There is a lot that Meghan Markle gave up when she married Prince Harry, but apparently, the rules that dictated her sacrifices and do rule every other working Royal, don’t apply when it comes to Queen Camilla.
The life of the British Royal Family is complicated, especially when you add social media into the mix, and Camilla may have found a way to navigate the rough waters that sank Meghan’s massive social media following (three million followers on Instagram before she deactivated it in 2018).
According to Vicki Perrin, the chief executive of The Queen’s Reading Room charity, Queen Camila may soon join TikTok as a book influencer. “Never say never,” said Perrin, who has worked tirelessly to promote reading and writing through her work on radio, TV, and now with Queen Camilla’s charity.
Were Queen Camilla to do so, this would make her the first member of the Royal Family to join the platform and would show a way to navigate one of the more awkward rules of being a Royal. One of the core rules of social media for members of the Royal Family is that they shouldn’t have personal social media accounts and can only have joint accounts, like the Prince and Princess of Wales have, to share pictures of official engagements and events.
Queen Camilla taking to TikTok in a role associated with her Reading Room Charity would allow her to partake in the important BookTok scene and promote reading, writing, and talented authors while also keeping her in the clear, as long as the account did not vere toward the personal.
BookTok is where millions of people share their thoughts, reviews, and recommendations for reading material on the social media channel TikTok, and it has proven to be a powerful element in the world of publishing. Perrin extolled the joys of BookTok to The Telegraph, saying, “What’s so wonderful about BookTok is that you have people from all different walks of life saying, ‘This is a book that has moved me,’ and that is so much more important than anything else.”
According to Perrin, the charity now reaches 12 million people across 170 countries all around the world, making it a powerful force in the quest to promote the joy of reading and the advantages of literacy. Through TikTok, a platform that tends to skew a little younger in demographics, the Queen could amplify her reach and the benefits of the Reading Room to help younger people fall in love with new books or potentially even engage with reading in a meaningful way for the first time.
According to Harvard Health, reading books can be a lifesaver, as participants in a study on health and retirement by Yale University School of Public Health have shown. Per the study, people who read books regularly had a 20% lower risk of dying over the next 12 years than people who weren’t readers or who read periodicals. This difference was present even when accounting for race, education, health, wealth, or marital status, so keep on turning those pages as you get older, folks.
Of course, there may not be entirely altruistic reasons behind a move onto TikTok for the Queen, as she has been known to find ways to remind the younger members of the Royal Family that she is, and always will be, their stepmother.
This could be a purposeful move to show Harry and Meghan, who are currently on the outs with the rest of that family, that there can be rules for some, and not for others, even if the end result is a positive for those who are helped by the charity.
