Kate Middleton’s Diana moment arrives in cancer announcement

On April 27, 1993 Diana transformed herself from beloved princess to true icon in less than 10 minutes — and now Kate has done the same.

The “three of us in the marriage” line. The revenge dress. That mournful solo Taj Mahal photo op. We all know by heart – by rote – the major beats of the story of Diana, Princess of Wales.

But in the oft-repeated, well-worn tale of the tragic royal, one key moment that is generally ignored is what took place on April 27, 1993 when Diana transformed herself from beloved princess to true icon in less than ten minutes.

On that day, Diana stood before the audience at Kensington Town Hall and spoke about bulimia, her speech emotional and clearly a deeply personal one. It was the first moment that the then 31-year-old, in her own words and her voice, shared her suffering with the world.

That fundamental aspect of Diana, her willingness to show people her own pain and her own trauma, to invite us into her most private, inner life (to some degree) and her willingness to embrace vulnerability, was the making of her as a mythic figure.

Over the last 48-hours, her daughter-in-law Catherine the Princess of Wales has just, wittingly or not, done the very same thing.

Diana, Princess of Wales, standing before the audience at Kensington Town Hall, speaking about bulimia. Picture: YouTube/ITN Archive

Kate’s first real Diana moment is here. What we have just seen her demonstrate her in two minute, 15 second video is the utter making of her.

In 2010, when Prince William proposed to his longtime girlfriend, a woman whose name had become a byword for her willingness to stick it, it was with his late mother’s honking great sapphire and diamond engagement ring. The choice of this most famous, and it could be argued haunted, piece of jewellery was both simultaneously deeply touching gesture and buckling under the weight of all that symbolism.

But despite this start, the gal has done more than alright. In the 13 years since then, Kate has doggedly, if slowly, forged her own path injecting a certain middle-class respectability into proceedings, all station wagons and muddy hockey kit and everyone mucking in to clear the table.

Slowly Kate managed to convert the naysayers and the doubters (me included), taking what seemed like a predictable, safe charitable focus – early childhood – and using it to set up a world-leading foundation sponsoring groundbreaking research and seeking to fundamentally reshape the way an entire nation raises their kids.

Along the way Kate has won hearts, minds and the eternal devotion of the high street brands she reliably wears. Viscose for days!

Even just a few months ago, back in December 2023, it seemed like the Princess had landed in a pretty sturdy place – widely adored in the United Kingdom, earning top marks for her grace, her reliable good humour and having produced three future ribbon-cutters all boasting strong Windsor jawlines.

However over the course of only a weekend this perspective has fundamentally and irrevocably shifted.

Princess Kate had her first real ‘Diana moment’ in the last 48 hours.

In a video released in the early hours of Saturday morning, AEDT, Kate, seated on a wooden garden bench and looking a far cry from her usual made-up, bouncy self, revealed in a relatively lengthy video that she has cancer and is undergoing preventive chemotherapy.

This was Kate like never before – emotional, raw, and letting the world see a whole new- and wholly other – her. In a horrible bit of symmetry, here for the second time in Prince William’s life was a woman he loved consciously making themselves vulnerable for an audience of billions.

Like Diana decades before, Kate’s bravery in sharing her diagnosis has seen her take on a mythic quality.

What is integral to Diana’s her image, her mythic quality is the extent to which she showed the world her suffering and pain. Her marriage breakdown to then-Prince Charles, her eating disorder, her doomed romance with cad James Hewitt – the princess who emerged in the 90s was often unstinting in making her personal torment known.

What Diana did was open up her personal wellspring of pain and allowed the world to see her as human, as fallible and a bit broken. (Also, the victim of a supposedly rotten husband, but that’s a topic for another time.)

The gutsiness it took for Diana to do this saw her shift simply hugely popular to being viewed as positively saintly.

Kate, who delivered the message on Friday night, UK time, said it has been ‘an incredible tough couple of months’ for her and the royal family. Picture: Odd Andersen / AFP

In ditching the emotional austerity of the late Queen and the traditional unfeeling model of royalty, the former Princess of Wales made her hurt and her trauma an intrinsic part of her story that people, decades after her death, still respond to.

Kate is now undergoing a similar transformation.

The current Princess of Wales had, until now, a pretty much fairytale storyline, but her cancer news has recast her narrative as one of steely pluck and courage.

Consider the coverage her video received, making the front pages of basically every major newspaper in the world and in some instances beating out the Moscow terror attack that has claimed 137 lives for top billing.

Or videos shared to X, formerly Twitter, showing British and American reactions to the Princess’s announcement.

The world reacts to Kate’s sad news.

A post from a restaurant in Louisville in the US.

The numbers around Kate’s video are mind boggling. On just the official Kensington Palace Instagram and Twitter accounts (the Waleses are not on TikTok), the piece was viewed more than 180 million times in the first 24 hours. Their official Instagram account has grown by more than 400,000 followers, by one estimate, in the same short time span too.

There are also the ripple effects of Kate’s video to consider.

The impact of Diana’s 1993 speech was quite literally world-changing. The conversation around eating disorders and especially bulimia went from one of shame to a tremulous new openness, the princess managing to do more to destigmatise a disease that affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide than decades of well-meaning education campaigns.

Likewise, King Charles’ January announcement he would be undergoing surgery for an enlarged prostate saw visits to the relevant webpage run by the National Health Service jump 1000 per cent. (It was during his operation that His Majesty’s doctors discovered he too has cancer.)

Who knows what far-reaching impact Kate’s openness might have?

You can actually watch Diana give her eating disorder speech here. After multiple seasons of The Crown and an endless tide of movies and books and more mistake-riddled TikToks than a sensible person could poke a stick at, I think this is the version of the princess we should remember. A woman who stood up in front of a roomful of strangers and who with wit and grace and grit and heart, showed the world just who she was.

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.