Keeping in touch! Queen Elizabeth II‘s grandson-in-law Mike Tindall offered more insight regarding the royal family group chat after previously revealing its existence.
During an episode of his “The Good, The Bad and The Rugby” podcast on Wednesday, February 9, Tindall, 43, recalled reaching out to athlete Ellis Genge about Duchess Kate‘s skills on the field.
“I text Ellis and said, ‘Mate, please tell me anything she messed up on,’ so I could sort of [mention it in the] family WhatsApp group, get to her,” the former rugby player told his cohosts about Kate, 40, participating in a training session at Twickenham Stadium. “He said ‘No she was actually pretty good, and she was really good at kicking.'”
Mike, who is married to Zara Tindall, previously explained that the group chat was created on WhatsApp to help members of the family make summer plans together.
“It’s just what you do to try and set up get togethers and we are going to something that is the same,” the U.K. native told Good Morning Britain in August 2019. “If you are going to go, ‘Are you going to take the kids?’ Quite a lot of people have family WhatsApp groups. I don’t think it’s a new revelation.”
At the time, Mike noted that his wife’s royal family members are part of the group chat. Fans assumed that Prince William and Prince Harry participated in their cousin’s chat along with their respective wives, Kate and Meghan Markle.
The information on the royal family’s preferred form of communication comes after Jonathan Sacerdoti weighed in on the monarch, 95, having a social media presence.
“There’ve been reports that the queen has a secret Facebook account, which I can’t quite believe [because] she is 95 years old,” the royal expert exclusively told Us Weekly in November 2021. “So, I have trouble sometimes with new technology, but she seems completely able to pick these things up. We saw her during lockdown with all the Zoom calls and the video calls. And now, since her health’s been not quite as good as it was in the past, she’s been doing more [appearances] that way. And now we find out about the Facebook account. It’s extraordinary to think how readily and easily she picks up these new technologies.”
Sacerdoti explained that Elizabeth also stays in touch with her loved ones over the phone.
“Apparently the queen has two people who she speaks to the most on her phone,” he added at the time. “And she also apparently has a mobile phone, which is said to be a Samsung [and] is packed with anti-hacker encryption [from] MI6, so that nobody can hack into her phone. But the two people she phones the most are said to be her daughter, Princess Anne, and her racing manager, John Warren. … So this is apparently who can get through to the queen from anywhere in the world. If he calls, she answers.”