Take a look at the Princess of Wales and you see ‘Queen’
Can you be sent to the Tower for saying that the Princess of Wales is slaying it? I’ll risk my neck, because at the coronation there was no other word. She played her part spectacularly well. As she stood outside Westminster Abbey, in the pouring rain, a friend I was watching it with whistled admiringly. “She looks,” he said simply, “magnificent.” If ever a woman faced a date with destiny, it was her. If ever a woman rose to it, she did. When rumours started circulating a week or so ago that she was going to wear flowers in her hair, I thought: “Oh no. Please don’t. It’s a coronation, not Woodstock.” I needn’t have worried.
The Princess of Wales knows exactly what she’s doing. As of this weekend there is no longer any trace of the slightly nervy, unremarkable middle-class girl from the home counties. Somewhere along the way Kate Middleton has acquired more star power and charisma and regal bearing than all the other royals combined. How ironic that Prince Andrew bangs on about his “blood princess” daughters, but it’s actually the girl from Berkshire who makes the monarchy look exciting and relevant. You can tell me till you’re blue in the face that the monarchy isn’t about star power, that it’s about stability, the constitution, yada yada blah. It is and it isn’t, but star power matters. Henry VIII knew it. Elizabeth I knew it and so did Elizabeth II. Now it matters more than ever, in the internet age when civilian stars are ten a penny, as Harry and Meghan are discovering, but royal fairy dust is thin on the ground.
Charles and Camilla are all very well. They seem good people with the best of intentions. I’m pleased he has finally got the job he was born to do. But who would you be more interested to meet, Kate or Camilla? Kate has the mysterious air of Queen Elizabeth about her. Every so often during the fandango I found myself thinking: “Where’s the Queen?” It’s going to take a very long time, if ever, before “the Queen” means anything other than Elizabeth II to a lot of us. And I suspect, whisper it quietly, that it’s going to skip a generation. I look at Camilla and I think: “Well done, love - crack on, excellent diamonds.” I look at Kate and see “Queen”.
There’s a photograph of her arriving at the abbey and looking over her shoulder directly into the camera. Compare it to one taken in the same place on her wedding day and see the transformation. There’s a steeliness to her gaze that wasn’t there 12 years ago. There’s an alchemy at work that the other royals must desperately wish they could bottle. It’s the title and the history and the clothes, sure. It’s about being comparatively young and slim and brushing up extremely well. As Prince William put it recently, bless him: “Oh, she always looks stunning.”
Yet it’s also the old-fashioned stuff, like posture. She looks as though she has spent the past 12 years balancing a book on her head, and who knows, maybe she has. Shoulders back, head up, ramrod straight in robes that weigh a ton, she swept up the aisle of that abbey. If she worried that her mischievous five-year-old son Prince Louis behind her might run amok at any minute, she didn’t show it. Princess Charlotte was in command of herself, and it was a canny touch that she was in a mini-me version of her mother’s outfit. And Kate’s 3D-embroidered headpiece was a modern masterstroke. No one can compete with the Crown Jewels - which, she’s well aware, she’ll be wearing next time around - so don’t even try. Meanwhile she’d clearly decided to shake things up a bit. She ticked the Diana box with her earrings. She could have worn any tiara under the sun, but instead she wore that confection of silver bullion, crystals and silver thread, and hats off, as it were, to the milliner Jess Collett.
I’m not sure it’s in anyone’s interests, least of all theirs, for Charles and Camilla to bat on until death. We all know they’d be happier feeding the chickens at Highgrove. I get that William and Kate may not want the top jobs just yet. Their children are still young, and Charles and Camilla are still hale and hearty and up for it. I get, too, that the monarchy is more heredity than celebrity, but you know what? Sod it. Kings and queens abdicate in other countries. So do popes. Let’s not wait until William and Kate are in their sixties; let’s crack on and crown them. Meghan: start practising your game face.
The Times
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