A long, royal ride

“Place no faith in miracles —
Against all evidence
Faith is the miracle!”

From The Scientific Proverbs
of Bachchoo

Britain, while confident in its conceit of being the best-placed culture to patronise and instruct the rest of the world, is a deeply tribal society. Queen and Country is, despite the cynics, republicans, satirists and latter-day Bolshevik, the credo of the tribe.
The tribe has its chiefs and shamans and it ensures that they are pavilioned in splendour and girded with praise so that the respect due to them can be maintained. It would be tempting in profiling the young royals, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, and his Duchess, Kate, to conclude that beneath the pomp and circumstance, the royal family are perfectly ordinary human beings. It wouldn’t be true.
They are an in-bred eccentric and temperamental lot. The great strain on them, in times when civilised countries are casting off the last vestiges of tribalism and embracing a democratising entropy, is trying to appear like the girl-and-boy-next-door while keeping their distance from the mob.
The most recent royal announcement from the palace was that William and Kate will be spending the festive season with plain Mr and Mrs Middleton at their non-palatial, if large and vulgarly furnished, house.
Pippa, Kate’s hapless younger sister, she of the celebrated bum, was induced to write a piece in a popular weekly saying she was looking forward to her family Christmas and to her father’s penchant for dressing up in fancy disguises and surprising them all. The notice of royal engagements and whereabouts did add that after a day or two the Duke and Duchess would move to the Royal household in Sandringham to be with William’s father, Prince Charles, and his grandparents, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.
If Prince William had not been born into the royal family and if Catherine Middleton, the second commoner in history to have married a potential king, remained plain Ms M, they would be perfectly normal, vivacious, pleasant, even handsome, ordinary people. The accident of birth and the compulsion towards marriage have robbed them of that ordinariness and though they may not object to that theft, they most certainly regret the loss of their right to be left alone and their right to anonymity.
Britain doesn’t have a monarchy. That went with the decapitation of Charles I. Parliament took ever-increasing powers and left Britain with a surviving but politically-impotent royalty.
William was born in St Mary’s hospital, Paddington, a public hospital with a private ward. His mother, the late Princess Diana, insisted that William and his younger brother, Harry, should be exposed to the ways in which other British youngsters are brought up. Her imagination about this process stretched to taking them to Disneyland, feeding them McDonald’s fast food, buying them clothes from High Street shops and giving them gifts of videogames — just as the boys from down the road could expect.
Prince William went to four private schools and then to St Andrew’s University in Scotland where he met Kate Middleton who came from a middle-class family (the name doesn’t come from their class, but probably from a town where her ancestors lived).
William, on graduation, joined an Army regiment and then trained as a helicopter pilot in the Royal Air Force. He served on the search and rescue emergency teams, which are summoned to help people in distress who can only be reached by helicopter because of weather conditions or remote locations.
Kate Middleton’s grandparents were northern working-class people. Her parents were flight attendants and worked in the airlines in West Asia. Kate was born, as was William, in 1982 and she studied history of art at St Andrew’s University where they began dating in 2002. Kate subsequently worked in a clothing chain store and then for her father and mother who had, after leaving the airlines, founded a firm called Party Pieces, which deals in accessories for parties and celebrations.
On the face of it, as any search through the Internet will tell you, Kate and William had ups and downs in their relationship like any other young couple.
In 2007, they went on holiday together and the newspapers reported that their relationship had ended as Kate felt neglected by William and William at 25 felt he was not ready to commit to marriage. Though they weren’t identified specifically, there were reports of William “seeing” other women.
Three years and very many rumours later, in 2010, Kate and William announced their engagement from their reunion holiday in Kenya’s natural wildlife reserve where they went to celebrate William’s qualification as a search and rescue helicopter pilot. In April 2011, they were married in Westminster Abbey.
Kate had long before surrendered her right to anonymity and earlier this year a photographer sneakily took nude pictures of her on holiday in France and sold them to newspapers all over the world.
And now the announcement of her pregnancy and its progress with hospitalisation for severe morning sickness and the ghastly episode of the prank phone call and the suicide of nurse Jacintha Saldanha.
That the celebrated but private state of pregnancy is violated by such an event is bad enough, but now the newspapers have taken to speculating where the royal baby was conceived. The Daily Mirror is in favour of a Welsh farmhouse which the Duke and Duchess rented. The Daily Express pinpoints a night in the Solomon Islands and the Daily Mail very authoritatively says that the baby couldn’t have been conceived “in the searing heat of the Far East” where they spent a holiday to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee.
The severe bouts of morning sickness indicate to some that the Duchess may be carrying twins. In which case there is speculation as to which twin will be the first to emerge and become King or Queen. And what happens in the case of a Caesarean birth? Will the surgeon decide?