Kate’s middle-class ways seem baffling to UK toffs
IT IS only a week since Kate Middleton released her now infamous snap to mark Mother’s Day, unwittingly setting off a cascade of feverish claims and improbable conspiracy theories. The harmless picture of Kate flanked by her three children, which internet sleuths immediately spotted had been tweaked, was like pouring petrol on the flames of speculation that have been gathering since Kate suddenly withdrew from her duties, giving what royal-watchers deemed was a most unsatisfactory account of her mystery illness.
As the list of photographic changes lengthened, the snap was variously interpreted as a sign that the mother of three was at death’s door, if not gone already. Another theory had Kate waiting for her facelift to settle before going public. Most damaging for the royals was the idea that the photograph was symptomatic of deeper problems in her marriage to Prince William, with far-fetched theories raging about the couple having separated.
It’s not the first time a controversy has inadvertently highlighted a cultural chasm between countries that are quite similar in most other respects. In this country, where motherhood is imbued with such importance, Kate’s honouring Mother’s Day with a greeting even though she is ill is normal. As is her enhancing the photograph, particularly if her husband spent only a few seconds taking it.
MOST mothers make sure to brush their children’s hair, wipe their faces and straighten their clothes before any photo that is destined to do the rounds of relatives and grandparents. Why should Kate Middleton be any different, we wonder?
As the most famous woman on the planet, whose photos are pored over for grey hairs, telltale signs of botox or clues to her children’s personalities, her attention to detail is justified, necessary even. Yet in Britain her eagerness to keep up appearances arouses suspicion about what else she is trying to hide.
Kate Middleton has an enigmatic quality. She doesn’t speak much in public or attend many events. Her passion project is early childhood, but her focus seems wholly on her own children. Yet she moves in aristocratic circles where traditionally children were a nuisance.
Charles Spencer, less than 20 years older than Kate, has a new book out about being sent to a brutalising boarding school when he was just eight. Times have changed, but the legacy of the upper class’s complicity in damaging their young by dispatching them to miserable boarding schools remains. In that milieu Kate’s hands-on mothering must seem odd, if not deranged.
HER perfectionist streak also sets her apart from the silver-spoon brigade whose terrific sense of entitlement means that no self-improvement is ever thought necessary. Kate’s elegant figure, her pristine but slightly staid wardrobe – even her earnest piano-playing in public – must seem hideously tryhard and middle class to a bunch of toffs who wear ragged jumpers as a badge of honour.
The fiasco of Kategate may baffle the land that gave birth to the treasured Irish Mammy. But it also encapsulates motifs of the rigid British class system and its arcane rules that are thankfully just as foreign on this side of the
Irish Sea.