Kate Middleton miracle that seemed impossible

One month after announcing her cancer diagnosis, the Princess of Wales has pulled off the unimaginable.

COMMENT

On 1 April, the world passed a historic landmark for which, for some disappointing reason, Westminster Abbey declined to energetically ring their bells in celebration. On that day in 2004, on the slopes of the Swiss ski resort of Klosters, the world learned that Prince William had finally decided to go steady with a nice gel. Or as The Sun put it on their front page, “FINALLY … Wills gets a girl.”

Those photos were the official introduction of Kate Middleton to an immediately fixated public.

Here we are, two decades, one wedding, four titles, three children, and five house moves later and Kate somehow still has the ability to surprise us. Kudos.

Because the princess has just pulled off quite the coup without so much as a shot being fired or a sternly-worded statement having to be put out on starchy Kensington Palace letterhead.

Kate has gone dark.

How is it that the most-hunted, most obsessed-over, most-talked about woman on the planet has managed to pull off the greatest disappearing act since Jimmy Hoffa?

For the first months of this year, there was mounting, mounting, mounting hysteria over the princess’ whereabouts. Then came the nuclear detonation of 22 March which saw the Princess of Wales stun the world by revealing that she has cancer.

Planned abdominal surgery in January, she patiently explained looking down the barrel of a BBC camera, had led to the diagnosis and so, on the advice of doctors, she was beginning preventive chemotherapy.

Kate Middleton in a video revealing she is undergoing treatment for cancer.

In the 24 hours that followed, the verb ‘reeling’ got used more than at any point in time since Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.

What has happened in the one month since Kate’s video verges on the bloody extraordinary – nothing.

No covertly-shot grainy phone footage of her leaving a Kings Lynn Cafe Nero with her morning almond latte has cropped up on X or Instagram or TikTok. No German tabloid has published long lens shots of Kate and her three children enjoying a wholesome, windswept Norfolk beach gambol taken from a fishing vessel bobbing off the coastline. And no enterprising member of the public with an eye for the main chance and a major payday has hidden behind a tree to photograph the princess taking Prince Louis to his jazz flute lessons.

In fact, the world has not seen hide nor hair of an in-the-flesh Kate for 36 days, since she and Prince William were spied on March 18 at what is indisputably now the world’s most famous farm shop. (Never before in history has popping out for a rye loaf caused a future King so much bother and stress.)

Prince William and Kate Middleton haven’t been papped since March 18. Picture: Chris Jackson – WPA Pool/Getty Images

So how to explain all this? Animal, vegetable or accident? Coincidence, sheer dumb luck or has Kate been huddling indoors with the curtains shut and refusing to venture out in the daylight hours? How has the world’s most famous woman vanished from the seeming face of the Earth?

Like a Low Countries ground war, there are clues suggesting that the answer might lie in some behind-the-scenes slogging away. Coups, even sneaky, squirrely, clever clogs ones require work.

(I’m imagining a war room inside the Waleses’ Kensington Palace offices with staffers pushing plastic toy soldiers around with long wooden sticks as they plan. ‘On Tuesday Her Highness has wants to go to Zara, so we will leaving Camp Wales at oh-nine-hundred hours…’)

In her video, the princess said of herself and her family, “We now need some time, space and privacy while I complete my treatment.”

Not long after, a friend of the Waleses’ spoke to the Sunday Times’ royal editor Roya Nikkhah, revealing that Kate, while undergoing chemo, “wants to be able to carry on with as active and normal a routine as possible and not have it become a huge issue when she goes to a farm shop.

“Moving forwards, they will be very strict on enforcing their right to privacy.”

Is that precisely what we are seeing – or more accurately, not seeing – right now?

The Wales family attend the Together At Christmas Carol Service at Westminster Abbey on December 8. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

What makes this situation even more remarkable is when you consider the wider picture.

The UK press was always going to play deferential ball with the palace’s new iron-first Kate stance, if for no other reason than they would probably enrage the public if they were gleefully sending their snappers to Norfolk and Windsor and sternly instructing them not to return until they had found and bagged their titled quarry.

But, shockingly, there are more press in the world than the Nescafe-fuelled denizens of the square mile around Fleet Street. For years now, German, French and Italian magazines have shown zero hesitation about publishing paparazzi photos of members of the royal family that their British counterparts would never dare.

For example, the 2020 photos of Princess Beatrice, husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and stepson Wolfie swimming while on holiday in Italy or the 2021 shots of Kate and a baby Prince Louis having gotten out of a car while stuck on London’s Battersea bridge, both of which ran in European women's’ magazines.

It was a French magazine – Closer – that bought and ran the photos of a topless Kate in 2012 and had to pay out $191,000 in damages in 2017.

The conventions, arrangements and concessions that have been worked out between Kensington Palace and the British media since the birth of Prince George in 2013 have never applied to American or European media nor do they voluntarily follow the UK’s Independent Press Standards Organisation’s Editors’ Code of Conduct.

My point is, US sites like TMZ or Italy’s Chi could be having a field day right now, considering they have deep pockets, don’t dance attendance on the palace or generally show much in the way of scruples.

And yet nothing. So, has there been some “enforcing” going behind-the-scenes?

Prince William have been able to go about their lives without any intrusion for the past month. Picture: Andy Commins – WPA Pool/Getty Images

Another complicating factor in all of this: humans with phones.

Snagging a photo of Kate today equates to the shortest of short cuts to internet fame and the chance to cash energetically in.

Again, we have not seen this, something that I doubt we can ascribe to the masses suddenly deciding to embrace decency and restraint.

Consider here that in 2019 Kensington Palace sought help from Instagram to help manage the wave of abuse directly at Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex and Kate.

After Kate’s video last month, X CEO Linda Yaccarino praised the royal, posting that “Her request for privacy, to protect her children and allow her to move forward (without endless speculation) seems like a reasonable request to respect.”

The Times’ Nikkhah reported that Yaccarino’s “intervention [had] led to expressions of hope in Kensington Palace that social media companies may seek to stem the tide of unfounded stories about the couple.”

A source close to William and Kate told Nikkhah: “For her to come out and say that gives us hope. This could be one piece of good news to come out of this. There is so much misinformation out there. She’s in a position to do something about it.”

So have the social media giants ‘done something’ to “stem the tide” of any photos that might have found their way online? I’d be very interested to know.

The bottom line is, for once, a good ‘un. Kate and William and their children have gotten the breathing room they want and need.

In 2024, I think we can update that famous headline. FINALLY … Wills gets his girl what she really wants – some privacy.

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.