The King and Royal Family are showing a more ‘human’ side after a difficult year

“I’m still alive,” the King joked, as we watched him work the room inside Waltham Forest Town Hall.

It was just one moment of a few I’ve seen on royal jobs this year where, despite everything, he’s seemed more relaxed than ever.

Don’t get me wrong, he’s had many years of perfecting that very natural style of trying to lift the room.

He’s always had a reputation for being empathetic and tactile, but as one palace source said to me: “As he moved from prince to sovereign, we could have seen him rein back that more emotional side… what’s happened this year just seems to have accelerated how he interacts with people.”

It’s been just one of the outcomes of what has been the most unexpected, and at times incredibly difficult, year.

I was expecting it to be 12 months during which we got back to a sense of normality, after a tumultuous and busy few years.

Instead, family has at times had to come before the royal, as we heard from the King himself in his most personal Christmas Day message, thanking medical teams for helping them through the “uncertainties and anxieties of illness” and providing them “with the comfort we needed”.

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One man in the crowd outside Waltham Forest Town Hall said this year has “humanised him”. I’d completely agree, or at least it’s brought that warmer side of him to a greater audience.

The palace has noticed it too, a source saying there is “nothing more reductively human than an illness that impacts so many people”.

But it’s the openness with which he’s responded to that diagnosis that has been most striking. And it’s come out through his work too.

He’s still wanted to show us the kind of monarch he wants to be, with food poverty, the environment and community at the heart of his work. A knife crime event he hosted with Idris Elba, was one that stands out for me.

With astonishing frankness, he told assembled cabinet ministers and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, that he would be watching their progress closely on the issue of youth violence.

In the past, he’d have been criticised for showing an opinion or straying very close to overstepping the “constitutional guardrails”. Now, there seems more of an acceptance that this is how our new King wants to do things, and they are different from his mother.

It has felt like we’re seeing a new style of reign for the British Royal Family, that most of us couldn’t have predicted, where they have been more open about their frailties, partly, I’m told, encouraged and emboldened by the warmth they’ve received from the public.

The video messages from the Princess of Wales in particular have broken the mould.

Kate and William have always held a firm line on their privacy and yet in what he described as a “brutal” year, we have “heard directly from them and they have seen the power of that”, I was told by a Kensington Palace source.

And if you were in any doubt about how significant that’s been, they added: “It has been an evolution in the way the Waleses want to communicate.”

It’s not only come across in their health announcements but also through their causes, with Prince William’s homelessness documentary and his Earthshot Prize, or Kate’s Christmas Carol service.

“Empathetic leadership is now a golden thread through their work,” I was told, with “impact and scaling” driving this more personal approach and how they can use their position to do that.

A “greater realisation of what’s to come” and the roles they will have to take on has further spurred on what you could see as a more defined blueprint of what they want to achieve now and in the future.

New openness ‘may have been forced’

But it’s been that profile and the global fascination in them, that has caused the biggest problem.

Social media blowing up with conspiracy theories around Kate earlier in the year and the Mother’s Day photograph that was pulled by picture agencies.

Communications experts believe their apparent new openness may in some ways have been forced on them. Mark Borkowski, a PR and crisis communications expert told us: “We now have an audience that demands more from the Royal Family through channels that do not have the same level of control that you would have with traditional media.

“There’s a lot of freewheeling opinion that is coming across the globe every second of the day, and the speed of reacting to that and providing strategically controlled messages, to appease that crowd is incredibly difficult.

“And I think they’ve done the best that they can in a world that is not governed by mainstream media.”

The family’s silence on the Duchy of Lancaster and Duchy of Cornwall finances, the Prince Andrew scandal involving the alleged Chinese spy, and over Prince Harry’s ongoing court cases, show there is still a line on what they will and won’t discuss.

But it has been a year where the boundaries have in some ways significantly moved, just look at the video of the King pulled into a group hug, akin to a scrum, with the New Zealand women’s rugby team.

Who knows what 2025 will bring. I’m told the Princess of Wales will continue to “balance her recovery with continuing to come back to public facing duties” and the King is already filling his diary, even in January, around times he has to come back to London for treatment.

“One of the enduring strengths of the institution has been its ability to reinvent itself,” a palace source said to me.

We were talking about the past anxieties over what the new reign would be like and that it wouldn’t be the same as the last.

But as the source told me: “Ultimately the traditional touch points remain the same… it’s not about how one monarch can fill the past pair of shoes, but how they can make their own pair.” And ones that must successfully carry them in the complex media landscape they now tread.