Why Kate is set to ‘bail on Windsor
The Princess of Wales is on the move, according to a new report, but don’t expect to see her anywhere in public.
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There is a certain generation of 90s kids who possess the useless but particular skill set required to play Where In The World is Carmen Sandiago? on a computer the size of a bar mini-fridge for hours after school.
This year has seen a toxic version of this game spawned for a whole new generation in the form of Where in the World is Kate!?
The answer to that question today is somewhere in, or around the Windsor Great Park where she, husband Prince William and their three primary-school aged kids live in domestic bliss and ring-of-steel security.
However, the Wales famille is on the move, with a friend of the prince and princess having revealed to The Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes that they are set to “bail out” of their chocolate boxy Adelaide Cottage.
Their destination: Their Georgian manor house in Norfolk, finally somewhere where they can really get a decent game of hide and seek going, at least for the duration of the upcoming half term break.
A friend of the couple told Sykes: “The key thing for her now is avoiding any kind of stress or anxiety and just getting on with the business of getting better. They will bail out and be off to Sandringham the moment school breaks up.”
After months of few, if any, dry crumbs of information about Kate’s status, Sykes’ most recent reporting has come up with a series of much more sizable bites of news.
News like, Kate is on the move north, but nowhere near anything like the public. And news like, and far more significantly, that the Princess of Wales’ diary for the rest of the year is in a truly extraordinary state. Empty.
The weekend just past marked five months exactly since the princess put on a nice slick of her favourite eyeliner to undertake her last official duty, namely not yawning her way through a Christmas morning church service in December 2023.
That eyeliner will be staying, neglected, in her currently unused makeup bag for a while yet.
A source has told the Beast: “Lots of people involved in planning need to know what all the principals are doing a long way in advance. I am told that Kate’s diary for this year is empty. There is nothing planned. She may not appear in public for the rest of the year.”
If this is correct, that means 2024 might be the first year where the princess has not undertaken one official engagement. Not a one.
It feels like come a grey frosty afternoon in December this year, a pristine, unmarred by a single pen-stroke Smythson desk diary will be unceremoniously dumped in a wicker waste paper basket in a Kensington Palace office, untouched and totally unused.
If this is correct and we won’t see Kate out and about at all in 2024 out on official manoeuvres, it will be time to dust off the word ‘never’ and really put it to use.
Never before will such a senior working HRH have been wholly and utterly absent from public life for a full 12 months, if not more. Never before will a Princess of Wales have been shuttered away as she receives medical treatment for so long. Never before will a member of the royal family have so publicly battled such a serious illness.
You might have to go back to Queen Victoria in the 1860s who hied off to Scoltand to mope around Balmoral for decades after the sudden death of her beloved Bertie for a Windsor to have absented themselves for so long from the glare of public view.
(Though it must be noted that with Victoria, there came a point when the British people thoroughly got the pip with their maudlin Queen refusing to return to London to do some Queening, while there is near universal sympathy and understanding as for why Kate hasn’t clocked on this year.)
Realistically at this point I should be devoting more of my working day to finding some new ways of saying ‘extraordinary’ because this is precisely how things stand, and will most likely continue to, for a series stretch of time yet.
At this point last year, with the royal family riding high from the success of the coronation, to have suggested that Kate would vanish - hey presto! - from public life for a whole entire year would have been ludicrous verging on the Bedlam-worthy.
There was, I’m assuming, no contingency planning or crisis playbook that could or would ever foresee a situation where Kate (or William or King Charles who obviously also has cancer) ended up out-for-the-count for 12 months. It would have had to have been up there with worrying about a stray asteroid taking out Sandringham or preparing for what to do if Russian space junk rained down on the royal enclosure at Ascot.
Only, the wild, the outlandish and the astonishing have now happened. The Princess of Wales, per the Beast, could very well not be seen for the rest of the year, at which point it would seem advisable for someone with good eyesight to be positioned watching skywards to ensure a sputtering Sputnik cast off doesn’t hurtle into the Mall during Trooping the Colour next month.
For months now, William and Kate’s office would logically have to have been working out how to manage the princess’ patronages, charities, and large-scale initiatives - keeping-the-home-fires-burning stuff.
However in the grander scheme of things, things seem much less obvious or straightforward.
With Kate undergoing preventative chemotherapy, with William having scaled back his work for much of this year to support her and with the King also undergoing treatment, the end result is a series of hard-working - but fundamentally pallid - 60, 70 and 80-something HRHs left to push the royal barrow.
The timing further complicates matters.
The death of the late Queen represented a pivot point for the royal family to recast and refashion the monarchy for a new generation and century. This should be a moment when Crown Inc, having come through the other side of years of tumult and eyebrow-singing TV interviews and loss, should be relaunching themselves with vim and vigour and most importantly vision.
Instead, in the battle for hearts and minds the palace needs to be waging to solidify public support, they seem permanently on the back foot. Sykes’ revelations, that Kate is possibly out of the picture until 2025, makes this picture even more dire.
But lord, who knows. The way 2024 is going, we can’t discount any possibility or scenario, no matter how…oh no, here it comes…extraordinary it might sound.
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 Why Kate is set to ‘bail on Windsor
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