The public’s dissection of Kate Middleton reveals us at our ugliest
own illness – reveals us at our ugliest. We are, it would appear, still a nation of tricoteuses spoiling for an execution.
Our ability to “other” those in the public eye is not confined to royalty. When Nicola Bulley went missing in January 2023, she and her family were reduced to a murder-mystery plotline by true crime fans testing their mettle as amateur sleuths.
So persistent was their prodding, so wild their surmising, Lancashire Police were forced to reveal details of Nicola’s mental health that were none of our damned business.
Anti-climax
WHEN it emerged she had (as detectives always maintained) fallen into the river and drowned, there was a sense of anticlimax, as if the scriptwriters of a bingeable box set had messed up the finale. But the free-for-all around Kate was worse and more mainstream. Many of those who baulked at the dehumanisation of an ordinary woman from St Michael’s on Wyre had no qualms about implying Kate had been abused and/or was filing for divorce.
Or that she had undergone plastic surgery, or was in a coma, or that William was having an affair. Feminists felt able to join in the fun. Why? Because Kate relinquished her membership of the sisterhood when she married William? Because she may (or may not) have been mean to Meghan?
With so much awfulness going on in the world, we crave a diversion and I get that. It’s why we all went crazy over an escaped macaque, and why memes of the woeful Willy Wonka experience were circulating long after the joke had run its course. But our light relief oughtn’t to come from exploiting someone else’s distress. That’s what they were doing, those podcasters who tilted their heads in a parody of concern before going on to remind us – nudge, nudge – of William’s temper.
“We hope what the palace says is true,” they gushed.
“We hope Kate really *is* recovering from routine surgery.” Yet what a waste that would have been of all the energy they had ploughed into suggesting otherwise. I wonder how they felt watching her heartfelt video: vindicated or repentant?
Relentless probing
WE can kid ourselves that all we were looking for was transparency, but it’s hard to conceive of the circumstances that would have justified such relentless probing.
Just because Charles and Diana lived out every cough and splutter of their lives in the public eye does not mean William and Kate should be required to follow suit.
What good did the world discussing Diana’s bulimia or the couple’s waging of a public propaganda war do them or their sons, who still carry the scars to this day? What good did it do us?
If you believe – as I do – that the country would be a better, more equitable place without a monarchy, then make that argument on its own merits.
But don’t take your frustration out on a woman in crisis, a woman trying to protect her children in a way their father never was.
All the speculation has achieved is to heighten the risk that the damage inflicted on William and Harry will be handed down to the next generation.
In her essay, Mantel suggested Kate had been chosen as William’s bride because she was so different to Diana “whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture”.
She said Kate seemed “capable of going from perfect bride to perfect mother, with no messy deviation”. But anyone can break under the right sort of pressure.
How shameful that – almost 27 years after Diana’s death – we have continued to chase her successor through metaphorical underpasses.
How odd and unedifying, this enduring impulse to destroy royal women so we can later anoint them queens of our hearts.
How shameful that – almost 27 years after Diana’s death – we have continued to chase her successor through metaphorical underpasses