Surely Kate has given enough already?

Lechery

NOTHER week, another naked royal. After Prince Harry’s strip billiards, the Duchess of Cambridge has something she wants to get off her chest. Or rather, the French magazine Closer has done it for her.

This week’s issue boasts topless photos of the duchess holidaying with Prince William on a private estate in the Luberon area of Provence, taken with a long lens by a lurking photographer who the couple were entirely unaware of. The editor of the celeb rag, Laurence Pieau, has gone so far as to promise nipples. She added that the shots in the magazine might help Prince Harry feel less alone.

I don’t often feel much sympathy for the duchess. You won’t find me wringing my hands at how exhausting her schedule must be, at how taxing it probably is being that smiley all the time, how damn hard life is when you’re expected to be coiffed every time you leave the house.

And I certainly didn’t feel sorry for in-the-buff Prince Harry when his own mortification of the flesh occurred earlier this month: you get drunk with a bunch of strangers in LA and you take your life, not to mention your crown jewels, into your hands.

But Kate, sunning in the privacy of another rich person’s home, has not brought any of this on herself. This is simply not part of the deal. We see plenty of her already, without needing her to be paraded through newsagents and shopping malls uncovered. It’s a total violation. It’s prurience taken to sickening extremes. It’s “grotesque and totally unjustifiable”, to quote the palace’s statement.

Oh, well, you might say, it’s the French – what do you expect? The nation that uses breasts to sell everything from fishing wire to septic tanks can have no true understanding of how invasive it must be to have oneself splashed across the media without one’s consent.

French women practically go topless on the school run, so what’s the problem? No. Just no. A climate of lechery doesn’t negate common decency. And that a female editor can be quite so blasé, quite so voyeuristically vile, about the whole business is doubly grotesque.

The female body belongs far too much to everyone else as it is, and not just in France. There are breasts everywhere, it seems, a backdrop to modern existence. In ads, on magazine covers; here a gratuitous décolletage, there a pneumatic cleavage.

It’s horribly retrograde to stalk and secretly snap away like this at a time when press ethics and privacy are so much in the court of public opinion. Not only that but a massive drop in sales of these sorts of fame-focused grotmags has meant a recent retrenchment from their ilk, cutting back pages and pages of celebrity gossip to something that sits more comfortably under the “lifestyle” tag in WH Smith.

But the duchess is arguably one of the most famous women in the world, certainly one of the most photographed. And there’s the rub: has she not given enough already? It chokes me to say it. I don’t mean her slavish devotion to us plebs, reading out wooden speeches in a glottal monotone, opening schools or having her picture taken digging some sort of boring communal garden in which she can’t possibly take any real interest. I mean that, even before this debacle, Kate had virtually no private life to speak of anyway.

The parallel is obvious. It was unwanted and unregulated press attention, and the relentless pursuit – quite literally – of Prince William’s mother by French paparazzi that led to her death. And now he sees the cycle begin anew with his wife.

Thankfully, the public seems more protective of this princess than that one. We have learned our lesson perhaps, having devoured pictures of Diana, and we know now that our curiosity is sinister, smothering, even deadly. To indulge it, is to encourage the sort of lurid coverage that no one in their right mind could argue was in the public interest.

Otherwise, it’s the equivalent of using a pair of binoculars to watch the girl next door undress: tempting, but something you should have got over a while ago. – The Independent