For many of us, corded landline phones went out of fashion last century, superseded by more convenient, compact handsets, but for the royals, they’re still pretty much in fashion.
After moving to Windsor Castle to isolate in March 2020, the Queen has been pictured conducting her weekly meetings with Prime Minister Boris Johnson using an old fashioned rotary dial telephone.
Earlier this week, the Duchess of Cambridge updated her and Prince William’s new YouTube channel with a video of her chats with participants to her photography contest Hold Still.
Kate, 39, was pictured holding a black corded landline telephone to her ear as she coolly chattered away to finalists near a window in her London home, Kensington Palace.
While the Duchess has previously been spotted with an iPhone mobile, when she read out questions submitted for her Early Years Q&A in an Instagram video shared in November, both she and William, 38, tend to use the old fashioned landline when it comes to handling engagements.
In March last year, during the first coronavirus lockdown, William was photographed talking on the telephone to Mind Charity’s CEO Paul Farmer about the importance of mental health from a desk in the Palace which also housed a black corded telephone.
The Duchess of Cornwall has also been photographed numerous times throughout the pandemic keeping in touch with people from her and Prince Charles’ Scottish home, Birkhall, via a corded handset.
Royal expert Phil Dampier told FEMAIL that Her Majesty has likely used the same phone for years, and has an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality.
He said that the Queen doesn’t believe in change for change’s sake and if she’s happy with something she keeps using it for years.
Dickie Arbiter, the Queen’s former press spokesperson, added that Her Majesty is quite frugal and sees no point in changing something if it works.
He told FEMAIL that it, fits the ambience if you’re living in a medieval castle, why put something modern in? The white phone fits, and it’s a rather old fashioned Bakelite phone, and as far as she’s concerned, it works, why replace it?
And he said that you’d be amazed at how many people have corded telephones, how many people have old fashioned homes, because they want old fashioned telephones, because they look good, it looks better than anything modern, and at the end of the day, it’s about choice.
But is it really a show for the cameras so they can pretend they’re just like you and me, and that once the cameras are away, the hi-tech stuff comes back out, and let’s face it, if they had state of the art phones, the snowflakes would be complaining about wasting money.
But perhaps the Queen has a point and something the rest of us could learn a lesson or two from by not replacing things just because of the latest trend, and at least they won’t get their brains cooked by a mobile telephone.
The Royal Family are, by their very essence, a Retro brand, and it gives their followers a snug, comfy feeling that nothing ever actually changes, and the British simply love living in the past, and sometimes, but not always, old is better built than today’s modern equivalent, and at the end of the day, it’s just a phone that sits on a table, and if you like living in the 1950s, you may as well do it right.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 