You can have a private life or be a princess – but you can’t have both, Kate
WE’RE not quite at the ‘off with their heads’ stage, but once again, a royal has angered the unwashed in a scandal that has a lot to do with eating cake.
And just as Marie Antoinette’s infamous advice to ‘let them eat cake’ never actually happened, there is a definite blurring of fact and fiction about this latest royal hiccup as well. Kate Middleton’s admission that she photoshopped the official photo released to reassure her subjects that all was well in the House of Windsor has spectacularly backfired and even a glimpse of the princess travelling in a car with her husband on Monday afternoon seems to have done little to quell the questions and conspiracy theories that have flown around the internet since the lady vanished from public view after Christmas.
Even if we are to accept that there really is nothing to see here (and personally, I’d be very disappointed to learn that my favourite theory, that Kate was the mastermind behind the doomed Willie Wonka Experience and has gone to ground isn’t true), the manner in which Kensington Palace has mismanaged Kate’s illness and her absence from public life has been telling. Essentially – cue the confectionary reference – the royals have been trying to have their cake and eat it. On the one plate, they lead an extremely privileged and pampered life at the expense of the taxpayer; on the other, they demand that those taxpayers mind their own business and take their every statement and photo release as gospel.
It’s entirely understandable when people choose not to share details of their health and medical records. The very fact that euphemistic phrases such as ‘under the weather’ or ‘having a procedure’ are accepted as legitimate excuses for absences and exemptions shows how cagey most of us are about revealing too much information about a health issue. But most of us do not live rent-free in enormous palaces with armies of staff to serve our every whim.
If the royals don’t have the appetite for public dissection of their bits and pieces, then they should consider selling the castles and the crowns and move into a semi-detached house in Birmingham. In all conscience, you cannot claim to be part of the great unwashed when you have your own ladies of the bath chamber.
Historically, the British royals were considered superior to mere mortals – indeed, ‘divine’ was a word scattered like snuff through ancient royal documents and diktats – but the modern, streamlined royals have rebranded themselves as ordinary people ‘in service’ to their subjects. In other words, Charles and his family would like to put it about that being royal is their job.
And a large part of that job involves living their lives in their front windows, so to speak.
The King’s refusal to divulge what kind of cancer he’s being treated for is at odds with this commitment to serve; likewise, the announcement that Kate Middleton was to have ‘major abdominal surgery’ raised more questions than it answered. Now, Kensington Palace’s refusal to release the original photograph that Kate apparently turned into a media studies project both deepens the mystery and adds to the echo chamber in which the formerly least irksome royal princess is currently residing (or not, depending on your conspiracy theory of choice).
The late Queen understood her grandchildren’s current dilemma better than most. ‘If they can’t see us, they can’t believe us,’ she is said to have warned her family. The trouble for Kate – and for the broader royal family as it attempts to navigate its way through yet another crisis – is just that: in the absence of trustworthy images of the next queen and proper details of her illness, people have stopped believing that she is simply recovering from surgery. If she is, and that is all there is to that, then Kensington Palace should release the undoctored photo or take a new one that isn’t so obviously gussied up to look like everything is ticketyboo.
Even princesses are allowed look awful after surgery, but people need to see Kate now, to end a circus of speculation which, however wildly entertaining it is to indulge in, could ultimately cause a constitutional crisis in the UK. Which would only really be wildly entertaining for us.