Meghan Markle’s major royal complaint shut down by new Kate photo
The Princess of Wales has gone to her very first music festival – and the photo evidence says a lot about what royal life is really like.
COMMENT
There are some combinations of words I never thought I would read, like “Princess Anne” and “Magaluf hen’s party”, “Queen Camilla” and “Dry July” – and “the Princess of Wales” and “rave”.
And yet here we are, contemplating the very fact that the royal family’s head girl, Kate, the Princess of Wales has actually gone to her first ever music festival. The Court Circular will never live this down.
I know: We live in truly remarkable times.
Unfortunately, hot on the heels of the initial report – as I imagined the princess merrily twirling glow sticks while Prince William watched the kids and perused the John Lewis knitwear sale – along came someone with an actual photo of her in festival mode.
Sadly, the shot, showing Kate with an unusual amount of skin in an off-the-shoulder top chatting to two middle-aged blokes in an overlit marquee, makes it look more like she’s at a Hedgerow Preservation Society meeting in the upstairs room at a pub, but hey.
At least Kate is holding what looks suspiciously like a cocktail and is not dressed like she’s about to attend an Anglican prayer group.
And while “Future Queen goes to festival, fails to put ‘high’ in ‘Your Royal Highness’” is a subject I could happily waffle on about at length, this picture can actually tell us a much more interesting story – a story about women who marry into the royal family and about their freedom. (Also, about how sedate this particular posh rave looked).
Which brings us to Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, because all roads seem to lead to the former Suits actress somehow.
When the duchess sat down with Oprah Winfrey in 2021 there was more than a hint of an echo of Diana, Princess of Wales’ infamous 1994 Panorama interview. Both women recounted how they had plunged into marriages only to find themselves trapped within a bizarre, stifling ecosystem, and both women recounted how their new identity required self-sacrifice and self-abnegation.
Meghan, like Diana, went on the telly to turn royal “fairytale” whistleblower, and the reality of royal life that the duchess painted was one of restriction where basic freedoms, like even being able to hold onto her own passport, were supposedly denied.
“There was very little that I was allowed to do,” Meghan said.
“So, even, ‘Can I go and have lunch with my friends?’ – ‘No, no, no, you’re oversaturated, you’re everywhere, it would be best for you to not go out to lunch with your friends’. I go, ‘Well, I haven’t … I haven’t left the house in months’.
“You have to understand, as well, when I joined that family, that was the last time, until we came here [to the US], that I saw my passport, my driver’s licence, my keys. All that gets turned over.”
(Raising the question: Is there a drawer somewhere with the dusty keys and passports of Kate, Sophie, the Duchess of Edinburgh and Queen Camilla? Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York’s are probably in there too, because who can drive after three glasses of chablis at lunch?)
Anyhoo, when Oprah put it to the Duchess of Sussex that she had been “trapped”, she concurred. The equation seemed simple – palaces equal prisons.
Ultimately, Meghan’s characterisation made her 20 months of official HRH-dom sound inherently strangulating and oppressive, and given that you and I have never married princes, it’s one we could never outright dispute.
Except then along comes Raver Kate and her one naughty girl cocktail to throw a bit of a spoke in the wheels.
How do we square Meghan not leaving the house for months on end and her penitentiary-like existence with the UK’s newest dance partygoer?
Because when it comes to Kate, she is both one of the most famous women in the world, and yet hardly lives a secluded life devoid of fun, opportunities to flex the royal titanium American Express credit card, and what I’m hoping is the occasional jug of Blue Illusions.
A small smattering of examples.
In 2017, the future Queen zipped off to the Meribel ski resort in France to celebrate her sister Pippa Middleton’s hens’ party.
In both 2019 and 2022, the princess joined Thomas’s Battersea parents’ drinks evenings at Prince Harry-approved Chelsea watering hole, the Hollywood Arms, on multiple occasions.
“There was no fuss or fanfare,” a source told the Daily Mail about one such evening.
And then this week came the spontaneous Houghton Festival outing. The 41-year-old had been dining with the Marquess and Marchioness of Cholmondeley, David and Rose while the 24-hour dance party held on their estate was on.
Luckily, the Daily Mail had the inside scoop about how this highly surprising situation came to be, revealing: “After dinner, one of the guests suggested that Catherine go to the festival. Catherine was nervous about the idea, but, after much discussion with her protection officers, she went with lots of security. William wasn’t there”.
Elsewhere, the London Evening Standard revealed that yes, that was a spicy margarita in her hand and that the Princess of Wales had been eating affogato, an Italian coffee and ice cream dessert too, and her party had left a $1393 tip. (Side note: Who the hell orders a sweet course at a music festival?)
Kate’s wide-ranging existence outside of Kensington Palace or the Windsor Home Park where the Wales family is now based is hardly restricted to well-bred knees-ups.
In the last couple of years, she has taken her elder two children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte to shop at a Smiggle store, been seen doing the supermarket shopping, has hit up Sloane Square institution Peter Jones and has been regularly spied getting behind the wheel of the family’s Audi station wagon. (Glamorous right?)
Keep in mind too that these are not all meticulously planned in advance outings either. In 2021, Kate went, as a private citizen, to attend the vigil for slain London woman Sarah Everard, laying a bouquet of flowers she had picked from her garden. (The princess also ensured that her comms teams let it be known to the media that “She remembers what it felt like to walk around London at night”).
It is not only Kate who gets out and about either, with the Prince of Incipient Middle Age, Prince William, photographed in June shaking his thang at East London nightclub Koko, proving he is exactly as naff a dancer as you would imagine him to be.
While indisputably all of these instances – and I’m sure many, many more that we don’t know about – would have involved Kate and William’s close protection officers perspiring nervously as they watched a future King or Queen Get Down, still, the Waleses are out there, living their lives. (Sure, there would have to be some limits – ‘No Your Highness, Burning Man is definitely not possible, even if you have already bought all that glitter and all those steampunk goggles’).
And they are living their lives in an open (or at least open-ish) way that Diana could never, ever have dreamt of.
In that Panorama interview, which we now know, thanks to the Dyson Inquiry, that the princess was essentially conned into doing, Diana said: “When I go out of my door, my front door, I’m being photographed. I never know where a lens is going to be.
“A normal day would be followed by four cars; a normal day would come back to my car and find six freelance photographers jumping around me.”
As far as I am aware, in the years that William and Kate have been together, that nightmarish scenario has never come to pass.
The question this Kate “rave” picture raises is, while I am confident that voluntarily climbing inside the royal cage would be a horrendously challenging personal experience, is it as socially suffocating as all that?
(There is also the tricky question of how the Duchess of Sussex’s “very little that I was allowed to do” quote chimes with the fact that twice in 2019, she jetted off to New York on personal trips to spend time with friends).
William and Kate’s lives are freer because there would seem to be much more of a public respect for boundaries – consider how few, if any, shots like this we have ever seen of the prince and princess in the wild, even though they are not living sequestered, sad sack existences.
There has also been a shift in public attitudes towards the leering, voracious lenses of the paparazzi.
If Kate was daily being followed by four carloads of snappers and “six freelance photographers jumping around her”, there would be an outcry.
Still, I think we can all agree on the biggest takeaway here: Never order ice cream at a music festival. Also, the royal cage can be a surprisingly spacious one too.
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.
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