A daughter born in Lisbon, a new little sister for August and Ernest, and a rare week where the monarchy news doesn’t come with an asterisk attached.
Princess Eugenie and her husband Jack Brooksbank welcomed a daughter earlier this month, born in Lisbon and weighing a very respectable six pounds nine ounces, a new younger sister for five-year-old August and three-year-old Ernest. The palace announcement was warm, brief, and entirely uncomplicated, which, if you have been following this family’s headlines for any length of time, is genuinely worth noting on its own. Not every royal story these days comes without an asterisk.
I will admit a small, professional bias here. Eugenie has always struck me as one of the more quietly likeable working members of this extended family, someone who has built a public profile around genuine causes, anti-human-trafficking work in particular, rather than around the tabloid churn that so often swallows royal coverage whole. A third child, arriving healthy, in a family that has weathered its share of genuinely difficult years recently, feels like precisely the kind of story this column exists to cover on the good weeks.
Speculation over the new baby’s name has already begun in earnest, as it always does, with royal watchers combing the family tree for hints of who might be honoured. I have no particular insight to offer there beyond the obvious observation that this family has, historically, shown a fondness for names with real weight behind them, and I would not be remotely surprised if whatever is eventually announced carries a nod to someone specific. We shall see. I am resisting the urge to guess in print and be embarrassingly wrong about it within the fortnight.
What I find genuinely touching, reading back through the coverage of Ernest’s arrival a few years ago, is how consistently Eugenie and Jack have kept their children largely out of the more relentless side of royal media attention, official announcements handled with real warmth but comparatively little of the staged photocall energy some other branches of the family have leaned into over the years. It is a choice, clearly a deliberate one, and I happen to think it is the right one, for what that is worth from someone whose entire job involves writing about this family for a living.
Congratulations to Eugenie, Jack, August, and Ernest, then, on the newest addition. It is a small thing, in the grand sweep of a year that has otherwise handed this column no shortage of heavier stories to cover, but small good things in royal reporting deserve exactly as much column space as the difficult ones, and this week, I am genuinely glad to be spending mine here.
I think there is a broader point worth making here too, one that goes slightly beyond this one family and this one birth. Royal reporting, mine included, spends a great deal of its energy on institutional questions, succession, funding, accountability, the genuinely thorny stuff this column returns to often enough. It is worth remembering, every so often, that this is also, underneath all of that, an actual family, with actual children, having actual, ordinary joys alongside everything else. Eugenie and Jack welcoming a healthy daughter is, at the most basic human level, simply lovely news, and I refuse to feel even slightly embarrassed about saying so plainly, constitutional analysis be damned for one week.
Wishing the whole family well, and I will no doubt be back here in a few years covering whatever school milestone or minor scrape this newest addition gets up to, the way this job tends to go.
More from this author at Isla Campbell, prat.uk.