The world, and particularly the UK, has always been interested in royal bodies. That attention has mostly been on the women who marry into the family, and who from then on surrender to a life of scrutiny. Besides other duties, they produce the heir and the spare. Their opinions and silences, their health and ill-health are fodder for the press. They are the tea leaves through which the future of the British monarchy is often read. It is not a load any woman should be expected to carry. Kate Middleton’s recent faux pas—of editing a Mother’s Day image with her children—has escalated into ‘Kategate’ because for so long she has been seen as an outlier, a royal woman who was not a loose cannon, one who made a Windsor marriage seem nice and normal.
Middleton, however, is not the problem. The demand and supply of daily perfection that Kensington Palace provides to royal family-watchers is. It plays an active role in feeding gossip machines. The disease took hold in the 1980s when the present Princess of Wales’s late mother-in-law, Diana, was hatched as the “dream princess” before the public until time revealed there was going to be no happy ending. The afterlife of that marriage—of Charles with Camilla, and of Charles and Diana’s children, of Kate and William—has continued to feed the new media frenzy in their country. In Britain, everybody, one suspects, may now be on the verge of being turned into a terminally online person so as not to miss every swing of the lives of the Windsors.
In mid-January, when Middleton was hospitalised for a surgery, she exercised her right not to disclose the specifics of her ailment. King Charles’s cancer announcement was officially released and was, in contrast, seen as the move of a responsible king. After spending two weeks recovering in a clinic when it was announced that her recovery was extended—it was the moment that the first conspiracy theories began to pop up. From a growing-out-a-hair-colouring disaster to how the media hounding proved that Harry and Meghan did well to scoot ‘The Firm’, the criticism has been loud, personal and vitriolic. Can the British public trust the monarchy is a question for the British public to answer. But what the backlash proves yet again is that the hand that feeds a frenzy will have to be prepared when there is a bite-back.