Nasty attack unleashed on Kate

A new and viscous claim has started circulating on social media after one unremarkable detail about the Princess of Wales was revealed.

Philosopher Edmund Burke gave us the handy term the “swinish multitude” and hooboy … he must have had X (or Twitter for those of us still working in old money) in mind when he jotted down that one.

Social media is hardly known for being a kind and cuddly place full of supportive gestures and the digital equivalent of trust falls, but the past few years have irrefutably proven that the royal family and your Twitters and Facebooks et al make for some particularly toxic bedfellows.

On Tuesday, Kate the Princess of Wales came under fresh, heavy fire for having the sheer bloody gall to go on holiday. I know, how dare she.

Catherine, Princess of Wales, has come under fire on social media over her plans to take a holiday. Photo: Clive Brunskill/Getty Images.

How dare she be allowed to suck up great big lungfuls of restorative, healthy Highland air and enjoy wholesome quality time with only her husband Prince William, their three kids and whatever MI5 drone watches over them, while she continues to battle cancer.

What has happened is this: On Sunday the Daily Mail ran a story about the Princess and her family heading off on hols to Scotland, which you would have thought could be easily categorised as wholly unremarkable and benign.

The Telegraph then ran a similar piece about Kate’s holiday plans, innocuously, you would have thought, posting a link to it on X.

The reaction? The only word that even vaguely does this justice is “unhinged”.

“Spring break, dumber break, holiday break face lift break. Damn that b***h lazy.”

“Poor thing! Posh pampered lazy faking cancer poppet on vacation she’s so brave.”

“She is always on holidays :)) LazyKate.”

“How courageous to continue vacationing and attending marquee sporting events as the country is in flames”.

“Vacationing from what? What has she done or has she ever done that deserves a vacation.”

The Princess reportedly plans on spending some quality time with her family. Photo: Chris Jackson/Getty Images.

That is, of course, but just a gross taste of what is out there.

This situation is, of course, horribly reminiscent of when, in February and March, social media was swamped by an unprecedented, hysterical deluge of claims and counterclaims about Kate’s whereabouts, wellbeing and marriage.

Things calmed down once the Princess of Wales revealed she has cancer, but the noxious undercurrents speculating about what was really going on still swirled about social media. Then came June when Kate was well enough to attend Trooping the Colour, her first official engagement of the year. Cue X being overrun with people posting the absurdly offensive notion that her diagnosis was a cunning ruse and she had just been out of the public eye to recover from a facelift.

Now, with this Balmoral holiday situation, here we are again, the digital mob getting their pitchforks out to take aim at a mother-of-three who is fighting cancer.

There is low and then there is this.

And it’s at this point we have a choice to make: I could keep finding evermore incensed adjectives or we could talk about the bigger picture. The Meghan picture. With the Princess of Wales, this is not the first time a royal WAG has been bombarded online.

When lonely heart Prince Harry met and wooed one Suits actress back in 2016, the unveiling of their romance brought with it a deluge of “outright sexism and racism” from “social media trolls and web article comments” he said in a statement at the time.

Kate recently dipped her toe back into royal life when she made an appearance at Wimbledon. Photo: Karwai Tang/WireImage.

Things hardly improved and by February 2019 had gotten so bad for the new Duchess of Sussex and for Kate that the Palace was “ forced to seek advice from social media companies over online abuse and physical threats,” the Guardian reported at the time.

Spoiler alert – whatever the Silicon Valley’s supposedly best and brightest might have ideated and blue sky-thunk clearly did not work. Six years on, royal Twitter is a generally pestilential and upsetting place with the egregious level of vituperation directed at Meghan generally sitting at around Defcon Five.

For Kate, while prior to this year she and the royal family have come under some social media fire, this year has seen things shift into a wholly new and horrible league.

As with Meghan back in 2016, Crown Inc. seems at a loss as to how to get any sort of polite, vague grip on the situation and that’s the point I suppose, isn’t it? Social media is the wild west, an ungoverned and ungovernable frontier where hate of all stripes and varieties can thrive and grow.

The Palace’s approach thus far has been to put their hands over their ears and to hum the National Velvet theme tune and to wait for the squall to pass, but is this any sort of longer term strategy? Because it would seem to me that the Meghan and Kate situation represents but a taste of what might lie ahead for both the Sussex and Wales kids.

The social media reaction to her time off will come as another blow for Kate during an already difficult year. Photo: HENRY NICHOLLS / AFP.

Prince George, Princess Charlotte, Prince Louis, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet will be the first members of the royal family to entirely grow up in a world riddled with devices and social media. Even now, from this vantage point, it seems obvious that the coming years for them, and their parents, as they enter their adolescence will be rife with opportunities for social media to wreak havoc with their lives and to negatively impact their mental and emotional wellbeing.

A royal teenager getting up to the stock standard usual silliness of all teenagers who have sunk two alcopops? “Recipe for disaster” doesn’t quite begin to cover it.

The House of Windsor has already had a sour taste of exactly this situation back in 2012 Prince Harry indulged in shandy or 17 and then proceeded to get his gear off for a jolly game of strip billiards. Who took the photo of the Prince? It was speculated by the New York Times to have been taken surreptitiously by a partygoer armed with, you guessed it, a mobile phone.

Just imagine if that same Sin City scene was to play out today – such is the saturation of devices in the world that even before Harry had finished unbuttoning his trousers the whole affair would be being live streamed on three different platforms and Piers Morgan would have already started a thunderous comment piece.

Going forward, the Waleses and the Sussexes are going to have to navigate this not-so- brave new world – being the parents of a future King and young princess and princesses – and knowing that every room they ever walk into will be filled with countless gizmos ready to record their kids’ every utterance and mildly naughty bit of adolescent tomfoolery.

The icing on this Kate cake? Rain is forecast for later this week for Aberdeenshire, where Balmoral is located. Après the digital deluge, she could also face a real and soggy one.

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.

Originally published as Nasty attack unleashed on Kate