Last Wednesday, I interviewed Elizabeth Day at the National Concert Hall. (For everyone who keeps asking – yes, she is utterly delightful and yes, her skin does look that dewy in real life) When it came time to open up the conversation to the audience, amongst all the questions about friendship and failure and boundaries and self-esteem, there were at least ten queries about the Princess of Wales.
Where’s Kate?
What’s your theory about Kate Middleton?
Which are you more interested in, Kate Middleton or the Willy Wonka Experience?
Truly, I was amongst my people.
I would be ashamed to tell you how much of my week has been taken up with this story, how much time I’ve spent discussing/obsessing over/sharing memes about it. None of that was speculating about a woman’s health diagnosis, FYI, and all of it was marvelling at how the royal comms team could be this incompetent. A photograph that looked like a child’s jigsaw puzzle, pieces jammed in where they shouldn’t have been? Frankenstein-ed to high heaven but you’re not going to include DIANA’S (CURSED) ENGAGEMENT RING?! A kill notice from the world’s photo agencies, usually reserved for images from – checks notes – North Korea? A “statement” from “C” saying oopsie, my bad you guys!!, as if I’m supposed to believe that the Princess of goddamn Wales has spent the last two months taking an evening class in Adobe photoshop? As my friend Jeanne Sutton said (subscribe to her excellent Substack here), “I love how even I, a woman raised on unpasteurised milk and the Farmer’s Journal, have a better royal strategy than a literal Prince.” I’d say Meghan Markle spent two weeks in that place and was like, I need to hire my own people immediately, y’all are fucking clowns.
Look, if we Occam’s Razor this shit – and keep in mind the TMZ pap shots of Kate and her mother – the most likely answer is that the Princess has had surgery and she’s on medication that has temporarily changed her appearance. I’ve seen it with family members who’ve been prescribed steroids; it can take a toll on the body. (Conspiracy theories about an imminent divorce announcement aside, swollen fingers would also explain the absence of her wedding rings.) In an institution which has not traditionally encouraged its female members to speak, instead preferring to use imagery to communicate, it’s easy to understand why someone might not want to be photographed when they don’t feel at their best. So much of Kate’s public image is predicated on the idea of ‘perfection’, and how her beauty and thinness interplay to create that image. As she has taken up more space in the public consciousness over the last two decades, we have watched her body shrink accordingly, the same as Princess Diana’s did before her, the same as countless other famous women.
I was being facetious at the beginning of this newsletter but I genuinely cannot imagine what the kind of pressure must feel like. I’ve written before about my relapse with an eating disorder in 2016, and it’s no coincidence that coincided with a time where I felt highly visible. I was on television, I was doing public events, I was getting my photograph taken frequently. I wanted to have some semblance of control, to