Kensington Palace, which remains in its private quarters the London residence of Prince William and Kate (for ever to be known as) Middleton, currently has an exhibition in its public rooms of “Untold Lives”, a medley of royal servants. If any of the tourists walking round on Thursday felt the piquancy of treading so close to a home Kate Middleton may or may not be in (for the first time since her marriage, probably, nobody can say for sure where she is), that didn’t show on their politely interested faces.
The opening portrait is of Bridget Holmes: 96 years old, carrying a mop in comedic representation of her role as a “necessary woman” to monarchs all the way from Charles I to William III. Taking into account the different conception of childhood in the 1590s, when she was born, we can reasonably assume Holmes spent about 90 continuous years shovelling shit, her life remaining untold so that the story of kings could be told.
That’s the deal with the monarchy; inequality needs two halves – a large number of lives debased and made menial to enable some shiny ones at the top. It would have made perfect sense when kings, having divine right, were a bridge between men and God, and a reasonable amount of sense in an age of greater deference, but these days it only makes sense if the spectacle of enormous wealth is itself somehow nourishing to the national psyche.
If William and Kate represent some fantasy life, that we can enjoy remotely as a fairytale, projecting ourselves into it, then – here’s a cute paradox – the more that costs, the more it’s worth it. It never did it for me, but what do I know? The Prince and Princess of Wales only have one job in this contract, which is to enjoy perfect lives. People always go on about how hard the royals work, and I’ve never really bought it – how hard can it be, going places, shaking hands, being polite, going home? But if the real job is to embody a life in which wealth, being magic, has erased every care, then I can see that would be awesomely hard work.
Just how much damage this family has inflicted on itself since Kate was last seen in public on Christmas Day will be impossible to determine until the mystery has lifted. Certainly, they’ve breached their contract with the world’s media. When news agencies had to pull the Mother’s Day photo of the princess and her three children, believing it to have been doctored, this holed them beneath the waterline, trust wise, and it’s hard to see how they could now recover. Phil Chetwynd, global news director of Agence France-Presse, described neutrally on BBC Radio 4 that the Firm had moved into the same credibility bucket as North Korea, which seems harsh – almost nobody, except everyone on the internet, thinks Kate Middleton has been shot in the head – but fair. Trust is pretty binary: you either have it or you don’t.
The relationship between the British press and the royals has been vexed for ages, observably since Meghxit but arguably since Diana. The deal was supposed to be this: the tabloid press would write fawningly about the core team, choose one or two hate figures whose privacy would be traduced and inner life relentlessly speculated upon, and the Firm would enable all that with tactical intel drops and the turning of a blind eye.
It really did seem in 1997 as though that equilibrium had been destroyed. In the aftermath of Diana’s death, the red tops talked about a “vast outpouring of grief”, and that was real, but they omitted to mention the rage people felt towards the newspapers that had hounded her. The palace, though, sought no vengeance. Only Harry admitted even holding a grudge, and things were back to normal pretty soon. Harry and Meghan’s various cases against the press were a mixed bag – some won, some dropped. What they didn’t achieve was any significant realignment of the media/monarchy protocols. In the end, it’s Harry living in the US, trying to make sense of a life he wasn’t born to rule, not the Daily Mail.
With the British public, though, the royals’ contract is completely different. A small but growing number of us wish they would simply desist, become normal, stop costing so much. A sizeable middle doesn’t care one way or the other, and those who do watch these lives with fascinated admiration need them to be perfect. We can talk loftily about William and Kate’s missteps – how could they have been so stupid as to Photoshop an image, and so amateurishly? Don’t they know the first rule of lying, in public life, which is: stop doing it and tell the truth? But they haven’t been stupid at all, they’ve behaved exactly as humans do, trapped in a deal they can’t uphold. They cannot lead the perfect, trouble-free lives that they have to lead in order to make sense.
The rumours and theories about what’s happened to Kate Middleton are so varied and lurid now that whatever the truth is, I anticipate its landing as a bit of an anticlimax, which will hasten the return of normality. So maybe they’ve actually played a blinder, and with their secrecy and cack-handedness generated a drama against which the truth will look like no big deal. But I don’t think this was deliberate. I think their lives are, ironically, a bit like a fairytale, but one of the dark ones, where a troll (or a nation of trolls) holds them hostage to an impossible demand.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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