Mind-blowing detail in Kate Middleton’s return to the spotlight

There is one story and one story only, a story that is not only splashed across every British news site using War of the Worlds-sized fonts but even has the venerable New York Times verging on breaking into an excitable sweat. (At the time of writing, this story is running above the New York Times’ coverage of the 2024 US presidential race.)

SHE’S BAAAAACK.

Kate, the Princess of Wales is, as I type, trying to remember the intricacies of one of the KPIs of her day job, waving to the crowds while maintaining a look of beatific munificence and warmth. In the early hours of Saturday morning, AEST, the princess revealed she will make her first public appearance in nearly six months this weekend and will be appearing at Trooping the Colour, King Charles’ official birthday celebration.*

However, in all the hubbub and noise and fizz after Kensington Palace released not only an unexpectedly poetic and moving shot of the princess but a statement she had personally written, there is one detail that really captures just how big this is all.

The (London) Times’ Kate Mansey has reported Kate’s Trooping “attendance was considered significant enough for it to alert No. 10 and the Cabinet Office who, in turn, have informed the opposition parties.”

Just imagine the scene inside Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Downing Street offices when this took place – all the aides, all the special advisers and the unthinkable number of Oxbridge degrees clustered in one small room, all of them self-importantly clutching their phones – when some harried private secretary beetled in to break The News.

Consider that, even with Mr Sunak currently fighting, and likely losing, the battle for his political survival during an election campaign that looks set to return the Labour Party to power for the first time in nearly 14 years, it was considered weighty and major enough that he be informed that a 42-year-old mother-of-three is going to stand on a balcony this weekend.

This tableau — of a PM being pulled aside to be briefed, of whispered conversations, of someone working out who gets the lucky job of informing opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer — is the sort you can see being necessitated by, say, homicidal facelift fancier

Vladimir Putin deciding to launch a ground invasion, or someone starting to cough in a Chinese wet market near the pangolin cages. Kate has always mattered, but this Sunak fact emphasises just how big Kate now is.

Ever since William put Diana, Princess of Wales’ quail’s egg-sized sapphire on his university girlfriend’s finger in 2010, the princess has mattered politically, to some degree give that she will one day be Queen and is the mother of a future King.

However, there is what that used to look like – her slotting into the royal firmament and thus having Walkers’ shortbread start slapping your face on their tins of shortbread – and how things stand now, with an update regarding her health ranking up there with Finland being overrun by Russian ground troops. The princess now occupies a place in British public life and the public imagination and psyche that you would have to go back to the former owner of that sapphire ring to find an equal to.

Camilla is the actual Queen, Princess Anne was born second-in-line to the throne and official spares Prince Andrew, the Duke of York and Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex have both actually gone to war and been in the line of fire and yet, do you think Sunak would be having these sorts of hushed conversations if they were fighting cancer? If any of them, mid- chemotherapy, decided they were well enough to venture out into public and to watch some military parading hither and yon at Horse Guards?

Looking back at the last six months, the Princess of Wales’ sudden and complete removal from public view has thrown up (or should that be, throne up?) some painful, home truths about the House of Windsor. In the battle to keep Crown Inc chugging along, to keep it as a going concern and to ensure that republican sentiment does take anything like root, the King is all well and good. But really? The figures that are the PR nuclear power station of the royal family? The people who hugely and disproportionately draw eyeballs and interest and clicks are Kate and William and their family.

In the new image of the Princess of Wales, taken by regular royal snapper Matt Porteous, she is seen standing beneath a willow tree which Google tells me means can symbolise rebirth. That’s nice and all but to me, what this current Kate and No. 10 situation and even the imagery of the shot drives home is that it’s Kate who is the trunk, the solidity, the foundation on which the future of the British monarchy rests. And so for now let us say godspeed to Kate’s longtime dresser Natasha Archer who is, I’m assuming, currently debating chapeau options with the princess while Prince Louis roars around his parents’ bedroom with some London milliner’s weeks of hand-appliqued, silk-threaded graft perched on his little head.

(*Charles was actually born in November; however, since George II in 1748, the annual military event has also served as the sovereign’s official birthday celebration.)

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.