Is the Princess of Wales the best thing the royal family have going for them? The one on whom all hopes of them pulling through to the other side of this seething, seedy mess rest? The one with all the cards, all the power?
I’d say so. While the others fester and, presumably, tremble every time a breaking news bulletin pings, Kate just looks incredibly good, eh? Literally — such as last night on the Baftas red carpet, in floor-length, off-the-shoulder muted pastels — and reputationally. This woman who endured not merely cancer but the toxic whirl of gossip and speculation that preceded her making her diagnosis public. Who clearly loves her kids ferociously, and hands-on, in a “we’ll do the school runs, thanks” sort of a way, a way not twisted, stilted and distorted by poshness. Who has — I’d bet big money — never been privy to so much as a bitchy WhatsApp group, let alone sent an email that might threaten the core of her family, and the identity of her country, were it to be made public. (Seriously — is anyone in the world less likely to be featured in the Epstein files?)
While Sarah Ferguson has reportedly been holed up in the £13,000-a-day Paracelsus Recovery centre in Zurich (on whose buck exactly?) and The Mail on Sunday publishes evidence that the King was warned that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor had “abused the royal family’s name” in his dealings with the financier David Rowland; while that image of Andrew slumped down in the back of a car on being released from custody becomes memes — in my favourite he has been transposed onto jolly royal wedding-style commemorative crockery — Kate just… gets on with it. While the rest of them fall further and further apart, the princess rises higher (a YouGov poll put her public approval rating at 68 per cent, bigger than any other royal) and looks better, more decent, more moral, more authentic. Because, presumably, she is all those things.
• ‘Kate will be a queen who really listens’ — by palace insiders
So yes, it really feels as if the princess holds all the power. Question is: what will she do with it?
Anything, I’d guess, that means the future royal family will treat her children better than their predecessors were treated as children (or indeed, better than their predecessors treated children).
She’s presumably gunning for Andrew to lose his right to succession. It’s a point of principle — for Andrew to become king, Charles, then William, then all three of his and Kate’s children, then Harry, then both of his children would have to die — but as it stands it does serve to highlight the ludicrous nature of succession. Which in turn exposes the ludicrous nature of royalty. A stroke of dumb, mindless luck that could, in theory, fall to an alleged sexual predator/financial criminal, one who might even, at the point he ascended to the throne, be serving prison time at His Majesty’s (so, his own?) pleasure.
The Princess and Prince of Wales at the Baftas
SCOTT GARFITT/GETTY IMAGES
It’s possible that the princess has been gunning for that since she joined the royal family, mind. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has rather cast a shadow over the whole of her relationship with Prince William. The photographs of the former prince walking with Jeffrey Epstein in Central Park after Epstein’s release from his first prison sentence were taken in December 2010 — barely a month after William and Kate publicly announced their engagement — and published in February 2011, barely two months before the wedding, on April 29.
Days after the Central Park images, the picture of Andrew with his arm around the waist of Virginia Giuffre was published. (As a consequence, William’s advisers forbade Andrew from attending events at which the royal couple were due in the run-up to the wedding. Feeling that his UK trade envoy gig might be threatened by his waning favour with his nephew, Andrew seemingly used the wedding to lobby David Cameron, then prime minister, during what Andrew described in a recently released email as a “very supportive chat”. )
What must that have felt like to Kate — a 29-year-old outsider, a former accessories buyer for the fashion company Jigsaw — as she tremulously approached the institution, the royal family? Can you imagine? There you are, freshly engaged to a prince, who happens to be the love of your life, suddenly the most photographed person on the planet… And bam! Your fiancé’s uncle is pictured out on a casual stroll with the world’s most famous sex offender. Then, oops! There he is again, one arm slung round the waist of a woman accusing his dear friend Jeffrey Epstein of sex-trafficking her. How mad must it have seemed?
Kate’s middle-classness was regularly used against her in the early days of her relationship, engagement and marriage to William. Yet now? It seems like her — indeed, their — saving grace. Because Kate did not come from poshness — she was not embroiled in the collective madness it can enable. The entitlement, the blurring of right and wrong that comes with money, social status and severely reduced consequences — never mind the excusing of (expectation of, even) extramarital affairs. This was not her sensibility, not her world. To Kate, presumably, Andrew was not merely the comedy overindulged lazybones wrong ’un — “Oh no! What has uncle Andy done now?” — he was blatantly, terribly bad news.
Oh, but Kate is not just middle class! She is a millennial. She’s from the generation who forged MeToo. Is she woke? Maybe. She certainly seems driven in her campaign to help children in their early years of life (an endeavour that stacks up, in a way Princess Eugenie’s anti-trafficking Anti-Slavery Collective really doesn’t, anymore). It is likely that her age means she holds the world to a slightly higher moral standard, the kind of thing that makes Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s behaviour more repugnant yet. That’s her accident of birth.
How funny that the two qualities on which the future of the royal family may well depend are those of being middle class and a millennial. And aren’t they just incredibly lucky to have her?