On a chilly day back in January, one of the most recognisable women in the world plunged into a surprised crowd of shoppers in Leeds’s Victorian market.
The Princess of Wales obligingly fielded requests for selfies, including with a man so flustered by encountering royalty he could barely get the words out. (She reassured him gently that “we all get nervous”, though if she still does after more than a decade of this, it doesn’t show.) But after shaking some hands and chatting to traders, she moved on to the University of Leeds for what was arguably the heart of the day. The princess, promoting her new project on how the first five years affect children’s life chances, attended a lecture on child psychology and afterwards talked to students on the childhood studies course about their dissertations. “It makes me want to be back at uni,” she told them. “Everyone says it’s never too late.”
It’s a decade now since the late novelist Hilary Mantel described the then duchess as a “jointed doll on which certain rags are hung”, almost too smooth and plastic to be real. She was, Mantel wrote in a long essay on the royal body politic through the ages, “as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character”.
The vitriol of the backlash against Mantel may partly explain why few would say such things now – but only partly. At 41, the princess once dismissed by some as a glorified clothes horse is emerging as a more substantial figure on whom a monarchy rocked by scandal elsewhere can increasingly rely.
It has been, as royal evolutions are, a slow process. When she married her prince at 29, the then Kate Middleton chose a gilded but perilously narrow path. She must be just interesting enough to feed the media beast, but never so interesting as to be divisive. She can’t have a career in the conventional sense, but also can’t be seen to do nothing with her days. She can compete playfully with her husband at things that don’t matter, like spin bike challenges in Welsh leisure centres, but not eclipse him. It’s a life too luxurious to be described as hard, but the history of royal spouses – from a wronged Diana to a once-vilified Camilla, and lately Meghan saying she has had suicidal thoughts – suggests it isn’t easy, either.
If she has ever struggled, she hasn’t complained. Her uncle Gary Goldsmith once described her as “self-sufficient, resourceful and extremely capable. She comes from a family of doers and fixers … Carole [Middleton, her mother] has taught her girls to deal with problems with calm capability, not histrionics.” She has the kind of resilience often learned in boarding school, characterised by tight control over one’s feelings, but without appearing chilly or remote. (Despite her best efforts to get people to call her Catherine, the friendlier Kate has inexorably stuck.)
She found her niche in the family as a sort of royal Boden mum, a sporty mother of three always game for wholesome outdoor activity, from training with the Irish Guards in the snow to toasting marshmallows round a scout campfire. It feels authentic (a family friend once reportedly described her wanting nothing more from life than lots of kids, a house in the country, dogs and an Aga) and by January it had made her the second most popular living royal after Princess Anne, according to YouGov’s net positivity ratings. She has the kind of soft power politicians would kill for and if some still find it all rather bland, criticism tends to magically slide off her.
“She’s popular, but more importantly she’s not unpopular,” says Victoria Murphy, a contributing editor for Town and Country magazine, who has covered the royals since the year William and Kate got engaged. “She has this approach which is very similar to the one Queen Elizabeth had – we feel that we know her a bit, that we’ve seen the real her, but she’s still something of an enigma. We don’t know a huge amount.” Conscientious and careful to get things right, Kate has moulded herself to fit the institution, rather than trying to change it.
“When she started she was very nervous and very keen to listen to what people felt she should be doing. Over time she’s become more confident in taking that lead herself, but I still think it’s always been in a very quiet way,” says Murphy. “I don’t think she’s ever going to be someone who goes into a room and instantly takes command. The type of leadership she offers is that she convenes people and brings people together. She’s a team player, and a good listener.” It’s a collaborative approach for a world where unelected royals must be seen to have purpose, but not to impose their will on a democratic nation. To understand her unfolding strategy, you have to turn the clock back five years from that morning in Leeds.
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She knows what she’s talking about’
The then Duchess of Cambridge was heavily pregnant with her third child, Louis, when she first convened a steering group to examine how children’s life chances could be improved by intervening more effectively in their earliest years. By then she had been a patron of the children’s mental health charity the Anna Freud Centre for two years, and worked alongside princes William and Harry on their campaign to destigmatise mental illness (her own younger brother, James, has written about his experience with depression). When Kate began creating her solo portfolio, she built on all that, her convictions sharpened by what she later saw of the Covid pandemic’s impact on young families.
The eventual result was the Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood she launched in 2021, guided by an advisory group stuffed with academics and policy experts, and tasked with highlighting the critical impact of the first five years on children’s developing brains. It aims to support but never judge parents, distilling neuroscientific research into practical advice they can use from pregnancy through to children starting school. But beneath this project lies an agenda the princess is said to consider the social equivalent of the climate crisis: joining the dots between childhood experiences and later life addiction, family breakdown, mental heath problems and homelessness. She has done her homework – visiting forest schools in Denmark, talking to child development experts at Harvard University, polling parents – and in 2020 gently rebuffed the idea there was something “mumsy” about it all, arguing that to assume she was interested just because she had children “ultimately sells the issue short”. Those who have worked alongside her don’t doubt her seriousness.
“For her, this is a life’s passion,” says Imran Hussain, the director of policy at the charity Action for Children, who sits on the centre’s advisory group and describes her as “extremely knowledgable” about the science. “She’s been on this issue for a long time, she has a really good team of people, and from there she’s built this centre. It’s working with rigour, and it’s working for the long term.”
At first, Hussain found meetings with the princess nerve-racking – “I definitely started babbling the first time I met her” – but he says she doesn’t stand on ceremony: “She knows what she’s talking about, and she’s just genuinely interested. So you kind of forget pretty easily who she is, and it’s just someone who is really, really curious about what we can do to support young children and their parents.”
Carey Oppenheim, the early childhood lead at the Nuffield Foundation and a fellow member of the advisory group, agrees the centre is “very focused on catalysing society and social change”, aiming to create lasting impact. Crucially, she says, the princess has an extraordinary reach: “What’s really striking is that she’s got this ability to connect with a very wide audience, in a way that’s informed and genuine and very accessible and human.”
An animated video for the Shaping Us campaign Kate was promoting in Leeds, showing a malleable clay baby being lovingly moulded by its parents into a happy five-year-old, was shown nationwide in cinemas and screened live at Piccadilly Circus. Once a nervous, stumbling public speaker, the princess has grown in confidence, opening up about her own parenting habits on the presenter Giovanna Fletcher’s Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast. Yet for all that, there are constitutional limits on what she can meaningfully do.
Royals can challenge stigma, as Diana did by shaking hands with Aids patients: they can raise awareness of gritty social issues, as King Charles did for decades through the Prince’s Trust, and meet ministers, as Kate has. But they can’t express political opinions or lobby for policy changes, meaning the princess must sidestep critical issues for parents such as long waits for children’s mental health services, Sure Start closures or the crisis in nursery funding.
Oppenheim, who is a former Downing Street policy adviser, argues that avoiding politics still leaves the princess plenty of room to operate: with the main parties focused on childcare mainly as a means of helping parents into work, for example, she can highlight the often overlooked case about what good quality nursery education can do for small children’s development. The time she spends with midwives and nursery workers also showcases the important work, Oppenheim says, of people whose work is not always “seen or recognised or valued”.
But Justine Roberts, the chief executive of the parenting website Mumsnet, says its users’ reactions have been mixed: while some hope Kate will make a difference, others are sceptical. “There’s a feeling that it’s very obvious what’s needed now and it’s not more awareness, it’s more investment, and perhaps she’s not the right person to make that tangible argument.” While hers is a long-term strategy for gradual social change, reflecting a dynastic monarchy’s tendency to think in generations, parents squeezed by a cost of living crisis want help now.
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The ‘Kate effect’
The princess’s own childhood, growing up in the Berkshire commuter belt village of Bucklebury, was by all accounts happy, and she has talked of raising her three children the same way, with lots of muddy outdoor play, competitive sport and crafts. (The Waleses employ a nanny but are hands-on by royal standards, clearing their diaries for school holidays.) Kate’s mother, Carole, was the family dynamo, founding a successful children’s partyware business while managing to make it to the children’s hockey matches.
It was at Marlborough college that Kate is first said to have befriended girls who moved in royal circles. There has long been speculation (and denial) that her last-minute decision to take a gap year and switch from Edinburgh University to St Andrews, putting her on the same history of art course as William, was not entirely coincidental. But however it started, the ensuing romance will shortly be mythologised all over again by the next series of the Netflix drama The Crown: how Prince William supposedly fell for her when she modelled in a transparent dress for a student fashion show; how they split up in her mid-20s, only to reconcile in time for a fairytale wedding. For their engagement photocall, Kate wore a blue Issa dress that sold out across multiple countries in 24 hours. It was an early harbinger of the so-called “Kate effect”, which made her an influencer before the term existed, and which Newsweek recently estimated is worth £1bn annually to the fashion industry.
Carly Whitewood runs Kate Middleton Style, a blog and Facebook page that for 12 years have documented every outfit Kate has been photographed in, helping users click through and buy the real thing or a cheaper lookalike. (Anything affordable such as by Zara sells out fast, says Whitewood, as do earrings; she herself recently bought a tartan check coat from Joules resembling one the princess has, which she wears to “channel my inner Kate”.)
Whitewood was at university doing a master’s in media and communication when she started the blog, having watched the royal wedding and seen interest in the bride’s sister, Pippa, explode. “ I just thought it might be fun to set up a simple page about Pippa to see if it got any traffic, and it did.” Things took off when she identified a bag Pippa was photographed carrying, telling her followers where to buy it, but before long Whitewood was getting more requests to identify Kate’s outfits than Pippa’s.
Pictures of the princess in gowns and tiaras still get the most hits, she says, but after that her most popular looks are “something you can see yourself wearing daily”, such as a summer dress and wedges. There’s far less interest in the businesslike blazers and trousers she has lately favoured for early years engagements, which Whitewood suspects suits her fine: “That’s why she’s wearing them. I suspect she would rather people focus on her work and not her style.” Whitewood, who had a baby just as the princess was launching her centre, says she has learned a surprising amount about her own daughter’s development from following Kate: “I’d say it’s influenced how I parent.”
As the millennial fanbase who have grown up with her enter a different stage of their own lives, the scope of the “Kate effect” seems to be widening. “Our audience is now as interested in hearing what she has to say as what she’s wearing,” says Hattie Brett, the editor of Grazia magazine, whose special coronation issue examines Kate’s influence. While she can still cause a run on anything she is photographed in, Brett says lately the princess seems to be buying fewer clothes and recycling old ones more, having worked out what suits her (often sleek mid-length coat dresses, with the Gianvito Rossi heels she owns in multiple colours). Brett was also struck by her choice of an environmentally conscious rented dress for last year’s awards ceremony for the couple’s Earthshot prize: “She’s studied, she’s thoughtful, and I think you can tell the effort she’s putting in. I thought that was a very clever move to tap into a conversation that lots of women have been having right now and makes her look much more relevant. She’s also wearing vintage, and we’ve never seen her wear that before.”
With age has also seemingly come the confidence to relax a little, appealing to a younger audience who encounter the royals mostly via social media feeds. Footage of Kate patting her husband’s bottom at the Baftas recently went viral, Brett points out: “That candid moment is what plays well for a digital-savvy audience. We wouldn’t have seen that from her 10 years ago.” Her fans remain heavily invested in the idea of an everlasting romance, judging by the popularity of slow-motion Instagram reels showing the Waleses looking adoringly at each other. Yet their domestic life remains a largely closed book, with both anxious to protect their own children from the kind of press circus their father experienced.
While the children grow up, there is an understanding between press and palace not to publish snatched photographs of them, in return for a supply of official images. But nine-year-old Prince George will be the first royal heir to reach adulthood in a fully digital world, where any fellow partygoer can film him on a mobile and upload the footage straight to TikTok, making protecting his privacy, and that of his younger siblings, eight-year-old Charlotte and five-year-old Louis, harder. Arguably Kate’s biggest parenting challenge, given the painfully obvious impact on Prince Harry of growing up as the “spare” to the heir, may, however, be managing the relationship between the future King George and his younger siblings. Assuming, of course, there is still a throne for George to inherit.
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A 21st-century Windsor
Harry’s dramatic departure from the royal stage, the scandal engulfing Prince Andrew, and the death of the Queen have all posed strategic threats to support for the monarchy, and a YouGov poll for BBC Panorama in April found barely a third of under-24s and slightly less than half of all 25- to 49-year-olds now favour its continued existence. The Waleses always looked surefooted but last summer’s awkward tour of the Caribbean – dogged by demands for slavery reparations, enduring anger over the Windrush scandal and criticism back home – illustrates the risks for them, too, of failing to move with the times.
Victoria Murphy suggests it will have been a “wakeup call” for the couple: “It’s the first time they have had an overwhelmingly negative dominant narrative around anything they’ve done and I think they’ll learn from that.” A review of the family’s links to slavery has since been announced, but mocking responses online to a recent newspaper story identifying Kate’s great-great-great-great-great-aunt as an anti-slavery campaigner suggests they have a long way to go.
Suggestions that Harry and Meghan, as a modern mixed-race couple, might have made a better job of that tour have rubbed salt into the wound already opened by their departure and subsequent allegations of racism. Running battles on social media between Kate and Meghan supporters are common, with rival fandoms feuding in the comments sections of royal blogs in what looks like an extension of wider culture wars (Kate People often but not always tend to be more socially conservative, and Meghan People often but not always to be more forward-thinking/socially aware). Unthinking gaffes that might in the past have been relatively quickly forgotten – like the way the Waleses once received Michelle and Barack Obama in a drawing room overlooked by a 17th-century painting titled the Negro Page – are unlikely to be so in future.
Dragging the Windsors into the 21st century is, of course, far from solely Kate’s responsibility. But the nearer her husband draws to the throne, the more she will be expected to embody an acutely contested sense of British national identity, alongside a jumble of conflicted beliefs about motherhood and family life. The stakes could not be higher, in a country where enthusiasm for the monarchy has been gently but steadily declining since 2019, and in years to come the pressures may be intense. When Michael Middleton designed a family coat of arms before the royal wedding, he chose three acorns to symbolise his children, representing the oak trees growing around the family home. Like those trees, Kate must hope she is now sturdy enough to weather a storm.
