Well, it appears that once again the media has managed to misfire its headlines with all the grace and accuracy of a damp Roman candle.
Princess Kate gives a thoughtful nudge to big business about the critical importance of early childhood, and suddenly every hack with a deadline is breathlessly reporting that Kate has called for six months of fully paid leave for all new fathers, across every business in the kingdom, large or small.
Oh, come off it.
I went to the same boarding school as Kate, and both of us were sent there by entrepreneurial parents who worked their socks off to build and run their small businesses.
If you know anything about the Princess, you’ll know she’s more Alan Sugar than Marie Antoinette. Her parents weren’t lounging in gilded ballrooms; they were running a party supplies business, the sort of hardworking, hands-on enterprise that frets over every payroll cycle. Believe me: Kate knows the difference between a FTSE 100 boardroom and a bakery in Bradford with four employees and a broken espresso machine.
Kate is an entrepreneur at heart. She understands the grind, the long hours, the stress, and the relentless juggling it takes just to keep the lights sometimes on when you’re a small family business. The highs are high but the lows can be very low.
She knows what it’s like to be on holiday, only for her parents to get the call that their office manager’s gone down with the flu. So you pack up, drive back, and they get on with it. No holiday for you that year. She remembers the tension when an employee called in sick, the quiet panic as her parents tried to figure out how to cover someone else’s job on top of their own that week. The worried glances, the whispered conversations, the sudden silences when you walk into the room.
Growing up as the child of small business owners, Kate lived that reality. She’ll have spent childhood weekends entertaining herself and her siblings in the office, had holidays cancelled, and logged endless hours helping her parents catch up on work. She knows what it means to shoulder responsibility and to step in when there’s no one else to do the job. That’s the world she grew up in… and it shows. It’s part of why she’s such a trooper.
Now, Deloitte, bless their well-tailored socks, have offered six months of paternity leave. Fantastic. Let’s be honest: they can afford it. Their business model doesn’t rely on three staff covering for a fourth who’s off for six months on paternity leave. It’s nice if you can afford it but to suggest this was mandated or even implied by the Princess for EVERY business is fanciful.
Let’s recall: the Princess is championing early childhood. Not quarterly HR policy for every cobbler, butcher, and Etsy seller. The Royal Foundation Business Taskforce has made a compelling economic case, investing in young children could generate £45.5 billion annually. That’s not about government diktats or ivory tower idealism; it’s about making the business case. Long-term thinking. Strategic talent development. The kind of thing more companies should do… if they can.
But let’s not confuse this for any crusade against small business realism. If every small business had to grant half a year of fully paid leave to every new parent, many would simply stop hiring anyone of reproductive age. The local florist, cafe or small office isn’t Deloitte.
When Prince William took time off after each of his children’s births, two weeks for George and Louis, six weeks for Charlotte, he showed leadership by example. But he didn’t vanish from the face of the Earth. He juggled duties. Did the school run. Balanced responsibility with reality. That’s exactly the tone the Princess is striking.
Yes, we need to rethink early years. Yes, we need more investment in childcare, parenting support, and flexibility. But please, let’s not lurch into utopianism disguised as Royal endorsement. The Princess is advocating for compassion, not compulsion.
We support innovation. We support children. We support businesses, large and small, making choices that work for them. But we don’t support lazy headlines that turn nuance into nonsense.
So here’s our suggestion: rather than mandate six months off for every new father, let’s give business leaders the tools, incentives, and freedom to support families in ways that don’t kill the enterprise in the process. Small businesses are already being strangled by Labour’s crippling National Insurance contributions, swelling regulation, and the creeping hand of state interference. Let’s not hand Labour another excuse to pile on with policies that sound compassionate but collapse under the weight of economic reality.
Because what’s the point of a generous leave policy if there’s no job to come back to?
By Claire Bullivant
Main image: Screengrab from public domain image / X.
