‘Deeply human’: Touching new Kate photos reveal princess’ post-cancer transformation
New photos of the Princess of Wales has shown off a major change as the 42-year-old royal mum of three gets back to work.
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I have no firm source here, but I’d wager that the first recorded royal hug, at least since Elizabeth I got all dewy-eyed around Lord Robert Dudley, was at some point in the early 80s involving a pie-frill-collared, fawnlike Diana, Princess of Wales.
Her legacy, today, truly lives on.
Kate, the Princess of Wales has been photographed back at work for the first time since announcing last month that she had finished chemotherapy.
The two new images, shared to her and husband Prince William’s social media accounts, show her meeting with 16-year-old photographer Liz Hatton, who has a rare form of cancer.
At first glance, you might think it’s a blessed, refreshing harking back to the BC times, before cancer made its grossly unwanted interruption into the royal storyline. In one of the new shots, there Kate is in one of her usual contempo business get-ups, looking just as she used to, like a mid-level Deloitte associate slightly rigidly posing for the company round robin.
However, look closer. Look again. Look at the leading image, the choice of which I’d say was no accident.
This is not the Old Kate we are seeing, but a woman who would seem to have been changed by the gruelling, dare I venture hellish, year she has just had.
The image that Kensington Palace chose to lead Thursday’s post with was not one of stiff faces all in their good clothes but of two women, both enduring and having endured cancer, connecting on a deeply human and real level.
Sometimes a hug is a helluva lot more than a hug.
There is only so far I can scroll back on Instagram before I get a cramp or do myself some sort of thumb injury but I was unable to find any sort of similar post that showed the princess embracing someone with whom she had just held an official event.
We can also do a bit of comparing and contrasting.
In May 2021, Kate met with five-year-old leukaemia patient Mila Sneddon, the little girl’s photo having appeared in Hold Still, a lockdown-era photography project. Later that same year, the princess invited Mila and her family to her inaugural Christmas carol concert.
Yes, it was still Covid times but still, even a hand pat was not offered up. Such was the Windsor Way. (Said without criticism, mind).
Back then, there were no arms being thrown around, no physical contact, nothing to show a princess who knew all too well the pain and sadness and fear of a cancer diagnosis.
What we are really seeing on Thursday is not a straightforward reversion to normal for the mother-of-three, the predictable politesse that was so often the hallmark of official Wales engagements, but a new version of the princess entirely.
Consider the people she generally meets while on official business and the places she goes.
Children, nursery schools, mothers, fathers, babies, toddlers, the occasional maternity unit,
baby banks. These are all places where a bit of a quick squeeze, a moment of human contact, even a shoulder pat here or there would not have been out of place.
And yes, there was the occasional quick but rare instance, like when Kate went to open a new day surgery unit at a London children’s hospital when she met someone briefly overcome with emotion.
However, that December moment was a notable exception, Kate literally keeping a hitherto entirely acceptable and understandable degree of professionalism going while on the manoeuvres. She was there on business, not to put on displays of public caring.
And then came 2024 and its nasty surprise.
Today, we should be looking back at a year that saw the Princess of Wales cover serious new ground with her marquee Early Years Foundation, see her talk about mental health with great gusto and do some two-handed international flag-waving for Crown Inc on a major royal tour with her newly-bearded husband.
There would probably have been some glorious new frocks trotted out, heavy on the wow, heavy on the dazzle, maybe Kate in a rarely seen tiara from the vault at the South Korean State Banquet, the princess earning reams of approving column inches for picking up the slack after King Charles’ own cancer diagnosis.
Instead, Kate has spent the year showing an astonishing degree of vulnerability and emotion, sharing videos and statements about this most personal of devastating experiences, all the while with her emotions so very close to the surface and her humanity just under the skin.
That shift would seem to have carried over into her easing back into her royal and public life.
The princess has twice in recent weeks featured in the Court Circular, the official record of royal engagements, signposting that the 42-year-old is clearly well enough to get back to work. Time for some blessed same-old.
Except the Princess of Wales we have seen today on the Kensington Palace social media accounts is coming across a changed woman, the immutable, irreversible mark of cancer having not only altered her as a person, but the way she will go about the business of princess-ing.
The princess might look the same – oh, those natty coloured suits of hers – but the woman inside them would appear to be changed, made over.
And this Kate?
If ever there was a woman who would have grasped her, unabashedly thrown her arms around her, who would have understood heartache and pain, it would have been Diana.
Now that – THAT – would have been a hug that would echo down the ages.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles
Originally published as ‘Deeply human’: Touching new Kate photos reveal princess’ post-cancer transformation
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