Kate and William’s break up saved her from Meghan failure
By dumping Kate Middleton, Prince William unwittingly ensured she would make a huge success of royal life later on.
COMMENT
Of all the Kates we’ve seen – Kate the Dignified Future Queen, Kate the Dedicated Photography Student, Kate the Hardworking Humanitarian, Kate the Tired Mum Who Just Wants A Huge Glass of Pinot Grigio and To Watch Bridgerton – my personal favourite has always been Kate the Single Girl.
This week marks the anniversary of Prince William ending things with his girlfriend of four years in 2007 thus giving us the glorious, brief reign of Queen Kate of Mayfair Nightclubs, a period when she and sister Pippa were regulars at the city’s most exclusive haunts.
There, Kate did what any sensible woman in her position would do: Go out and spend $32 a pop on pina coladas and show the sorry bloke what he was missing.
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At the time, the university sweethearts’ split seemed like a tragedy, that the world and Britain’s commemorative tea towel industry would be denied the Cinderella story we had all been promised.
Happily, things clearly turned out differently and the fairytale got back on track (quick! Restart the souvenir production lines!) but in the wake of Megxit I think those two months can be seen in a totally new light.
In fact, those two or so months might just have saved Kate from the heartache and struggle that another normal-woman-turned-duchess would face a decade later.
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See, when William and Kate got back together in June of that year, a moment which was cemented when he invited her to a Freakin’ Naughty–themed fancy dress party and she reportedly turned up dressed as a nurse in fishnets, they started to have Very Serious Conversations about where everything was going.
Within two months of all their romantic, cough, reunion the couple flew to the Seychelles for a getaway where, according to royal biographer Katie Nicholl, “For the very first time they talked seriously about marriage” and made a pact that they would tie the knot one day.
What their brief split had ultimately achieved was to help the couple decide that things were only going to end in one place: Them in front of the Archbishop of Canterbury, location TBD.
But what is crucial here is that by that August holiday, Kate not only knew where her relationship was headed but her life.
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She understood that marriage to William would mean far more than ending up with a husband for whom male pattern baldness was a certainty, or that she would have to spend every August from then until eternity in the wilds of Scotland pretending she loved fly fishing.
She understood that marriage to William meant accepting a future where she would be Queen, a life wholly dedicated to the Crown with all of the personal sacrifice that entailed.
In making that choice to get back together she was willingly and consciously relinquishing the freedoms of civilian life and accepting a life where instead she would be governed by strictures and rules not of her own making.
Basically, she went into the befuddling, eccentric enterprise that is monarchy with her eyes wide open to the demands and the personal sacrifices it would require.
None of which can be said for Meghan Markle.
It took less than 18 months for her and Prince Harry to go from their first date at Dean Street Townhouse to standing in Kensington Palace’s Sunken Garden for their engagement photocell, a period of time during which the happy couple lived on separate continents.
When Meghan pitched up in London in November 2017 it was to move straight into Harry’s then Kensington Palace home ‘Nott Cott’ – straight, that is, into the belly of the gilded beast.
There was no gradual introduction for the former actress, no considered, strategic immersion into what must be a strange, baffling world governed by a set of unspoken rules that no one ever took the time to explain to her.
By the time in 2017 she had moved her collection of Gianvitto Rossi heels and Instagram-worthy crystals (I’m guessing) into the Nott Cott wardrobe, what she had essentially done was signed on for a new life and job, the reality of which she had scant idea about.
Meghan went into this grand enterprise in love and buoyed, it seemed, by a hunger to use her new global platform for good, only for all that optimism and rose tinted- euphoria to crash headlong into the reality of what palace life was actually like.
A life that involved hordes of courtiers and staff being involved in countless decisions, a life where an armed security detail was ever-present and a life where her choices and agency were suddenly severely limited.
While in the real world Harry was the dashing, beloved prince, in their cloistered private world he had to take his place behind his father and brother, a precedence which would govern his life forevermore.
I wonder if, and when, the gilded fantasy gave way for Meghan, when it twigged how much of royal life involves enduring stultifying, mind-numbing official events without dozing off and that the pomp and ceremony and the chance to wear a purloined Russian tiara is actually only a minority of a royal life.
In retrospect, what Kate’s break from William gave her was a cooling-off period, it gave her perspective and breathing room to consider if being with William was the life – not the relationship, but the life – she wanted.
Meghan and Harry, blinded perhaps by love, instead raced towards the altar at breakneck pace in a delicious whirl of dopamine and joy only for that happiness to collide, painfully, with the actuality of what their married life looked like.
Married life which, per last year’s pro-Sussex biography Finding Freedom, meant dealing with their lower their place in the palace pecking order than the Cambridges; a married life that meant amped press scrutiny and criticism and relentless public interest.
In hindsight, Meghan’s royal journey was one of extremes: Of the highest highs and the lowest lows. She never had that moment of repose, as emotionally traumatic as it must have been for Kate, to take a step back and to appraise her royal future and to make a decision about what sort of life she – and Harry – really wanted. (After all, that line-of-succession thing meant they had choices and options that William and Kate have never had.)
With a new poll this week finding nearly 50 per cent of Brits want William to succeed his grandmother, thus skipping over poor old Prince Charles, we might be seeing a new Kate sooner than anyone thought; Vale, once and for all, Queen Kate of Overpriced Drinks and all rise for Queen Kate the Eternally Savvy.
Daniela Elser is a royal expert and writer with more than 15 years experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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