The video recording in which Catherine, Princess of Wales, revealed she is undergoing treatment for cancer will be remembered as a moving personal testament and a public profile in courage at a time of great challenges for the monarchy. Catherine’s demeanour was calm, her clothes and appearance ordinary, her voice steady, although the strain showed behind her eyes. Yet most of all, it was Catherine’s bravery that shone through as she described the “incredibly tough” two months that she, her husband and children have endured since her illness, so shocking and unexpected, was first diagnosed.
All those people across Britain who are afflicted by cancer – the total is about 3 million, with about 1,000 new diagnoses each day – and relatives and friends whose lives are upended by the disease will identify closely with the feelings Catherine expressed or intimated. Fear for the future, present pain, the often distressing side effects of modern treatments, worry about the impact on the children: such thoughts besiege and oppress the mind even as the body struggles. Catherine spoke vicariously for all who suffer.
This ability – to speak for and to speak to all of this country’s less exalted, less heard, less fortunate “ordinary” people – is a quality that the monarchy, in its uncertain, slightly anachronistic national leadership role, needs badly and has often lacked. It is essential to its continued relevance and popular support. Kate Middleton, the middle-class girl from the home counties whose very surname smacked of ordinariness, has occupied that treacherous common ground from the moment she and William married at Westminster Abbey in 2011.
Catherine’s positive, smiling personality, obvious commitment to her role as a mother and lack of airs and graces have helped make her the most popular younger royal since Princess Diana. Her normalising presence has proved especially important as the royal family experienced a string of difficulties. In hindsight, the death of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022 and the close of the second Elizabethan era triggered a period of turmoil. It has brought a cancer diagnosis for the late queen’s son and successor, King Charles III, further disgrace of Prince Andrew and damaging ructions over the maverick behaviour of Prince Harry.
Catherine’s key role in keeping “the Firm” afloat means her prospective absence from public duties for the foreseeable future will be all the more deeply felt in Buckingham Palace. With the king also out of action – like Catherine, the type of cancer he is suffering from has not been revealed – and with two princes in self-imposed or enforced exile, an already supposedly “slimmed down” monarchy begins to look depleted, overstretched and vulnerable. Yet this is not the moment for republicans to re-open the debate about its future. That must come, in time. But not now.
Right now, Catherine and her family deserve and must be afforded the privacy, time and personal space for which she has asked, in order that she completes a full recovery. Cancer charities have rightly praised her openness about her condition. Catherine has been laudably candid after weeks of unfair, sometimes malicious, speculation on social media and the international press. We wish her well over the difficult weeks and months ahead.
Catherine became a fairytale princess – the girl with everything. And yet, so it turns out, hers was not a charmed life after all. Her challenge is everywoman’s and everyman’s.
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