In the Duchess Olympics, Kate gets the gold

MY GOLD medal for 2020, if there were a Duchess Olympics, would be pinned on the uncomplaining chest of the Duchess of Cambridge. The past year has shown that Kate can ride the turbulent waters on the Windsor flume of fame and still keep her wits about her.

She can soar over the hurdles of royal scandal, jump clear of the whiny affronts lobbed her way from Team Sussex and somehow accomplish it all with a smile and a wave, while the world’s most perfect blowdry remains intact.

Look at that thing! Is it carved from teak and glossed with gossamer by 1,000 hair elves on the minimum wage? How does it stay just so, even when she is toasting marshmallows with Scouts or playing hockey or attending a banquet in a gilded palace?

And how does she do it all? With grit, quiet determination and a tailwind of Elnett Max Strength, I suspect.

Whether baking cakes with Mary Berry or colour co-ordinating her husband and her children in a rhapsody of blues for various photo opportunities, Kate has emerged as a perfectionist, a duchess of steel.

She is clearly a stickler, a woman whose cushions are always plumped and who never puts a foot wrong in her immaculate suede heels.

FROMJigsaw to international draw, has any other lowly outsider embedded themselves so successfully into their royal role as this middle-class former accessories buyer from Buckinghamshire? It is pretty remarkable, when you think about it. Most royal wives and husbands are drawn from the empathetic ranks of the aristocracy, while the lower born rarely fare thee well at the royal court.

Princess Anne’s brace of husbands kept to the shadows, while the Countess of Wessex keeps a relatively low profile and an endless collection of twinsets and sensible skirts at her Bagshot Park digs.

Fergie seems to have found a fitting role for herself, wearing silly hats and reading children’s stories out loud every afternoon — shush, I know, but let’s just leave her be.

Meanwhile, the short tenure of the Sussexes was ended by their piping hot sense of pique and failure to understand royal protocol and the hierarchy stitched into the line of succession like an impregnable ermine flounce.

As we know, a chilly antipathy now exists between the two commoner duchesses following a battle for status within royal circles — a battle that only one woman could win: she who will be Queen.

How insufferable it must have been for Kate to read the petty slights in Finding Freedom: the Sussexes biography in which she is accused of not ‘ reaching out’ to Meghan and once failing to give her sister-in-law a lift to the shops.

But the Duchess of Cambridge has risen above all this nonsense, neither complaining nor explaining and just getting on with the job. The only indication of her true feelings was her glacial demeanour at Westminster Abbey in March, her little red hat set to battle stations as she ignored the traitorous Harry and Meghan on their last public appearance as royals.

HOW I wished for a court painter like Holbein to do justice to this scene of magnificent royal seethe as the Duchess of Cambridge sailed down the nave, froideur incarnate in her red velvet cuffs.

These days she has been getting down to the meat and potatoes of royal life; holding an audience with President volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and First Lady Olena Zelenska at Buckingham Palace; donning an enviable Alexander McQueen trouser suit to announce the Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards; and meeting medical experts at the Institute of Reproductive and Developmental Biology at Imperial College London.

She seemed typically thrilled to be doing all of this while even managing to look fabulous in a white lab coat; no mean feat.

To be honest, I used to think that Kate was a bit boring, but have now had to reconsider and reshuffle my pack of royal favourites. In this modern world, amid the turbulence on social media and the clamour to matter, the Duchess of Cambridge manages to care about issues without making the issue about herself.

She pitches an image of intelligent interest in a cause instead of exuding howling self-interest and always hits the right note of raising public awareness instead of grabbing the moral high ground and lecturing the public. Unlike other royals I could mention.

Speaking of which, the defection of Harry and Meghan has had enormous implications for her family, leaving the Cambridges with a heavier burden. But she bears all this with a slightly wintry smile.

Of course she has help — and lots of it — but achieves all the above while being a hands-on mother. She’s no saint — who is? — but to have remained visible, cheerful and elegant throughout this difficult time makes her my duchess of the year.

Arise, D of C. You deserve it!