Kate Middleton, born to reign

This article is published in issue 2/3 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until January 18, 2022. It is a special issue, dedicated to the «princesses». Today, yesterday and tomorrow. There is Kate, of course, and there are Lady Diana and Charléne of Monaco. And then there are the new generations.

The most amazing success of the Kate Middleton forty is that no one remembers Kate Middleton in her twenties. But, before we get there, let’s start the story from the beginning.

Once upon a time there were two little boys split between two female figures. Mother: strong-willed and fickle, capricious and determined, sentimental and subversive. Moreover, dead: a mother who dies when you are little can only be mythologized. In contrast there was the figure of the grandmother: so alive as to seem immortal, so serious as to never indulge in sentimentality, so attached to the family business that she never forgave the woman who had undermined its foundations.

The two boys had a father, sure, but this is one of the many stories in which the male figures are marginal. The two boys did not need to wonder what they would do when they grew up: the family business was the English royal house, and it had almost never happened that some heir refused to work there. Part of the duties consisted in finding a wife, and it was there that the elder, who chose one of his grandmother’s model, differed from the younger, who chose one similar to his mother.

As much Kate seemed born to be a queen – one who studied all her life, one who seems to have been born there, one Elizabeth in a minor – so Meghan was a Diana in sixty-fourth.: rebellious, intolerant, determined to act as if the institution did not exist, as if marrying one of the heirs to the throne and an actor were the same job.

Catherine Middleton, the fairest performer for the role of Elizabeth, she has been married to William for almost eleven years, and periodically it is said that, if one day Elizabeth’s immortality should end, the throne could pass directly to William and Kate, skipping the turn by Carlo. That, poor thing, that throne has been waiting for him all his life, but he has done very little as a king: a marriage that cannot be recommended. After Diana’s death, he married Camilla, his lifelong lover. When in the fall of 2020 Netflix distributed the episodes of The Crown set in the eighties, a generation that grew up after the twentieth-century magazines discovered the most famous adultery of the last century. The joint Instagram of Carlo and Camilla had to suspend the comments, invaded by indignation: what have you done to poor Diana, aren’t you ashamed? History always repeats itself: the first time as first-rate entertainment, the second as a tired replica. If you weren’t there, trust the witnesses: the end of the twentieth century was an unrepeatable period for royal houses. Carlo was intercepted as he told Camilla that, unfortunate as he was, instead of reincarnating in a pair of her panties he would be reborn as her tampax. Diana was being sold to the tabloids by lovers with whom she consoled herself in the existence of Camilla, one of whom she whispered was the real father of Diana’s second son, Harry. Sarah Ferguson – Diana’s sister-in-law, wife of Prince Andrew – was photographed while an oilman sucked her toe.