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Well that’s it, I thought, and then five minutes later I heard from a friend (a sober, reasonable friend who, before last month, probably couldn’t have even picked Kate Middleton out of a lineup) and my friend said, “It’s a body double , TRUE? “She doesn’t usually walk like that.”
Once again in the gap:
In January, the royal family announced that the princess had been admitted to hospital for “planned abdominal surgery” and would be stepping away from public duties until around Easter. All was silent for several weeks, until royal observers began to think it strange that they had not seen her. absolutely. (No greeting from a balcony? No pre-recorded “thank you for your well wishes” video?) The conspiracies only fueled when she was seen: A family photo the couple posted on Instagram was republished by media outlets and then immediately retracted when it was discovered that the image had been hilariously poorly photoshopped, and a piece of Princess Charlotte’s sleeve was missing.
Kate later agreed to edit the photos herself, and you could come up with perfectly reasonable explanations if you wanted. Maybe this was the only way she could show all three of her children smiling in the same shot, or maybe she felt that her own appearance needed some touch-ups because, in fact, she was… recovering from abdominal surgery. Oh good. Too late. By that point, the entire Kate Middleton mystery had become, as Helen Lewis wrote in the Atlantic, “QAnon for wine moms.”
Why have so many people fallen into such a pit of speculation? More to the point: why didn’t the royal family immediately dump some Drano and cleanse the system? How is it possible that the Windsors, whose only job is really optics, are so terrible at optics?
It can be argued that the royal family, despite their centuries of practice, has no idea how to be famous. At least not famous today.
When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, fame was something else. Heads of state were expected to have a private life. The lung cancer that claimed Elizabeth’s father, George VI, was so closely guarded that his death shocked the nation, who had not even realized he was very ill. And then her queen reigned for 70 years, and the social customs around her changed, but the social customs that applied to her (those relating to the privacy of her own health) did not. A posthumous biography, to be published next month, reports that Elizabeth had also been battling cancer, myeloma, for years before her death, and no one knew it. She had managed to carry a fame protocol from the 1950s into the 2020s.
But when she died, we lived in a world of tinfoil hats, anti-vaxxers, lizard people and burning rubbish bins, very different from 1952, and the royal family still operates as if they lived in a world where the The public will believe them when they present something medical as routine or planned.
The announcement of Kate’s surgery was made on the same day the palace announced that King Charles III would seek treatment for an enlarged prostate. The news about Charles later turned into the announcement that the king would seek treatment for cancer. But not prostate cancer, an unspecified cancer. We still don’t know what type of cancer. We know the palace is discussing whether alterations would be necessary for his birthday parade in June, whether he will leave Buckingham in a carriage rather than on horseback.
You can guess what the public thinks of all this.
The question of whether Charles’s health, or Kate’s health, is our concern is almost beside the point. So is the question of what, if anything, is “really” going on with the family (Cholmondeley? Gloucester? Ostomy? IYKYK.) Those horses have left the barn, no matter if the king is in the saddle or in a chariot.
What the debacle has revealed, on a larger scale, is that the royal family has lost control of the narrative and doesn’t know how to regain it. Theirs is an ancient brand based on mystery rather than revelation, on sympathy rather than empathy, on being among people but not among normal people.
You could imagine a different direction the Princess of Wales could have taken at the beginning of this. One where she revealed his surgery ahead of time, explaining what it was and how she felt about it. You could imagine his social media posts afterwards, with pictures of Jell-O in the hospital and personal captions about how humiliating he felt to be physically compromised after a lifetime of good health. Maybe a statement acknowledging that he knows people are wondering about her, but he feels and looks like garbage right now and there’s no way he’s going out in a bathrobe, guys.
It would have been the most common. But it wouldn’t have been real. It might take away the mystery of where he had been, but it would also take away the mystique of the monarchy. And that’s what the current situation has revealed: royalty can no longer behave like royalty if they want to be trusted.
But once they start behaving like commoners, what’s the point?
In what was either a wild coincidence or truly expert trolling, recent weeks also saw a minor move by the Californian wing of the royals, Harry and Meghan, who in 2020 wisely cut off their own branch of the family tree and took it to Montecito. After years of silence on social media, the Duchess of Sussex quietly relaunched an Instagram presence of hers for “American Riviera Orchard,” which features a creamy gold insignia on a linen background.
The accompanying website is still empty (you can “join the waitlist”), but detectives searching for pending trademark applications in the United States discovered that American Riviera Orchard was a home goods company that offered household items. stationery, candle holders and yoga mats.
Mark my words, we are going to find Gwyneth Paltrow with Stonewall Kitchen; we’re getting preserves, chutneys and Meghan’s favorite gardening pants, and more than you wanted to know what herbal remedies Harry likes to turn to when he’s got a cold. He will be charming, mocking, sincere and also entirely staged.
Because Harry and Meghan know how to be famous. They hated being royals, but fame works for them. They’ll launch a lifestyle brand and Kate will launch a thousand conspiracies, grainy videos, yoga pants, until she finally returns to her normal public schedule and her own lifestyle, the actual brand, that people aren’t sure they need. buy.