Kate Middleton’s controversial strategy to control her cancer story

Kate Middleton’s video announcing that she had finally finished her chemotherapy treatment has been greeted with relief and joy by all those who see her as the royal family’s greatest asset and hope for its future. But the video has also triggered controversy. Put together by filmmaker and wedding specialist Will Warr, the footage has led many to wonder whether the Prince and Princess of Wales are embarking on a new strategy to communicate directly with the public, cutting out the media.

“I can’t imagine the King doing such a thing,” said senior royal affairs journalist Robert Jobson, author of the biography Catherine. The Princess of Wales. “It was slightly incongruous, and some parts of the text didn’t quite convince me, but overall, I think it was a good thing. The video moved many who saw it, it’s true, but is this the way the monarchy should do things?”

When the British royal family experiments with opening up to the public and exposing their private lives, there is invariably a divided reaction. Some are uncomfortable with an overly touchy-feely approach, while others see it as justifying their existence.

According to The Times columnist James Marriot, we are so used to feeding on the intimate details of celebrities’ lives that any demand for privacy is considered an affront. Marriot is among those who believe that Middleton has fallen into the trap of making a sad concession to an insatiably hungry public.

Although it was Kate who decided when and how she would reveal the end of her treatment, the video is a way of admitting that her private life is now everyone’s property. If there was a time when Prince William lashed out angrily at any photographer who tried to steal a snapshot of his children, the three-minute film that Kensington Palace posted on social networks offers an intimate look at their lives, controlled but inconceivable until now.

In it, William and Catherine hang out, hold hands, kiss, laugh. They play with their children and are shown as an idyllic family facing misfortune and recovery together.

In 1969, Queen Elizabeth II allowed the BBC cameras into her family’s life to film a documentary simply titled Royal Family. It was the brainchild of William Heseltine, then press secretary at Buckingham Palace, who wanted to humanize the Windsors for a public that considered them haughty and aloof. A total of 37 million people saw the footage. Rumor has it — as suggested in the Netflix series The Crown — that the late queen immediately regretted the decision and ordered the BBC to archive the footage and not broadcast it again.

Others, such as the late queen’s biographer, Robert Hardman, say this was not so. He claims that the palace was delighted with the documentary’s impact but wanted to retain control of a product that was more family album than public property.

But in the age of social media, it is difficult to put the genie back in the bottle once it is out.

“The Princess of Wales’ video feels like an attempt to meet social media on its own terms. Social media is, of course, the arena in which hunting Kate became a jolly global blood sport earlier this year, when — despite having been explicitly told that she would not appear in public before Easter owing to significant illness — the #BeKind brigade grew bored within weeks and whipped up a vicious feeding frenzy of conspiracy theories as to her absence and the reasons for it,” columnist Marina Hyde wrote in The Guardian.

A down-to earth Princess

Despite growing up in a wealthy, upper-middle-class family, Kate Middleton comes from a more prosaic background than her husband, Prince William.

“She went to private schools, and her parents always gave her the best, but she understands what an ordinary life is. And I think that’s important as we enter a world where new generations are questioning the idea of a hereditary monarchy,” Jobson says. “In a matter of 20 years, it will be challenged in places like Australia, Canada and New Zealand [where the British monarch is still the symbolic head of state], and Kate’s input will be very important in advising William.”

The Princess of Wales is the most appreciated royal figure in the U.K. According to the YouGov poll, which is regularly updated, her popularity is 71%. That of her husband, William, 69%. That of the King, Charles III, 56%.

Middleton’s illness came at a time when her popularity was stratospheric. She occupied all the front pages and was being lauded by both the British and international media. The two months that she absented herself from public life to recover from an abdominal surgery, unleashed endless rumors and conspiracy theories about where she was and the state of her health.

The sobriety with which she resurfaced in a video confirming her cancer diagnosis on March 22 contrasts sharply with this later production, which comes complete with slow motion, filters, music and rehearsed scenes.

The royalists who are unconvinced by this recent release argue that the Princess of Wales has surrendered to the voracity of a certain public and has wrongly believed that the only way to satiate their curiosity is with a saccharine version of a painful, personal reality, which any fight against cancer must surely be.

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