Inside Kate Middleton, Prince William’s week from hell
They’ve had three huge blows in the past week yet Prince William and Kate Middleton have hidden their anguish and stepped out in public.
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Being a member of the British royal family comes with plenty of perks: Small children are perpetually thrusting bouquets of flowers at you; enter adulthood and you will be given a stately pile to call your own and access Buckingham Palace’s vast underground wine cellar which contains $3.5 million worth of excellent plonk.
This week, perhaps for the first time in Windsor history, a bag full of fresh bagels from London’s famous Beigel Bake Brick Lane Bakery got added to that list.
With the northern summer winding down, it was time for William and Kate, Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, to get back to work. After all, there’s no rest for the wicked or anyone who is shackled to the exigencies of the sovereign grant.
The first item on the couple’s agenda this week was to try their hand at bagel making at the bakery and visiting a job centre and a mosque in the city’s east to hear how they have been faring during the pandemic.
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This outing was straight out of the Cambridges’ greatest hits file. Kate wore a pretty and demure frock, her trademark bouncy blow dry proof of what a lot of money and time can achieve, while William put on his best Listening Face and did some excellent nodding.
They smiled and wore face masks and were even caught by the attendant press sharing a personal moment when they were caught smiling at each other.
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And yet, despite this textbook-perfect engagement to mark their return to work, if you look beyond their smiles, this was a rubbish week for the Cambridges.
To start with there was Prince Harry’s 36th birthday on Tuesday. The Kensington Palace, Clarence House and Buckingham Palace social media teams all dutifully rolled out a series of warm posts about the Duke of Sussex, stuffing them with emojis and plenty of feel-good images of the Prince.
After a year of seismic upheaval and intra-family squabbling and rivalry dominating press coverage, here was a genuinely tender moment to try and repair their image.
But of course, it did not turn out that way. Social media commentators were quick to point out that Harry’s wife Meghan Duchess of Sussex was not in any of the images, interpreting her omission as a far-from-subtle slight on the part of the various royal houses. The story went global and for 24 hours, Meghan’s exclusion was the subject of frenzied discussion.
A quick but important side note here: There was absolutely nothing sinister in the fact the three lots of official royal birthday wishes for Harry did not feature Meghan. Traditionally, on a birthday, each royal house primarily shares images that highlight the ties between the duke/duchess in question with that house’s principal.
For example, the vast majority of the images shared to mark William’s birthday this year were of him with the Queen or Prince Charles. For Kate’s birthday, the photo gallery shared by the Buckingham Palace account included no images of William.
However, the very fact that there was such a media storm, erroneously or not, served to illustrate a much bigger point which is that, despite having set up shop on the US west coast a good 8750km away from London, the Harry and Meghan psychodrama will continue to loom over the palace.
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The reality is that no matter how hard William and Kate work, no matter how impeccable their performances, the couple faces having to live in the perpetual shadow cast by Harry and Meghan’s new Californian ‘court’.
In short, the Cambridges’ dull conscientiousness, in contrast to the far more gripping and twisty-turny Sussex ‘storyline’, means they will perpetually come in second in the public interest stakes.
Next up, Barbados! This week the Caribbean nation’s governor-general announced the country would remove the Queen as the head of state in 2021. When this move comes into effect, the country has been inching towards this for more than 20 years, it will reduce the number of countries of which the Queen is the head of state to 15.
The island nation might be only the first domino in the region to fall. The Telegraph reports that “experts said it was likely that other Caribbean nations would follow suit to become republics in due course, with Jamaica expected to declare itself next”.
All of which is bad news if your face happens to be on the currency or will be in the future.
Once travel restrictions are removed and it is safe to travel COVID-wise, thanks to the royal family’s dwindling frontline ranks, the responsibility of undertaking international tours to chivvy potential bolter nations from following suit will fall on William and Kate’s shoulders.
This is a prospect that must surely fill them with dread. As hands-on parents who do the school run, albeit with a sinister black Range Rover full of armed protection officers in tow, they seem highly unlikely to be willing to leave their young family with a retinue of nannies and sail off into the sunset.
Yet, on the other hand, as the future king and queen, they will face far increasing pressure to step up and shoulder more and more responsibility. (Factor in too that it is years since the Queen has undertaken a foreign tour and Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, are both in their 70s.) So, family vs country: That is the increasingly fraught highwire act that the Cambridges are going to have to walk in the years to come.
Lastly, but by no means the least, is the fact that Italian gossip magazine Chi managed to get their hands on a series of paparazzi pictures of Kate with her youngest child, two-year-old Prince Louis this week.
The shots are highly unusual, reportedly taken when Kate’s car (presumably driven by someone else) was stuck in traffic on a London bridge. At some stage, she got out of the car with Louis and the snaps show the Duchess holding her son as she showed him boats and tried to keep him entertained.
While Kensington Palace came to an understanding with the British press when Prince George was a baby about not buying or publishing any paparazzi images of the Cambridge kids taken without their parents’ knowledge that deal does not extend to press outside of the UK.
The images run by Chi are exactly the sort of shots that William and Kate have fought so hard to prevent. However, with global interest in the royal family reaching fever pitch, there is every chance that snappers working for international photo agencies or magazines will start to try and get more images such as these.
And, kids are unfortunately the ‘prey’ here. In the last month or so, European magazines have run images of Archie Mountbatten-Windsor playing in the garden with his grandmother in LA (now the subject of legal action taken by his parents) and an extensive number of shots of Princess Beatrice with her new husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and step son Wolfie taken while the trio was on holiday.
The Kate and Louis images are a reminder that no matter how much the Cambridges have worked to protect their kids, the more tabloid elements of the international press have put targets on their little back and there is only so much they can do to try and shield George, Charlotte and Louis from this sort of intrusion.
The unifying thread that runs through each of these issues – living in the long shadow of the Sussex soap opera, the increasing tension between duty and family and the possibility of a new pap feeding frenzy – is that none of these can or will be sorted out easily or fast.
In short, this week has offered us a series of dire portents about how much more complicated and stressful the Cambridge’s life might be about to get.
In previous years, William, Kate and the kids have jetted off to their favourite holiday destination Mustique to enjoy some serious lolling about. This year, they holidayed on the far-from-glam Isles of Scilly and made a brief trip to Scotland to be reunited with Gan Gan at Balmoral. (Family bike rides and insect bites, oh my!)
Here’s hoping that at some stage in the future they can feel that Caribbean warmth on their skin. With so many storm clouds on the horizon for the young family, they are going to need to make the most of the sunshine while they can.
Daniela Elser is a royal expert and writer with more than 15 years experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
Originally published as Inside Kate Middleton, Prince William’s week from hell