It feels authentic (a family friend once reportedly described her wanting nothing more from life than lots of kids, a house in the country, dogs and an Aga) and by January it had made her the second most popular living royal after Princess Anne, according to YouGov’s net positivity ratings. She found her niche in the family as a sort of royal Boden mum, a sporty mother of three always game for wholesome outdoor activity, from training with the Irish Guards in the snow to toasting marshmallows round a scout campfire. (Despite her best efforts to get people to call her Catherine, the friendlier Kate has inexorably stuck.) She comes from a family of doers and fixers … Carole has taught her girls to deal with problems with calm capability, not histrionics.” She has the kind of resilience often learned in boarding school, characterised by tight control over one’s feelings, but without appearing chilly or remote. Her uncle Gary Goldsmith once described her as “self-sufficient, resourceful and extremely capable. If she has ever struggled, she hasn’t complained. It’s a life too luxurious to be described as hard, but the history of royal spouses – from a wronged Diana to a once-vilified Camilla, and lately Meghan saying she has had suicidal thoughts – suggests it isn’t easy, either.
She can compete playfully with her husband at things that don’t matter, like spin bike challenges in Welsh leisure centres, but not eclipse him. She can’t have a career in the conventional sense, but also can’t be seen to do nothing with her days.
She must be just interesting enough to feed the media beast, but never so interesting as to be divisive. When she married her prince at 29, the then Kate Middleton chose a gilded but perilously narrow path. It has been, as royal evolutions are, a slow process. At 41, the princess once dismissed by some as a glorified clothes horse is emerging as a more substantial figure on whom a monarchy rocked by scandal elsewhere can increasingly rely. The vitriol of the backlash against Mantel may partly explain why few would say such things now – but only partly. She was, Mantel wrote in a long essay on the royal body politic through the ages, “as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character”. It’s a decade now since the late novelist Hilary Mantel described the then duchess as a “jointed doll on which certain rags are hung”, almost too smooth and plastic to be real. The Princess of Wales at Kirkgate Market in Leeds.
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