Kate Middleton photo that shouldn’t have been taken

COMMENT

Will you remember where you were when you heard? When you saw? When you first learned that Kate the Princess of Wales is, in fact, alive and breathing and still packing little lunches?

Kim Kardashian might have broken the internet with her outrageously ample bottom and a lot of body oil but Kate has managed to do it today by sitting perfectly still and not even smiling. (Now that is power.)

Overnight on Tuesday, photos of the supposedly ‘missing’ princess appeared showing her being driven by her mother Carole Middleton in Windsor.
 

And thus, having sighted the Princess of Wales, millions of people exhaled, relief swamping the globe with proof that she’s not being kept hidden away for sinister reasons or gated by fiendish palace forces.

Except these pictures don’t make me feel reassured – these pictures make me feel sad and cross.

It’s hard not to feel like these shots were something that Kate was essentially forced into.

Does anyone really swallow for a second that these images, emerging now, are nothing more than a jolly coincidence? That barely days after the internet and social media lost their collective minds and sanity over the fact that Kate has not been seen since Christmas Day, we suddenly get served up definitive proof that she is not bedridden or at death’s door or has attempted a pixie cut?
 

There are also some suspicious details here.

Some reports have suggested that these photos were taken after Kate and Carole had dropped the Wales troika off at school, with the princess and her other half Prince William renowned for their devotion to doing drop-offs and pick-ups. Therefore Kate doing exactly this thing is hardly out of the ordinary.

Next, the princess has been photographed driving near the Waleses’ Windsor home, Adelaide Cottage, on occasions before, thus, she would know where the spots are that an industrious snapper might lie in wait.

It’s nigh on impossible to not be sceptical, that we can easily swallow these pics surfacing at such a convenient moment being simply a matter of a snapper totally accidentally being in the right place at the right time.

Then there’s the wider context. The pressure on the Waleses over the last week has surged to the point where they could probably start creating their own diamonds at home. (Duchy of Cornwall jewellery, anyone? It would leave those oat cakes in the crumbly dust.)

Last week William managed to set off a mass panic after pulling out of attending his godfather King Constantine of the Hellenes memorial service less than an hour before an assorted array of Kings, Queens, princesses, princes and triple-barrelled chinless third-cousins gathered at St George’s Chapel in Windsor.

All that the prince’s Kensington Palace office would say was that the dramatic withdrawal was due to a “personal matter”, offering a dearth of actual details. With Kate having been at home recuperating from abdominal surgery for a month, the masses immediately put two and two together to equal secret disaster slash conspiracy. Social media not only abhors a vacuum but it has a hell of an imagination. Madness ensued.
 

This in turn sparked a wider debate over how upfront the palace could or should be here. Was Kensington Palace and William’s Kate blackout a gross miscalculation? In an age where the public demands greater accountability and transparency, was this plan always going to come to grief?

How much privacy and space does a future Queen get or need or deserve?

(Queen Victoria, who used to take herself off to damp, dark recesses of Scotland to mope about in black crinoline for years on end after Prince Albert’s death and left the proles to suck it up, would be horrified.)

With these new images, it’s depressing that it looks a lot like Kate felt she had to let her face be seen in public to stem the tide of delirium. There is something just a bit screwy and upsetting and off-kilter about the internet rabble being able to alter the plan for the 42-year-old’s recovery.

(Since the surgery was initially announced in January, the palace’s position has always been that Kate would not return to public life until after Easter.)

Then there’s the part of this that gives me the serious pips. Last week’s furore was set off by William and him offering up nothing more beyond that limp “personal matter” line. Such a purposefully vague explanation was always going to trigger an avalanche of speculation and fretting

Thus, the prince helped make the mess – why isn’t he helping clean it up? Why has it fallen to Kate, who had some sort of surgery significant enough to warrant two weeks in hospital, to dispel the grab bag of daft theories about where she is and what might be going on?
 

William could have, at least, been the one to drive the car and appear alongside his wife.

2024 wasn’t meant to be like this. This year is Charles’ first full year as an anointed King; we are meant to currently be seeing him putting into action the plan for ruling that he has had in his secret Clarence House desk drawer for decades that he would take out late at night while Camilla quietly in front of Newsnight.

After nearly 50 years of preparing and waiting, after having come through Prince Harry and Meghan the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s salvos and truth-telling, it should finally be Charles’ chance to shine, to show the world what he can and what sort of King he wants to be.

Instead, the 75-year-old is fighting cancer while the royal family wobbles and teeters.

With His Majesty reduced to WFAECE (working from an enormous country estate), Queen Camilla having nipped off for a few days on a sun lounger somewhere warm and the Sussexes having long since decamped to the taxpaying climes of California, the royal family has never looked more short-staffed or more dangerously depleted.

I wonder what the mood is currently like inside Adelaide Cottage. Not only has the cold, hard need for Kate and William to get their noses back to the royal grindstone ever been greater but they have had the mania of the last week piled on top too.

Imagine that pressure, that responsibility, and the stress of all of this – and all while trying to raise three children and trying to get better. It’s knackering to even think about.

Look at Kate in this new shot. Does she look like a woman who is ready or keen to be back on display? To be put on public view like a museum specimen?

I suppose if there is one lesson to be drawn from all this is that princesses might get all the gee-gaws and diamonds they might fancy but choice? Freedom? Real independence? Maybe there’s no such thing as a free ten-bedroom Norfolk estate after all. Everything has a price.

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.