue during a Cabinet meeting and a group of dockers made news after caustically offering to have a whip round to help him keep playing polo.

Which is to say that the Windsors and their private finances, given that they also receive £86.3m-a-year ($164m) in public funding to keep the monarchy afloat, has and will always be a very, very touchy topic.

Clearly, William and Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, have not spent much time poring over the long list of his grandfather's legendary howlers or they might have been a tad more sensitive to how badly their latest big announcement would go down in many quarters.

Late on Monday night, Kensington Palace confirmed that the couple's three children Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis will all be starting Lambrook School in Windsor starting next month.

Pitched as "very respectable yet not one of the posh ones," according to The Telegraph, the coeducational outfit boasts 17ha of grounds, including a nine-hole golf course, cricket, football and rugby pitches, a pool and croquet lawn, while students can pick up extra-curricular activities that range from fencing to scuba diving.

(The school already even has a royal pedigree with Queen Victoria having regularly pootled down in her carriage from her nearby Windsor Castle to check on her grandsons, Prince Christian Victor and Prince Albert of Schleswig-Holstein, when they were students there in the 1870s.)

Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Louis, Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, Princess Charlotte, Prince George and Prince William on the balcony of Buckingham Palace on June 2. Photo / AP

News of the Cambridges' move comes after months of credible speculation that they would be leaving their Kensington Palace apartment to set up home on the Windsor estate. Today, we know for sure.

At any other time, this announcement that the third, fourth and fifth in line to the throne would be changing schools would have barely caused a ripple however, instead this situation has the potential to develop into a serious PR crisis for the Cambridges.

The reason? Money.

Over the years, the value that the British monarchy represents to taxpayers has regularly surfaced as a hot-button issue but in recent years, has receded from view. What the Cambridges' news could do is revive this very debate, a debate that the royal family has no interest in coming within a cricket, football and rugby pitch of.

Added to which, there could not be a worse point in recent history to remind the public how exceedingly wealthy the Windsors are than right now, with the UK in the grip of a cost-of-living crisis.

Lambrook might not be "one of the posh ones" but it still costs a small fortune for any self-respecting Range Rover-driving parent to enrol their precious tot in and having all three of their kidlets attending will set William and Kate back £53,508 ($102,006) in fees alone per year. (And that is before one has even bought a school uniform, paid for an oboe lesson or even purchased a basic fencing lamé.)

This is all on top of the vast amount it will be costing the Cambridges to add a new Windsor home – their fourth – to their ever-growing property portfolio.

Adelaide Cottage, for which they will pay a commercial rent, now joins their 10-bedroom Norfolk holiday home Anmer Hall, their four-storey 'apartment' inside Kensington Palace and Tam-Na-Ghar, a holiday cottage in Scotland which was left to William by the Queen Mother. Clearly, they have the funds to staff, run and maintain all of their homes, a bill that must surely stretch into six or even seven figures.

Prince William and Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, leave after a service of thanksgiving for the reign of Queen Elizabeth II at St Paul's Cathedral in London on June 3. Photo / AP

The sore point here is not what the Cambridges are doing, but the timing.

The numbers in the UK make for grim reading.

One million British adults have gone a whole day without food in the last month because they could not afford to eat, The Guardian has reported, while one-in-four Britons "have resorted to skipping meals", according to an Ipsos/Sky survey.

Earlier this year, the governor of the Bank of England warned of "apocalyptic" food prices.

So, for the Duke and Duchess to decide, against this backdrop and with community feeling running sky high, to oh-so-casually demonstrate that they are, technically speaking, stonkingly loaded just seems idiotic.

Twitter has been having a field day with the Cambridges' blinkered splashing of cash.

It’s the talk of our foodbank. #ToryCostOfLivingCrisis

— Sean Davids (@MancTotter) August 22, 2022

£21k a year per child. A fully qualified NHS staff nurse only starts on £25k annual salary. Absolute disgrace #AbolishTheMonarchy #abolishprivateschools

— Ian NR 🚀🛸🛰️🌌 🍊🍋 🇪🇺 🌈🇺🇦🐱 (@noiseresearch) August 22, 2022

All at our expense, during a cost of living crisis. Disgrace.

— Web (@TDW1992) August 22, 2022

"While ordinary households are struggling with their energy bills and facing crippling inflation, why are we giving yet another home to William and Kate? This is disgraceful." @RepublicStaff https://t.co/HlHOASuavi

— amul desai (@heathrowexpres) August 22, 2022

William and Kate's decision to blithely add another historic property to their collection of historic properties while millions are going hungry is tactless at best and deeply insensitive at worst.

Yes, the Cambridges' timing here seems to have been dictated by where their children were up to school year-wise but surely another 12 months at Thomas' Battersea, their beloved London school, would hardly have hurt.

Instead, they have chosen to demonstrate a galling lack of awareness of, or interest in, the financial misery of millions of Brits who are struggling to put food on the table.

More broadly, the royal family has only just emerged from the last three years still standing after the horror show of Prince Andrew and the high drama of Megxit.

The absolute last thing that the Palace needs right now is for renewed focus on the cost of keeping the monarchy afloat, even if the figure works out at £1.29 ($2.45) per person, per year. That $164m in Sovereign Grant cash could sure pay for a lot of NHS nurses and doctors, couldn't it?

It's always worth remembering that myopically putting family self-interest ahead of public sentiment did not work out too well for the Russian, German and French royal families. (Both Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany were first cousins of William's great-great grandfather King George V.)

According to The Times, Lambrook teaches its students that "with privilege comes responsibility". Perhaps certain parents, especially certain titled parents who travel with armed security officers, need to learn that lesson first.

• Daniela Elser is a royal expert and a writer with more than 15 years' experience working with a number of Australia's leading media titles.