While we didn’t have a full 2020 Year in Review series on the blog this year, we still have two important posts planned! After counting the numbers of days worked by the Danish royal family in 2017, in 2018, and in 2019, I did it again this year. The tally posts will be posted tomorrow on Princess Marie’s Closet and UFO No More so stay tuned for those! In the meantime, read more about the Danish royal family’s days worked numbers below!
A few disclaimers before studying the data:
It is important to note that every member of the royal family works more than these numbers because there are countless hours of meetings and preparation behind each of these events and they are not on the calendar. Furthermore, as we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the work of every royal families and that is reflected in the numbers since a lot of events had to be cancelled or postponed to a later date. Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit Denmark, the Crown Prince couple family was living in Switzerland (until March) which also impacted their numbers. Prince Joachim and Princess Marie spent the year in France (and will continue to do so in the future) and they had different restrictions against COVID-19 than in Denmark. Prince Joachim also had surgery to remove a blood clot this summer. It is also important to note that with Prince Joachim being a full-time student and now having a full-time job, his numbers of days worked for the royal family keep decreasing and will probably keep doing so in the future.
These numbers represent the numbers of days worked (and not how many events they attended) in 2020. To count this, I used the Court’s official calendar, the Court’s social media accounts and the social media accounts of the charities they work with.
Onto the data now!
As a whole, the family officially worked less days than in 2019. For the year of 2020, someone in the family had a publicly announced event a total of 153 days of the year- 42% of the days in 2020. It was 227 days in 2019, 220 days in 2018 and 260 days in 2017. Queen Margrethe ends the year with 52 days worked while Princess Benedikte – whose numbers have been increasing each year since 2017 – officially worked 39 days. Princess Benedikte also acted as Regent for 7 days in 2020.
Unlike last year, Crown Prince Frederik is the member of the family who worked the most days with 58 days worked (i.e a day where he had an event on the calendar or a day where he had an unannounced event that we had photos of). Out of the 366 days of the year, Crown Prince Frederik was Regent for 9 days which is way less than last year because Queen Margrethe didn’t travel abroad as much as usual because of the pandemic. Crown Princess Mary worked 51 days in 2020. Some of her meetings with the Mary Fonden were not shared by the Court but were shared on the foundation’s social media accounts and they were counted. Obviously, there are probably a lot more meetings that aren’t shared publicly and thus can’t be counted and this is a good example of the disclaimer above: those numbers of days worked are only the numbers of events that were made public and official.
As stated above, Prince Joachim had an eventful year away from the royal family and his numbers reflect that. He only had 2 days worked in 2020 and I honestly don’t know what will his engagements pattern be like in 2021. I hope he would be able to do a few events during the French school holidays as the family usually travels back to Denmark but only time will tell. Princess Marie started an interesting engagement pattern at the end of last year by alternating between a lot of events in a short time in Denmark and then events in France but this is not a pattern she really committed to this year with only 12 days worked. That can be explained by the fact that a lot of her usual events were cancelled and that France often had tougher restrictions than Denmark and went through two lockdowns but I would hope that she will be able to pick up that engagement pattern again next year whether it is in person or by doing video calls.
Here is a recap of the data, what do you think about these numbers? What are you expecting for 2021?
Note: my count of days worked for the other Scandinavian royal families and the Spanish royal family will be posted on UFO No More in early January so stay tuned for that if you would like to compare these numbers to other royal families!
If you would like to use these numbers for your own article- please make sure to credit me and link back to my original post. If you have any questions or want more information about the data posted here, send me an email.
Princess Marie's Closet 