bitchy | Jones: Princess Kate’s mother nature videos are ‘out of touch’ & ‘misguided’

The Princess of Wales celebrated her 44th birthday on Friday by releasing her fourth and final video in her Mother Nature “four seasons” series. The “winter” video showed Kate prancing around alone on some royal estate, with Kate’s voiceover reciting something that sounded a lot like AI-written text. Despite The Royalist’s increasingly frantic rants about Kate’s popularity, I’ve seen very few justifications for Kate’s Mother Nature series. In fact, even regular pro-royal or royal-ambivalent people have taken issue with the videos as a huge waste of time, money and effort. There’s a huge messaging problem for Kate, in that she really has not shown any concern for the real struggles of average Britons, not to mention people who are currently being treated for cancer or who have lost loved ones to cancer. Speaking of, the Daily Mail’s Liz Jones has another highly critical piece about Kate’s shampoo/MAO-inhibitor commercials. Some highlights:

A harsh English winter: In the midst of this cold weather gloom, it was therefore surprising to see the latest video from the Princess of Wales. It is of course wonderful to see Kate looking so radiant, healthy and strong after the terrible cancer diagnosis that shook the whole nation. When she released her first video in summer announcing she was on the mend, I wrote about how moving I found it – and that it brought me to tears. Yet watching her latest video, I felt once again a little twitch of worry about the direction the slick Palace PR team seem to be directing her.

These videos feel like something the Sussexes would do: As I wrote about the first video she released, cancer is messy, imperfect and shattering. But the most recent of these strange films seems to be a misfire from a family once so protective of their privacy. It smacks of something Meghan and Harry might come up with.

The Winter video: Kate took the opportunity to mark her 44th birthday today by releasing the video, posted on Instagram, to close her series of more emotional – some sycophants would say modern, but I would say unwise – social media offerings made following her cancer diagnosis and recovery. This latest instalment of her time out with Mother Nature, entitled Winter – not very imaginatively, shows her walking through the Berkshire countryside at dawn. The clip is accompanied by her reflective voice-over and a soundtrack of plinky plonky music.

The video series was a bad idea: I am so sorry to say this on her birthday but who on earth told Kate releasing this video, today of all days when so many people are struggling, was a good idea? It’s not just unfortunate timing, its tone shows she – and by extension the Prince of Wales – has come unstuck. No matter how many hospital wards or Scout troops she might visit, she is missing the mark on how to truly empathise with the British public. And given the deep affection and respect we hold Kate in, that’s such a pity.

Out of touch: This three-minute nature-fest shows Kate is as out of touch as if she’d released a film of herself sitting on a throne wearing a crown, or waving from a private jet as she heads off to the Caribbean or on another skiing jaunt. This is not how winter, especially in the countryside, is for the vast majority. The reality is shivering at a bus stop in a thin coat (rural poverty is the hardest of all) or scraping thick ice off the windscreen. Or shovelling snow so you can get the car out, feed the animals or even just get down the path. Where’s the mud, the chaos, the road crashes (I saw two this morning up here in the Dales)? Now that would have been a better video: Kate helping locals to clear snow outside a school or church. Delivering boxes of groceries. Chatting to people waiting to see a doctor.

Keen Antoinette: She is delivering an idealised 1930s vision of rural life that no longer exists, or perhaps only survives inside the royal parks and estates. Her diction, too, is reminiscent of the late Queen’s early Christmas messages to the nation – as clipped as one of Charles’s yew hedges.

The people need health care, Kate: Far worse, though, is her whole ‘Nature is our quiet teacher’ schtick, that it ‘helps us to heal’. I am afraid this misguided way of thinking reminds me of The Salt Path scandal, in which a seriously ill man claims a several-hundred-mile hike and bracing sea air cured him. I imagine those with no money and chronic ill health who can’t spare a second from their demanding lives to stop and appreciate a tree or a bird will be left feeling a little inadequate having watched this.

Instagram comments: Writes one: ‘Well, if I wasn’t poor things would be a lot different.’ Another writes: ‘I like Kate but these videos are getting weird now. We get it — you survived cancer, but why not include a message encouraging people to donate to cancer charities so as to help others?’ The most telling comment I saw? ‘She might not have had the same outcome if like most of us with cancer she had to run the gauntlet of the often-incompetent NHS.’

[From The Daily Mail]

There are two things I’ll say in a backhanded defense of Kate. One, I certainly believe that this was some kind of dumb project cooked up by palace advisors as something simple and easy for a lazy and arrogant princess. As in, “all you have to do is sit in front of a microphone once every three months and recite some drivel, and we’ll send you out to preen in front of nature.” Everything around Kate is so tightly controlled and managed, I do think it’s unfair to solely blame her for this mess. A lot of people f–ked this up, and the Kensington Palace brain trust probably had their hands all over it. Two, Kate and her handlers are so terrified of doing anything that reeks of controversy or politics, this is basically all they’re left with. This is the royal equivalent of “just talk about the weather.” Now, all that being said, Liz Jones’s criticisms are accurate and well-stated. Kate is a dumbass for putting her keen stamp on this.

The Mother Nature series has been a deeply personal, creative reflection on how nature has helped me heal. But it is also a story about the power of nature and creativity in collective healing.

There is so much we can learn from mother nature, as we look to build a happier,… pic.twitter.com/yZ3u6yLEe4

— The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) January 9, 2026

Photos courtesy of Kensington Palace, Avalon Red.