Palace makes huge Kate Middleton call
A date was set for Princess of Wales’ return but some troubling details have surfaced that add even more mystery to her condition.
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COMMENT
The saying goes, “the lunatics have taken over the asylum”. Have the terminally incompetent or the chronically inept taken over Kensington Palace?
Gosh darn it’s been a bad week for the dozens and dozens of staffers tasked with keeping the good ship Prince William and Kate the Prince and Princess of Wales afloat. Their primaries, as they are known, have disappeared behind the security cordon of Windsor Great Park, with the princess continuing to recover from planned abdominal surgery and with the prince on tender spousal nursemaid duty.
(Given that previous Kings have beheaded, murdered, exiled, banished and occasionally just locked up in a remote Welsh castle their wives, William gets a massive tick of approval.)
But all of this peaceful recuperating – blankets tucked over knees, chicken soup sent over from the Michelin-starred Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons and long naps under blankets hand-loomed for Queen Mary – has been grossly derailed by people in suits.
Tuesday, UK time, brought the third screw up in the space of seven days for Team Kensington Palace before they were refused to confirm if Kate would be back at work by June.
What happened was, on Tuesday morning the UK’s Ministry of Defence website announced that Kate, in her capacity as Colonel of the Irish Guards, would be doing the official inspection of the regimental troops on June 8, as part of Trooping the Colour and put tickets for the event on sale. They even started at a bargain fiver.
“Hurrah!” the internet and the press cheered. Celebratory crumpet anyone?
A definitive date had now been set for the Princess of Wales to get back to being an ornamental symbol of monarchy on formal State occasions. Pip pip!
The prospect of the 42-year-old in a very nice frock with a very nice hat and wearing a lot of very nice bits of jewellery worth about the price of a semi in Hull was all a bit of rallying good news.
Enter Kensington Palace who then turned up to rain on the military’s parade. Hours after the MoD website went up and those tickets went on sale, it became clear that the MoD had gotten a bit too excited and been too hasty, forcing the palace into the position where it had to comment on when the world might see Kate plus hat again.
The terse (I’m assuming) response: The palace would not confirm whether Kate would be well enough to be a part of the event on June 8.
An official announcement as to her participation would only be made, sources told the Times,
“as and when a final decision is made”.
The palace not being able or willing to confirm Kate’s attendance at an event that involves a few hours of standing, carriage-riding and waving in June – three months from now is unsettling stuff. It is already seven weeks on from the princess’ surgery and five weeks since she left hospital.
And if Trooping is Kate’s first post-surgery engagement it would come a full two months after her original slated return to work date. (In January the palace was busy saying that she would be off until after Easter.)
Maybe the palace is simply just being overly cautious and the Princess of Wales will be back in the royal saddle next month as originally mooted. Or maybe it’s worry bead time.
Sometimes I wonder how Crown Inc. has managed to hold onto the throne for longer than the Roman Empire existed. Sheer bloody luck by the crate load?
This mess comes after last week’s William balls up. Slated to give a reading at his godfather Tino’s (that’s King Constantine of the Hellenes to you and I) memorial service being held walking distance away in Windsor, instead the prince bunked off with less than an hour to spare, blaming a mysterious “personal matter”.
Conclusions were jumped to faster than Princess Anne at second-hand horseshoe sale that Kate’s condition must be far worth Team Wales was letting on and that she had taken a turn for the worse. Ominous background music swelled.
What ensued was a bout of collective hysteria and delusions of palace misinformation and manoeuvring that researchers would do well to start studying, post haste. A wildfire of mistrust, speculation and fidget fretting engulfed Kensington Palace and it crackles on still.
Even the emergence of a paparazzi photo of Kate being driven by her mother Carole Middleton in Windsor didn’t manage to tamp down the furore, and instead only gave rise to a fresh crop of conspiracy theories, including that “Kate” was really sister Pippa Matthews, was a body double or even, get this, a wax figure.
(Side note: The royal family has access to the British military, all the branches of the secret service and is always popping up at Pinewood Studios to pose with an occasional Wookie. If the House of Windsor really wanted to pull a fast one over the public and to trick everyone, they would have done a much better job.)
These messes – the “personal matter”, the website, the Kate photo – can perhaps be put down to human error or coincidence or crossed wires. But that doesn’t change the fact that all of this bungling is hardly building confidence and trust in the monarchy now is it?
Today, Kensington Palace appears to have lost control of the narrative around Kate’s sick leave. Things are a shambles and there is now the prospect that the princess might be off sick for months still. Disaster, meet dynasty. Dynasty, meet debacle.
I hope Le Manoir is ready to, potentially, make a hell of a lot more soup and for a while yet.
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 Palace makes huge Kate Middleton call
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