Shame on baying mob who hounded Princess

Mrs M R Mills, Denby Dale.

I wonder how many of the baying mob, who believed themselves so clever to have discovered and called out the ‘trickery’ connected to Catherine, Princess of Wales’s Mother’s Day photograph, have received a cancer diagnosis themselves. I suspect very few.

If they had had such devastating news, throwing their hitherto comfortable and predictable little lives into chaos, one hopes they might have behaved better in their pursuit of Kate and her children.

I can speak with some authority about this as I have had a cancer diagnosis myself and, almost 30 years later, I cannot forget the impact of that diagnosis on my life at the time.

I had a family, a full-time teaching job and I had rarely had a day of illness in my life. The news was completely unexpected if not, in the early stages at least, totally unbelievable.I really thought there must be some mistake, this could not be happening to me and I was totally numb at the thought of what lay ahead.

My way of dealing with it, and this was common among my fellow cancer sufferers, to whom I offered peer support afterwards as their cancer journey started and progressed, was to retreat into myself, cutting myself off mentally from friends and family – even colleagues at work – who, it was clear, were embarrassed and had no idea how to approach me.

I was very much like an injured animal licking its wounds. I emerged from this self-imposed privacy and solitude only as my own cancer journey started, finally feeling able to face the world once more and accept whatever the future offered.

My own experience will demonstrate, I believe, the real damage done by the baying mob in denouncing and ‘killing’ Kate’s photograph. Her three young children will, I know, be finding it hard to understand their mother’s illness and looking for some normality and security in their suddenly insecure lives.

Kate sought to give them this by releasing a beautiful and happy photograph of her with them, her children, for Mother’s Day. What could be more normal and secure than that? Unfortunately, normality and security were of no interest to the mob, who preferred to consider only the photograph’s technical detriments.

I cannot even start to imagine the impact the outraged hubbub by the mob had on Kate, whose only motive in releasing the photograph, I believe, was to offer her children a little reassurance that she was there with them on Mother’s Day, smiling and happy, and that things were, and would continue to be, ‘normal’.

It was a simple message, an act of good faith and courage on her part at what must be a very bleak time. That our sanctimonious press, social media and metropolitan elite should continue for so many days to pursue the matter (and Kate), and that it dominated the national news throughout, was unbelievable and totally unacceptable.

Kate was incredibly brave to have taken to the media herself to finally explain something which, under normal circumstances, should have needed no public explanation. She was forced into a situation which no person confronting cancer should have to face, thanks to the baying mob’s self-righteous belief that they have ‘a right to know’.