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Kate changes Monarchy in three minutes with video from Meghan playbook

The Princess of Wales has just pulled off an unthinkable coup for the crown by stealing directly from Meghan’s playbook.

Princess Kate completes chemotherapy | Top Stories | From the Newsroom

If news.com.au has a capital letter budget, today’s the day we blow it all in one appropriately zealous, feverish binge. SHE’S BACK.

Alert the heralds and someone, somewhere please raise a buckling-under-the-symbolism flag: After months of chemotherapy, Kate, the Princess of Wales’ cancer treatment is finally over and she’s beginning the slow, steady climb back to public life.

HALLE-BLOODY-LUJAH!! (Hang there’s not an exclamation mark budget too, is there?)

Moreover, this brilliant news came on Tuesday with the most unbelievably personal, heartfelt and powerful bit of royal messaging since anyone bothered to start writing their speeches down on a bit of deer hide.

In the space of a three-minute, six-second video shot by filmmaker Will Warr at Kate and Prince William’s Norfolk home Anmer Hall (and co-starting said prince and their three kids), the princess revealed, “I cannot tell you what a relief it is to have finally completed my chemotherapy treatment.”

Elizabeth I would have been unimpressed by the Princess of Wales’ lack of rigid valour, Queen Victoria harrumphingly censorious of so many horribly common feelings and Queen Mary shaken that a future crown-wearer would do anything so vulgar as sitting on a log in full public view. IMAGINE.

Kate said she and Prince William are 'grateful' for the support they have received.
Kate said she and Prince William are 'grateful' for the support they have received.

However, in the three minutes of this video, Kate has just pulled off something that ardent royalists and temperate supporters and communications undergraduates will still be obsessing over and analysing when they are sitting for lectures delivered via hologram.

The way the Princess of Wales has handled this year might just have saved the monarchy, at least from any growing republican rumblings or burbling resentment of Crown Inc in the meritorious 21st century.

What Kate’s cancer has meant, besides royal correspondents and writers suddenly having to start using the word ‘journey’ without gagging slightly, is that it has transformed the monarchy from an institution underpinned by a certain emotional austerity and remoteness into something powerfully human and mortal.

To some degree King Charles’ cancer diagnosis has played a part in this too, but only a teeny, tiny fraction compared to the fundamental and profound way the princess’ openness throughout this year has.

In the video’s voiceover, Kate says, “This time has above all reminded William and me to reflect and be grateful for the simple yet important things in life, which so many of us often take for granted. Of simply loving and being loved.”

Catherine, Princess of Wales, walking in a field. Picture: Will Warr/Kensington Palace/AFP
Catherine, Princess of Wales, walking in a field. Picture: Will Warr/Kensington Palace/AFP

This could all have seemed very schmaltzy or artificially saccharine except that it’s actually deeply moving. I literally got chills watching this and I’d hazard that I am not alone. (Anyone bluntly unmoved by watching this video should immediately submit themselves for testing for psychopathy.)

Kate never had to do any of this. A Princess of Wales could have easily gotten away with a slightly brusque statement announcing her cancer and retreated fully, retreating behind the signature royal bulwark of stiff letterhead and the ready deployment of the third person.

She didn’t have to film a deeply personal message, sitting on a Windsor garden bench, the background spring daffs a discordant bit of vibrancy, announcing she had cancer in March. She didn’t have to, in June, pen and release a statement telling us she was having “good days and bad days”. And she didn’t need to let a film crew into the Waleses’ most private spaces and home and family life to capture and show not only them but the prince and princess’ marriage in such an incredibly intimate way.

This year, Kate has taken us, the people, to a previously unthinkable degree, on the journey with her; rather than tried and tested excluding the world she has included us in a way to and to an extent that no one could have predicted.

The Princess of Wales smiles inside the Glass State Coach on her way to Horse Guards Parade for the King's Birthday Parade "Trooping the Colour" in London on June 15, 2024. Picture: Henry Nicholls / AFP
The Princess of Wales smiles inside the Glass State Coach on her way to Horse Guards Parade for the King's Birthday Parade "Trooping the Colour" in London on June 15, 2024. Picture: Henry Nicholls / AFP

Kate has shown incredible vulnerability and a willingness to fight her fight in public view in a a way no member of the royal family ever has before.

What the princess has done is to make herself emotionally accessible in an unheard of and groundbreaking way. Really what I suppose it comes down to is the mother-of-three has placed her trust in us and in doing so has reworked the emotional contract that exists between Buckingham Palace and its subjects.

It’s unthinkable that we would be here today having this conversation without a certain couple who are now busy off fermenting their own soy paste in Montecito. From the forceful statement Prince Harry released in 2016 after Meghan Markle (now obviously the Duchess of Sussex) to all six hours (but who’s counting?) of Harry and Meghan, the Sussexes were the original trailblazers for this sort of open and very human style of connecting with the world.

It was the duke and duchess who pioneered this sort of soft-focused visual language and who were willing to take the great leap towards offering up this sort of social media intimacy.

It cannot be a coincidence that in April 2020, in the dust-settling months after Megxit, William and Kate picked up David Watkins, who had been the Sussexes digital communications lead. A year later, in April 2021, we got the first of these sorts of Volvo ad-like videos starring the Wales family, in that instance to mark their tenth wedding anniversary.

In the years since then, the prince and princess’ social media output has only gotten slicker and higher of sheen and what the couple shares has morphed from blunt, staccato updates with all the warmth and familiarity of a wartime telegram to evocative and at times emotional messaging.

Meghan and Harry, pictured in Colombia in August, were trailblazers of sorts. Picture: Colombian Vice Presidency/ Andres Castilla/AFP
Meghan and Harry, pictured in Colombia in August, were trailblazers of sorts. Picture: Colombian Vice Presidency/ Andres Castilla/AFP

This all amounts to some ‘saves the day, the future, the institution’ brilliant footwork right there.

Recently, the late Queen’s longtime groom and good friend Terry Pendry gave a lengthy interview to the Telegraph, suggesting that Her late Majesty’s health battle might have begun as early as four years before her death in 2022. (It has been reported the late monarch was suffering from a form of bone marrow cancer when she died.)

The world was never told any of this, nor even Pendry who spent hours every week one-on-one and alone with the late Queen as they rode out across Windsor Home Park. The only way he knew that something was wrong was because “she was getting lighter and lighter and frailer and frailer.”

Kate has swapped out that famed (and only deeply traumatising) stiff upper lip and repressive instincts for a whole new approach. She has demonstrated a very particular sort of bravery in being remarkably upfront and open that has not only earnt her untold affection, but more importantly from a bluntly pragmatic point of view, the public’s respect.

World War II was the making of the Queen Mother, taking her from a woman who was the walking personification of a cucumber sandwich and triple Dubonnet on ice to a figurehead of resolute British pluck in the face of the Nazi onslaught. She stayed the course and showed she had an iron backbone, even when bombs were falling on the Palace’s back lawn.

Kate revealed to the world she was fighting cancer in a video earlier this year.
Kate revealed to the world she was fighting cancer in a video earlier this year.

Over the course of this year, Kate has just managed to pull off the same thing but in a thoroughly modern fashion.

While the early months of 2024 saw a series of stumbles from Kensington Palace, like William’s last minute backing out of his godfather King Constantine’s memorial service thus immediately switching on all and every alarm bell, and Kate’s unfortunately amateurish Photoshopping of that Mother’s Day photo, from today’s perspective really Kate has played a blinder this year.

The Princess of Wales has, by and large, figured out a way to princess in the 21st century that feels thoroughly modern but also true to herself.

During the war, the Queen Mother wrote to her mother-in-law and after one particular Luftwaffe bombing, added a PS: “Dear old B.P is still standing and that is the main thing.”

In 2024, Kate has managed to ensure “dear old B.P” will stand for a hell of a long 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.

Original URL: https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/royals/kate-changes-monarchy-in-three-minutes-with-video-from-meghan-playbook/news-story/b6acf505a0ce9d34151c1bb4dfae1f33