Kate Middleton: perfectly at home - The royal bride-to-be seems to have all the qualities required of a modern princess. Vicki Woods sets off to investigate
'She's changed her hair,' says the Sun's veteran royal photographer Arthur Edwards, as a doll-sized Catherine Middleton and Prince William of Wales round the far corner of St Salvator's Quadrangle in the University of St Andrews in a blaze of unexpected sunshine. 'She's done it different to yesterday in Anglesey. It was all pulled back off her face.' Since Edwards's Nikon D2X has a telescopic lens the size of my thigh, he can see her every eyelash. 'It looked better yesterday. I did a lovely picture, very regal.' Thirty years ago it was Arthur Edwards who first spotted a young woman wearing a gold D on a chain around her neck and guessed who she was. He said, 'Are you Lady Diana Spencer? May I take your picture please?' And she said yes. He used a Leica back then.
The grassed quadrangle has 600 undergraduates in scarlet gowns to watch the Prince, as patron of the university, launch the celebration of its founding in 1413. The ones sitting on chairs bought winning lottery tickets. The tiny town has tea shops, coffee houses, a couple of boutiques, medieval buildings, only 16,000 people (half of whom are students) and eye-popping panoramic views: wow, look, the sea, the sea! (Off which the wind slices in like a boning knife.) As she nears the press pen a woman says, 'She's channelling Diana!' just as I'm thinking, oh, I had a little red jacket and short tight skirt just like that myself.
For the Anglesey lifeboat launch, her first official engagement since the wedding was announced, Catherine had worn a four-seasons-old Katherine Hooker coat, newly shortened to two or three inches above the knee, and a fascinator made of pheasant feathers. By now you'll be over the fascinator, having seen it again and again, but it was thrilling on the day. As was her word-perfect rendition of Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, the Welsh national anthem, in which she correctly pronounced 'wlad' as 'oo-lard'. Unlike John Redwood, the former Secretary of State for Wales, who pronounced it variously as erm, la-la or cripes (and you may still enjoy his embarrassment on YouTube).
So, it is begun: Catherine Middleton's vocational lifework as wife to the second in line to the throne of the United Kingdom. Work that may be harder than it appears. Her main duty is to produce the third in direct line, helpfully soon and helpfully male (in order to stave off a lot of wonkery from critics of male primogeniture). Her other duties are to pose for photographers, perform small ceremonies of dedication, celebration and/or commemoration for charitable purpose, before promenading among the populace. As Queen Charlotte nudged her sullen sons in The Madness of King George: 'Come on, smile and wave. That's what you get paid for.' Lucky Queen Charlotte didn't have to duck Nikons or HDTV.
I liked these public outfits – indeed, I've liked nearly everything she has worn: little coats and dresses at weddings, short, plain jackets, a lot of frisky hats ('She does that British-wedding look very well,' says Vogue's editor, Alexandra Shulman). But my admiration is not necessarily a good thing. By the time I'd crawled off the Edinburgh train that night, the online Huffington Post already had a story up: 'Kate Middleton officially entered princess territory today, by stepping out in the ensemble every leading lady must learn to love: the skirt suit.' HuffPo didn't say who'd made it, only that it was red, while everything else was black, including her gloves, 'which she later took off to reveal her engagement ring. Le sigh.' It took another 24 hours to discover the designer, and the worldwide fashion community was not thrilled. 'Luisa Spagnoli!' lamented Paula Reed, Grazia's style director. 'As Women's Wear Daily said, she's worn by grannies everywhere from Como to Calabria.' Light dawned. No wonder I'd thought she looked cute, pretty and polished in her little pillar-box red suit. I'd worn it myself, back in 1990, a Catherine Walker knock-off. Same 'Princess Di' colour, same two to three inches above the knee, a length that Sarah Mower at vogue.com smartly christened 'Middleton'.
'Everyone wants her to wear British fashion,' Reed says. 'It would be so good for the industry, it would give it a huge global boost. But she isn't going to the designers – or being helped by anybody who can go to the designers. We all know Victoria Beckham sent her things, and so did Matthew Williamson, but they were all sent back – the Palace is freaked at the idea that she might be seen to be taking freebies. So the poor girl's just having to go out and buy things herself. In shops!' We both shrieked at the nightmare of having to buy things in shops. The Clarence House press officer said Catherine wasn't a member of the Royal family yet, and they weren't giving any guidance, and what she did about her clothes was up to her. Yes, yes. But are you making her send Posh's frocks back, I asked. And she giggled.
What a soon-to-be princess wears may seem ridiculous to people of gravitas, but there's nothing footling about the public wardrobe worn by heads of state or notable people who aren't necessarily running wars or anything. A woman who wears nice clothes well looks a) competent, b) sane and c) reassuringly self-controlled. Every time I look at young Miss Middleton, I feel I've had a tiny spritz of Keep Calm and Carry On behind each ear.
Let's not be snobby about the M4 corridor, shall we? Royal Berkshire, where all three Middleton children were born and bred, is a fantastically handy place to grow up in. Decent houses with a decent bit of space, decent schools, tidy, managed countryside, good proximity to London and Heathrow. Bucklebury Common sprawls over a wide area and all the roads off it look alike. Which, during those hard years when country mothers spend most of their lives ferrying daughters to parties, means a lot of reversing down the wrong drive. At the Chapel Row end of Bucklebury, the Middletons' brick-built, five-bedroom house down a track off The Avenue is barely visible even in winter (when the woods are leafless). There is a sign up saying private road, though everyone in Bucklebury knows it's not a private road. Those of us who live on the Hampshire side of the M4 corridor prefer our less-managed, downland countryside. We think it's a bit posho, Bucklebury. But we admit the pubs are charming.
Or were. John Haley, the landlord of the Old Boot in Stanford Dingley (which is the second-nearest hostelry to chez Middleton), received his wedding invitation the day before I'd booked lunch there with a friend. So we arrived to find the Boot now a royal hotspot with a tour bus and taxis in the car-park, TV cameras all over the snug and a CBS team outside, filming a silver-haired chap leaning on his Bentley. Steph the barmaid came off the phone and said, 'That was Hello! again.' Was that the landlord outside, being interviewed? The barman peered through the window. 'No, that's our neighbour,' he said in wonder. Some Germans came clamouring in, so I left him to it.
Ever since she learnt to drive, Catherine Middleton has been going to my favourite Waitrose in unlovely Thatcham – a sprawling satellite of Newbury. Ten minutes from me and 10 minutes from her in the other direction but, to my irritation, I've never seen her in there. 'She was in last week,' said a boy stacking the sandwich shelf. 'On her way to Wales to launch that boat. She's always got a load of bodyguards with her now, though.' Down my way we enjoy spotting a princess-in-waiting: neighbours tease each other with royal glimpses. 'Pot Kiln in Yattendon!' one might say merrily. 'I looked up and thought, that looks like Prince William. And do you know, it was! With Kate. And the detectives at another table. She looked lovely.'
We've learnt over the years to hope rather desperately that royal brides will come from families that are happy to start with. While Diana Spencer was not precisely a motherless child, she seemed like one: her parents' divorce was bitter, her father won custody and access was difficult. (Years later, her brother Charles told me, 'I lived with parents who didn't speak for 25 years, you know. And it isn't good.') Sarah Ferguson's mother bolted all the way to Argentina with a polo player, leaving her daughter somewhat damaged, to put it kindly.
Catherine is from a happy family by all accounts. It's easy to assume, from looking at newspaper pictures, that they like each other. She and her sister walk out of a London party with hands entwined; she and her mother pause, heads together, outside Bruce Oldfield in Beauchamp Place; she and her sister put hours into Party Pieces, the family business. Catherine worked at Party Pieces throughout her seven-year engagement (though the tabloids obviously thought it wasn't much of a job). And she did do a three-days-a-week stint with Jigsaw (during their split) as an accessories buyer. Which is when she met Claudia Bradby, who designs very pretty little bits of jewellery, and who is married to Tom Bradby, who did The Engagement Interview. Good networking skills.
Her younger brother, James, seems to be his mother's boy: after Marlborough and Edinburgh (where he didn't graduate) he started up the Cake Kit Company, aimed at the same market as Party Pieces, close to their Bucklebury home. Middleton parents and children holiday together long past nest-flying age. They do seem to be nice people. A Buckleburgher who knows them (and wouldn't be named) told me Catherine was a 'sweet child, very polite even as a little girl. Pippa was the stunner as a child, though. Catherine had braces top and bottom and wasn't at all the glossy beauty you see today.' Michael is 'really very nice. She [Carole] is a bit nervy'. I get the impression that while Michael Middleton was accepted by Buckleburghers from day one as a nice chap, Carole was less embraceable. People call her aspirational (which is 21st-century English for pushy), perhaps because there was a quite savagely snobby book about Catherine's background early on. Also, 'Pippa was always called Pip or Pippa by family and friends,' says the same Buckleburgher. 'Kate was always called Catherine. We don't know where this Kate thing came from.' Well, it came from school, obviously, from university and latterly from the papers.
She'll never lose it now. 'Catherine' is far too long a name to fit tabloid headlines. But she's right to try to force our hands, I think (that's why I keep writing it out, though I long to say 'Kate'). The late Princess of Wales loathed her own headline-friendly diminutive: I remember an early Dafydd Jones picture of her at the polo for Tatler: her arms folded, her scowl mutinous, the photographers massed and the headline shouting 'Di! Di! Di! Di! DI! DI!' If I'd been proposed to by a prince of the blood at 28, I might have ditched my own disliked diminutive by now. Especially if I had use of a press office as effective as William's and Harry's seems to be. The royal biographer and historian Hugo Vickers says nobody knew the engagement was going to be announced on that November morning last year. 'Even the press secretary knew only 40 minutes before. On the day Diana's engagement was announced, her picture was on the front page of The Times,' he said. 'It was leaked the night before.'
Thirty years later, the information management has been superb from the moment the engagement was announced. The officialroyalwedding2011.org website looks like a page from justgiving.com; the betrothed couple displaying their humanitarian smarts by suggesting that donations to particular charities would be wonderful wedding presents.
A little amuse-bouche of news is placed on the website now and again: Catherine's biography, for example, shows her in Amman, Jordan. From the age of two to four and a half. Who knew? 'While her father worked there' – but for whom? And what as? And the pictures (sweet, but rather curiously chosen) are all stamped '© The Middleton Family'. Very savvy. I'm always impressed by people who work lawyers well; the Middletons work them very well: Harbottle & Lewis (who are lawyers to the Royal family) did an impressive job of slapping down the world's wriggliest paparazzo, Niraj Tanna, who took pictures of Catherine playing tennis last Christmas Day and (so I read) was trying to poke his Nikon through the window during lunch.
Her biography on officialroyalwedding2011.org says she was educated at Marlborough and St Andrews, which she was, but it wipes away the two terms she spent at Downe House first. One longs to know why she was switched. It's a single-sex school: Gabriella Windsor, the daughter of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, boarded at Downe House and told me she had chafed under the cloistered regime ('Literally cloistered!').
Anyway, Marlborough (the school du jour for a while now, along with Wellington College) suited Catherine – her name liveth forever more and shineth in gold on the roll of honour because she was a house prefect (Elmhurst) and a school prefect. A friend whose daughter boarded there says Marlborough 'spits out girls who are Able All Areas: the City, music business, fashion, politics. They're bright, they do sport, drama, art. They're also very glossy.' There is a certain something, no doubt. Here's a half-dozen Old Marlburiennes: Samantha Cameron, Frances Osborne, Ghislaine Maxwell, Sally Bercow, Catherine and Pippa Middleton. Gosh. No stereotyping there, then.
For Prince William, St Andrew's was a well-chosen university, in a tiny town (the student population are Americans, Japanese, Chinese, lots of Europeans, and – from south of Hadrian's Wall – mostly Sloanes) that let him live a student life. 'It says something about Fife people that they're not impressed by who you are,' says Peter, an (unimpressed) native Scot, who was in the year below, played against William's team (the Strokers) at footie and thought them a wee bit unserious because 'they wore pink socks'. Catherine was in 'a set of about 40 poshos reading art history', another alumnus told me, 'including Olivia Hunt, who was an ex of the Prince when Kate met him. Kate's become friends of all the exes.' Which is smart. They are pretty much all invited to the wedding, what's more, and so are hers (rather fewer in number). 'St Andrews is a very Sloaney, non-toff university and the whole scene, such as it was, just revolved around them, really. William's friends ('a very toff crew') are children of friends of the Prince of Wales, including those four dazzling Van Cutsem boys from Norfolk (Nick, Hugh, Billy and Edward), and Iona and Mary Douglas-Home, and the nightclub entrepreneur Guy Pelly, who famously took the flak for Prince Harry's spliffs. Catherine's friends are… tight-lipped. We'll see. It is not easy to have friends once inside the Royal family.
Professor Peter Humfrey was head of the art history department when William and Catherine were undergraduates. He was obviously very aware of the future king right from the beginning, but he barely remembers Catherine until she took the final-year course he taught, Titian and His Age. 'It included architecture,' he told me, 'and I think I'm right in remembering that she did a paper not on Titian or painting but on a Venetian palace called the Palazzo Corner.' He didn't know at all about her relationship with William until he saw the kissing pictures from Klosters, but the fact that she did nothing to draw attention to herself was entirely to her credit, he thinks. 'She kept quite a low profile. She did nothing to draw attention to herself. Very discreet. And these are qualities that should stand her in good stead in her future role. I'm afraid I haven't any juicy anecdotes about her,' he said, laughing. 'I didn't even know she was supposed to be called Kate!' Well, calling her Catherine proved right all along, Professor. He was the second reader for her final-year dissertation on Charles Dodgson's photographs, which he remembers as 'well written' and 'dealt with the issues sensitively and intelligently'. So is she clever? 'Most certainly. Intelligent and articulate. But also discreet.'
'I'll say!' said a classmate. 'You barely noticed her, she very sweetly just slipped in and out of class.' He added, 'And I'd say "conscientious" rather than clever.'
Catherine will be 'the only queen of England ever to have a degree,' says Hugo Vickers. And in art history, too – which might be useful? 'Yes, she's going to be living in some very lovely places. Princess Anne didn't go to university and she could have got a good degree. Before Catherine, royal women only went near a university if they were made chancellor.' It's amazing, the recent history of royal education: Diana Spencer famously gained no O-levels at school. Camilla Shand, later Parker Bowles and latterly the Duchess of Cornwall, gained one O-level and I've never discovered what it was in. Catherine got three A-levels in chemistry, biology and art and a 2:1 in art history. That's a fair bit of modernisation in 30 years.
The Queen allegedly expressed her approval of Sophie Rhys-Jones, now HRH the Countess of Wessex, by saying, 'You wouldn't notice her in a crowd.' If the Queen herself didn't have to signal her presence in public with fuchsia hats or egg-yellow coats and dresses you wouldn't notice her in a crowd, either. Catherine Middleton's polished reserve and apparent lack of the 'look-at-me' gene that is so essential to celebrity may endear her to her new family enormously. What was wrong with Fergie was that she believed she was bigger than the schedule. Long before her toe-sucking embarrassments, it was clear that she wasn't fantastically good at being HRH the Duchess of York. A friend whose mother was a lord lieutenant told me about some village visit, arranged on a bleak old day, with schoolchildren all lined up. 'My mother's an absolute pro,' said my friend. 'Unflappable, just rises above everything. But all these little things were outside in the freezing cold, waiting and waiting, and eventually Fergie sort of burst out of her car, spraying excuses. My mother bobbed the merest curtsy, held her wristwatch up to Fergie's face and tapped it: "One hour, ma'am. One hour." Then she led her down the receiving line, smiling.'
What will Catherine be called when she walks back down the aisle? It depends on whether the Queen offers William an earldom or dukedom. She may do, because she bestowed one of these on each younger son. Or she may not, because Prince William of Wales is always referred to thus, and he likes it. And we like it. It's become his surname: 'Flight Lieutenant Wales'. I suspect he won't be made a duke, in which case Catherine would (following the usual habits of royalty) be styled Princess William of Wales, in the manner of Princess Michael of Kent, which will puzzle people greatly.
Celestria Noel, a social commentator who knows about correct form, says Catherine herself wants to be called 'Princess Catherine. Maybe they'll just say, "She'll be known as Princess Catherine". Most people, to the extent they've even heard of Princess Michael of Kent at all, have no idea that her name is Marie-Christine, they think she's called Michael. You and I know a married woman is correctly called Mrs Mansname Surname – Mrs John Smith – but nobody puts that on their business cards any more. There's an extraordinary lack of learning about the distinctions. And the Palace is very practical about this sort of thing.'
What the world really wants to know is whether or not the normality of Catherine Middleton's happy, affectionate family life will be sundered for ever after April 29. Hugo Vickers thinks not. 'I'm told that if you surrendered your child to the Royal family you must have expected that it wouldn't be easy to see them. Yes, it has been what you called a closed circle in the past. But as far as I can see, Prince William will continue to see the Middletons. But it will be different. And more difficult.'
Two of my women friends, with a similar sort of connection to the Royal family, are on opposite sides of this. One friend was insistent that Catherine would barely see her parents again. 'Yes, they went shooting at Balmoral. Once! And that was just before the announcement of the engagement, wasn't it? It was a photo opportunity: This is Prince William's girlfriend, they're getting engaged, it's fine by us, here are her parents, they're not going to spill any secrets or talk to the press, are they? Flash-bang-wallop, thank you. They will never go up there for Christmas. I know something of that family and they will not change. The flunkeys, the offices that run on wheels – they won't change. They are rooted in a regulated life; they don't mind Kate becoming part of them but they won't let the Middleton family in – no way. A girl from the M4 corridor? [Sharp intake of breath.]'
The other friend thinks that far from the Middletons losing a daughter, they'll gain a son. It would be 'rare in royal marriages, but he may – just – be able to keep the connection to Berkshire. Her family is obviously very important to her; she is close to her parents from what we read; close to her sister and brother. Wills goes to Berkshire, and no doubt still will. So brilliant it's Berkshire, when you think. Near London. Near Windsor.'
Ah yes, Berkshire. Back we go, down the M4. I'm very amused by the thought that Catherine Middleton's trajectory proves the Edwardian hostesses' maxim: 'Always be good to the girls, because you never know whom they may marry.' Aristocrats (I'm told by one) are miffed by the soon-to-be Royal Highness because, to be frank, William should have married one of them. Aristos shelter royals in trouble, keep schtum about everything they overhear, put them up and entertain them and then when two princes of the blood come along at once, what happens? One of them finds Little Miss Middleclass and the other can't be prised away from a Zimbabwean businessman's daughter. Sigh. So when the engagement was finally announced, from every 18th-century drawing-room, every northern castle, moated manor and 12th-century great hall throughout the realm, there rose up cries of pain. ( telegraph.co.uk )
'She's changed her hair,' says the Sun's veteran royal photographer Arthur Edwards, as a doll-sized Catherine Middleton and Prince William of Wales round the far corner of St Salvator's Quadrangle in the University of St Andrews in a blaze of unexpected sunshine. 'She's done it different to yesterday in Anglesey. It was all pulled back off her face.' Since Edwards's Nikon D2X has a telescopic lens the size of my thigh, he can see her every eyelash. 'It looked better yesterday. I did a lovely picture, very regal.' Thirty years ago it was Arthur Edwards who first spotted a young woman wearing a gold D on a chain around her neck and guessed who she was. He said, 'Are you Lady Diana Spencer? May I take your picture please?' And she said yes. He used a Leica back then.
Soon-to-be princess Kate Middleton
Kate Middleton at age five
Kate Middleton at St Andrew's prep school in Berkshire, 1988
The grassed quadrangle has 600 undergraduates in scarlet gowns to watch the Prince, as patron of the university, launch the celebration of its founding in 1413. The ones sitting on chairs bought winning lottery tickets. The tiny town has tea shops, coffee houses, a couple of boutiques, medieval buildings, only 16,000 people (half of whom are students) and eye-popping panoramic views: wow, look, the sea, the sea! (Off which the wind slices in like a boning knife.) As she nears the press pen a woman says, 'She's channelling Diana!' just as I'm thinking, oh, I had a little red jacket and short tight skirt just like that myself.
For the Anglesey lifeboat launch, her first official engagement since the wedding was announced, Catherine had worn a four-seasons-old Katherine Hooker coat, newly shortened to two or three inches above the knee, and a fascinator made of pheasant feathers. By now you'll be over the fascinator, having seen it again and again, but it was thrilling on the day. As was her word-perfect rendition of Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, the Welsh national anthem, in which she correctly pronounced 'wlad' as 'oo-lard'. Unlike John Redwood, the former Secretary of State for Wales, who pronounced it variously as erm, la-la or cripes (and you may still enjoy his embarrassment on YouTube).
So, it is begun: Catherine Middleton's vocational lifework as wife to the second in line to the throne of the United Kingdom. Work that may be harder than it appears. Her main duty is to produce the third in direct line, helpfully soon and helpfully male (in order to stave off a lot of wonkery from critics of male primogeniture). Her other duties are to pose for photographers, perform small ceremonies of dedication, celebration and/or commemoration for charitable purpose, before promenading among the populace. As Queen Charlotte nudged her sullen sons in The Madness of King George: 'Come on, smile and wave. That's what you get paid for.' Lucky Queen Charlotte didn't have to duck Nikons or HDTV.
I liked these public outfits – indeed, I've liked nearly everything she has worn: little coats and dresses at weddings, short, plain jackets, a lot of frisky hats ('She does that British-wedding look very well,' says Vogue's editor, Alexandra Shulman). But my admiration is not necessarily a good thing. By the time I'd crawled off the Edinburgh train that night, the online Huffington Post already had a story up: 'Kate Middleton officially entered princess territory today, by stepping out in the ensemble every leading lady must learn to love: the skirt suit.' HuffPo didn't say who'd made it, only that it was red, while everything else was black, including her gloves, 'which she later took off to reveal her engagement ring. Le sigh.' It took another 24 hours to discover the designer, and the worldwide fashion community was not thrilled. 'Luisa Spagnoli!' lamented Paula Reed, Grazia's style director. 'As Women's Wear Daily said, she's worn by grannies everywhere from Como to Calabria.' Light dawned. No wonder I'd thought she looked cute, pretty and polished in her little pillar-box red suit. I'd worn it myself, back in 1990, a Catherine Walker knock-off. Same 'Princess Di' colour, same two to three inches above the knee, a length that Sarah Mower at vogue.com smartly christened 'Middleton'.
'Everyone wants her to wear British fashion,' Reed says. 'It would be so good for the industry, it would give it a huge global boost. But she isn't going to the designers – or being helped by anybody who can go to the designers. We all know Victoria Beckham sent her things, and so did Matthew Williamson, but they were all sent back – the Palace is freaked at the idea that she might be seen to be taking freebies. So the poor girl's just having to go out and buy things herself. In shops!' We both shrieked at the nightmare of having to buy things in shops. The Clarence House press officer said Catherine wasn't a member of the Royal family yet, and they weren't giving any guidance, and what she did about her clothes was up to her. Yes, yes. But are you making her send Posh's frocks back, I asked. And she giggled.
What a soon-to-be princess wears may seem ridiculous to people of gravitas, but there's nothing footling about the public wardrobe worn by heads of state or notable people who aren't necessarily running wars or anything. A woman who wears nice clothes well looks a) competent, b) sane and c) reassuringly self-controlled. Every time I look at young Miss Middleton, I feel I've had a tiny spritz of Keep Calm and Carry On behind each ear.
Let's not be snobby about the M4 corridor, shall we? Royal Berkshire, where all three Middleton children were born and bred, is a fantastically handy place to grow up in. Decent houses with a decent bit of space, decent schools, tidy, managed countryside, good proximity to London and Heathrow. Bucklebury Common sprawls over a wide area and all the roads off it look alike. Which, during those hard years when country mothers spend most of their lives ferrying daughters to parties, means a lot of reversing down the wrong drive. At the Chapel Row end of Bucklebury, the Middletons' brick-built, five-bedroom house down a track off The Avenue is barely visible even in winter (when the woods are leafless). There is a sign up saying private road, though everyone in Bucklebury knows it's not a private road. Those of us who live on the Hampshire side of the M4 corridor prefer our less-managed, downland countryside. We think it's a bit posho, Bucklebury. But we admit the pubs are charming.
Or were. John Haley, the landlord of the Old Boot in Stanford Dingley (which is the second-nearest hostelry to chez Middleton), received his wedding invitation the day before I'd booked lunch there with a friend. So we arrived to find the Boot now a royal hotspot with a tour bus and taxis in the car-park, TV cameras all over the snug and a CBS team outside, filming a silver-haired chap leaning on his Bentley. Steph the barmaid came off the phone and said, 'That was Hello! again.' Was that the landlord outside, being interviewed? The barman peered through the window. 'No, that's our neighbour,' he said in wonder. Some Germans came clamouring in, so I left him to it.
Ever since she learnt to drive, Catherine Middleton has been going to my favourite Waitrose in unlovely Thatcham – a sprawling satellite of Newbury. Ten minutes from me and 10 minutes from her in the other direction but, to my irritation, I've never seen her in there. 'She was in last week,' said a boy stacking the sandwich shelf. 'On her way to Wales to launch that boat. She's always got a load of bodyguards with her now, though.' Down my way we enjoy spotting a princess-in-waiting: neighbours tease each other with royal glimpses. 'Pot Kiln in Yattendon!' one might say merrily. 'I looked up and thought, that looks like Prince William. And do you know, it was! With Kate. And the detectives at another table. She looked lovely.'
We've learnt over the years to hope rather desperately that royal brides will come from families that are happy to start with. While Diana Spencer was not precisely a motherless child, she seemed like one: her parents' divorce was bitter, her father won custody and access was difficult. (Years later, her brother Charles told me, 'I lived with parents who didn't speak for 25 years, you know. And it isn't good.') Sarah Ferguson's mother bolted all the way to Argentina with a polo player, leaving her daughter somewhat damaged, to put it kindly.
Catherine is from a happy family by all accounts. It's easy to assume, from looking at newspaper pictures, that they like each other. She and her sister walk out of a London party with hands entwined; she and her mother pause, heads together, outside Bruce Oldfield in Beauchamp Place; she and her sister put hours into Party Pieces, the family business. Catherine worked at Party Pieces throughout her seven-year engagement (though the tabloids obviously thought it wasn't much of a job). And she did do a three-days-a-week stint with Jigsaw (during their split) as an accessories buyer. Which is when she met Claudia Bradby, who designs very pretty little bits of jewellery, and who is married to Tom Bradby, who did The Engagement Interview. Good networking skills.
Her younger brother, James, seems to be his mother's boy: after Marlborough and Edinburgh (where he didn't graduate) he started up the Cake Kit Company, aimed at the same market as Party Pieces, close to their Bucklebury home. Middleton parents and children holiday together long past nest-flying age. They do seem to be nice people. A Buckleburgher who knows them (and wouldn't be named) told me Catherine was a 'sweet child, very polite even as a little girl. Pippa was the stunner as a child, though. Catherine had braces top and bottom and wasn't at all the glossy beauty you see today.' Michael is 'really very nice. She [Carole] is a bit nervy'. I get the impression that while Michael Middleton was accepted by Buckleburghers from day one as a nice chap, Carole was less embraceable. People call her aspirational (which is 21st-century English for pushy), perhaps because there was a quite savagely snobby book about Catherine's background early on. Also, 'Pippa was always called Pip or Pippa by family and friends,' says the same Buckleburgher. 'Kate was always called Catherine. We don't know where this Kate thing came from.' Well, it came from school, obviously, from university and latterly from the papers.
She'll never lose it now. 'Catherine' is far too long a name to fit tabloid headlines. But she's right to try to force our hands, I think (that's why I keep writing it out, though I long to say 'Kate'). The late Princess of Wales loathed her own headline-friendly diminutive: I remember an early Dafydd Jones picture of her at the polo for Tatler: her arms folded, her scowl mutinous, the photographers massed and the headline shouting 'Di! Di! Di! Di! DI! DI!' If I'd been proposed to by a prince of the blood at 28, I might have ditched my own disliked diminutive by now. Especially if I had use of a press office as effective as William's and Harry's seems to be. The royal biographer and historian Hugo Vickers says nobody knew the engagement was going to be announced on that November morning last year. 'Even the press secretary knew only 40 minutes before. On the day Diana's engagement was announced, her picture was on the front page of The Times,' he said. 'It was leaked the night before.'
Thirty years later, the information management has been superb from the moment the engagement was announced. The officialroyalwedding2011.org website looks like a page from justgiving.com; the betrothed couple displaying their humanitarian smarts by suggesting that donations to particular charities would be wonderful wedding presents.
A little amuse-bouche of news is placed on the website now and again: Catherine's biography, for example, shows her in Amman, Jordan. From the age of two to four and a half. Who knew? 'While her father worked there' – but for whom? And what as? And the pictures (sweet, but rather curiously chosen) are all stamped '© The Middleton Family'. Very savvy. I'm always impressed by people who work lawyers well; the Middletons work them very well: Harbottle & Lewis (who are lawyers to the Royal family) did an impressive job of slapping down the world's wriggliest paparazzo, Niraj Tanna, who took pictures of Catherine playing tennis last Christmas Day and (so I read) was trying to poke his Nikon through the window during lunch.
Her biography on officialroyalwedding2011.org says she was educated at Marlborough and St Andrews, which she was, but it wipes away the two terms she spent at Downe House first. One longs to know why she was switched. It's a single-sex school: Gabriella Windsor, the daughter of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, boarded at Downe House and told me she had chafed under the cloistered regime ('Literally cloistered!').
Anyway, Marlborough (the school du jour for a while now, along with Wellington College) suited Catherine – her name liveth forever more and shineth in gold on the roll of honour because she was a house prefect (Elmhurst) and a school prefect. A friend whose daughter boarded there says Marlborough 'spits out girls who are Able All Areas: the City, music business, fashion, politics. They're bright, they do sport, drama, art. They're also very glossy.' There is a certain something, no doubt. Here's a half-dozen Old Marlburiennes: Samantha Cameron, Frances Osborne, Ghislaine Maxwell, Sally Bercow, Catherine and Pippa Middleton. Gosh. No stereotyping there, then.
For Prince William, St Andrew's was a well-chosen university, in a tiny town (the student population are Americans, Japanese, Chinese, lots of Europeans, and – from south of Hadrian's Wall – mostly Sloanes) that let him live a student life. 'It says something about Fife people that they're not impressed by who you are,' says Peter, an (unimpressed) native Scot, who was in the year below, played against William's team (the Strokers) at footie and thought them a wee bit unserious because 'they wore pink socks'. Catherine was in 'a set of about 40 poshos reading art history', another alumnus told me, 'including Olivia Hunt, who was an ex of the Prince when Kate met him. Kate's become friends of all the exes.' Which is smart. They are pretty much all invited to the wedding, what's more, and so are hers (rather fewer in number). 'St Andrews is a very Sloaney, non-toff university and the whole scene, such as it was, just revolved around them, really. William's friends ('a very toff crew') are children of friends of the Prince of Wales, including those four dazzling Van Cutsem boys from Norfolk (Nick, Hugh, Billy and Edward), and Iona and Mary Douglas-Home, and the nightclub entrepreneur Guy Pelly, who famously took the flak for Prince Harry's spliffs. Catherine's friends are… tight-lipped. We'll see. It is not easy to have friends once inside the Royal family.
Professor Peter Humfrey was head of the art history department when William and Catherine were undergraduates. He was obviously very aware of the future king right from the beginning, but he barely remembers Catherine until she took the final-year course he taught, Titian and His Age. 'It included architecture,' he told me, 'and I think I'm right in remembering that she did a paper not on Titian or painting but on a Venetian palace called the Palazzo Corner.' He didn't know at all about her relationship with William until he saw the kissing pictures from Klosters, but the fact that she did nothing to draw attention to herself was entirely to her credit, he thinks. 'She kept quite a low profile. She did nothing to draw attention to herself. Very discreet. And these are qualities that should stand her in good stead in her future role. I'm afraid I haven't any juicy anecdotes about her,' he said, laughing. 'I didn't even know she was supposed to be called Kate!' Well, calling her Catherine proved right all along, Professor. He was the second reader for her final-year dissertation on Charles Dodgson's photographs, which he remembers as 'well written' and 'dealt with the issues sensitively and intelligently'. So is she clever? 'Most certainly. Intelligent and articulate. But also discreet.'
'I'll say!' said a classmate. 'You barely noticed her, she very sweetly just slipped in and out of class.' He added, 'And I'd say "conscientious" rather than clever.'
Catherine will be 'the only queen of England ever to have a degree,' says Hugo Vickers. And in art history, too – which might be useful? 'Yes, she's going to be living in some very lovely places. Princess Anne didn't go to university and she could have got a good degree. Before Catherine, royal women only went near a university if they were made chancellor.' It's amazing, the recent history of royal education: Diana Spencer famously gained no O-levels at school. Camilla Shand, later Parker Bowles and latterly the Duchess of Cornwall, gained one O-level and I've never discovered what it was in. Catherine got three A-levels in chemistry, biology and art and a 2:1 in art history. That's a fair bit of modernisation in 30 years.
The Queen allegedly expressed her approval of Sophie Rhys-Jones, now HRH the Countess of Wessex, by saying, 'You wouldn't notice her in a crowd.' If the Queen herself didn't have to signal her presence in public with fuchsia hats or egg-yellow coats and dresses you wouldn't notice her in a crowd, either. Catherine Middleton's polished reserve and apparent lack of the 'look-at-me' gene that is so essential to celebrity may endear her to her new family enormously. What was wrong with Fergie was that she believed she was bigger than the schedule. Long before her toe-sucking embarrassments, it was clear that she wasn't fantastically good at being HRH the Duchess of York. A friend whose mother was a lord lieutenant told me about some village visit, arranged on a bleak old day, with schoolchildren all lined up. 'My mother's an absolute pro,' said my friend. 'Unflappable, just rises above everything. But all these little things were outside in the freezing cold, waiting and waiting, and eventually Fergie sort of burst out of her car, spraying excuses. My mother bobbed the merest curtsy, held her wristwatch up to Fergie's face and tapped it: "One hour, ma'am. One hour." Then she led her down the receiving line, smiling.'
What will Catherine be called when she walks back down the aisle? It depends on whether the Queen offers William an earldom or dukedom. She may do, because she bestowed one of these on each younger son. Or she may not, because Prince William of Wales is always referred to thus, and he likes it. And we like it. It's become his surname: 'Flight Lieutenant Wales'. I suspect he won't be made a duke, in which case Catherine would (following the usual habits of royalty) be styled Princess William of Wales, in the manner of Princess Michael of Kent, which will puzzle people greatly.
Celestria Noel, a social commentator who knows about correct form, says Catherine herself wants to be called 'Princess Catherine. Maybe they'll just say, "She'll be known as Princess Catherine". Most people, to the extent they've even heard of Princess Michael of Kent at all, have no idea that her name is Marie-Christine, they think she's called Michael. You and I know a married woman is correctly called Mrs Mansname Surname – Mrs John Smith – but nobody puts that on their business cards any more. There's an extraordinary lack of learning about the distinctions. And the Palace is very practical about this sort of thing.'
What the world really wants to know is whether or not the normality of Catherine Middleton's happy, affectionate family life will be sundered for ever after April 29. Hugo Vickers thinks not. 'I'm told that if you surrendered your child to the Royal family you must have expected that it wouldn't be easy to see them. Yes, it has been what you called a closed circle in the past. But as far as I can see, Prince William will continue to see the Middletons. But it will be different. And more difficult.'
Two of my women friends, with a similar sort of connection to the Royal family, are on opposite sides of this. One friend was insistent that Catherine would barely see her parents again. 'Yes, they went shooting at Balmoral. Once! And that was just before the announcement of the engagement, wasn't it? It was a photo opportunity: This is Prince William's girlfriend, they're getting engaged, it's fine by us, here are her parents, they're not going to spill any secrets or talk to the press, are they? Flash-bang-wallop, thank you. They will never go up there for Christmas. I know something of that family and they will not change. The flunkeys, the offices that run on wheels – they won't change. They are rooted in a regulated life; they don't mind Kate becoming part of them but they won't let the Middleton family in – no way. A girl from the M4 corridor? [Sharp intake of breath.]'
The other friend thinks that far from the Middletons losing a daughter, they'll gain a son. It would be 'rare in royal marriages, but he may – just – be able to keep the connection to Berkshire. Her family is obviously very important to her; she is close to her parents from what we read; close to her sister and brother. Wills goes to Berkshire, and no doubt still will. So brilliant it's Berkshire, when you think. Near London. Near Windsor.'
Ah yes, Berkshire. Back we go, down the M4. I'm very amused by the thought that Catherine Middleton's trajectory proves the Edwardian hostesses' maxim: 'Always be good to the girls, because you never know whom they may marry.' Aristocrats (I'm told by one) are miffed by the soon-to-be Royal Highness because, to be frank, William should have married one of them. Aristos shelter royals in trouble, keep schtum about everything they overhear, put them up and entertain them and then when two princes of the blood come along at once, what happens? One of them finds Little Miss Middleclass and the other can't be prised away from a Zimbabwean businessman's daughter. Sigh. So when the engagement was finally announced, from every 18th-century drawing-room, every northern castle, moated manor and 12th-century great hall throughout the realm, there rose up cries of pain. ( telegraph.co.uk )
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