Bayoubuzz Kate Middleton

Sorry, Kate Middleton, you're no Princess Diana
Written by  Sarah Whalen
Wednesday, 30 January 2013 21:48

Tagged under
Kate Middleton
Princess Diana
Prince Charles
Prince william
Sarah Whalen

And Kate's admirers are making sure that you know this.

Including an English cider farmer, who happens to be the father of Alice Temperley, Kate Middleton’s favorite dress designer.

You remember at least one of Alice Temperley's dresses--black, sheer, bohemian bell-sleeves with applique Hungarian-style floral embroidery?  You may remember another dizzying, floor-length,lace-covered concoction that made Kate into looking like an aging, vainglorious mother of the bride?

Princess Diana may have made some fashion mistakes in her life, but Alice Temperley was not one of them.

Julian Temperley, who apparently earns his living making cider, or farming apples, or perhaps both, recently opined to British newspapers that Kate will be a better British princess than Princess Diana.  Kate, says Temperley's father, “has everything going for her, and everything Diana didn’t. She’s got her mother, her brother, sister, father. Diana didn’t have her family support, even at the beginning, and she was 10 years younger than Kate.”

How tactful is THAT?

It’s unclear how much Ciderman Temperley knows about the Middletons, or how much he actually knows about the late Princess Diana, other than what he’s read in the same papers he’s giving interviews for.

But it seems to me he may have it a bit backwards.

Diana may have been “10 years younger than Kate,” but she was married to a man who was still shagging his married mistress, who was also 10 years or more older than Diana.  Kate is married to a prince who seems so closely watched by the Middleton family that he’s not been allowed to ever STOP shagging Kate.  Kate’s also married to a man close to her age who seems never to have reached an independent adulthood.

Not that this is William’s fault.  Losing his mother in his teens to a death that remains mysterious and unexplained can be soul-crushing indeed.  Not having the normal love and affection from his father, either, who during William and Prince Harry’s formative years seemed wholly preoccupied with organic farming and his married mistress (whom he later finagled into being his lawfully wedded spouse) is also soul-crushing.  And never having had a real girlfriend except for the one who corralled him in college could be another source of stunted development.

What worries the British people is that Prince William has never appeared to grow up.

Nor has Kate ever grown up.

She’s not had the experience of having to create a career for herself or pay her own light bill, and the careers of her friends are frankly frightening.  Emma Sayles, her high school chum, is a self-deluded sex trade promoter.  Her other school chum, Jessica Hay, makes a living off of talking about Kate.  Kate’s sister, Pippa, was paid a small fortune for a book on “entertaining” that is mocked even by people in India.  Her brother is, frankly, a ridiculous person who seems deeply confused about his sexuality, vomits and pees in the street, and attempts to make a living by selling lewdly-decorated cakes.  Her uncle, Gary, is a heavily-tattooed self-styled “IT startup” guy who was filmed chopping up cocaine in his kitchen and offering to arrange for hookers, in a variety of countries.  Kate and William used his Ibiza villa, “Casa de Bang Bang,” for sexual trysts but also for vacations involving the whole Middleton clan where everyone looks fairly squished up together in a way seldom seen in royal circles.  We wonder: Does mother Carole make her brother hide the cocaine and hookers when the children come to visit?  If there is a baby, will cocaine residue be about when the whole family congregates?  Kate’s parents are constantly about, and seem to be constantly jockeying for position with William vis-a-vis the Queen herself–witness the Sandringham debacle at Christmastime, which now seems to be arising every year.

Whatever you want to say about Princess Diana and her troubles, she grew into her role, and she was exceptional in many ways.  The public expressed infinitely more genuine love and affection for her than Kate or any of the Middleton family will ever likely enjoy.  At age 19, Diana apparently believed that she was marrying for life, and marrying a man who, by law, had to love her, or at least go through those motions, and stay married to her.  With divorced parents, she had several strikes against her from the start.  Her troubled family was not fully there for her, as Ciderman correctly points out.

But Diana grew up in spite of these hardships.

We all watched her.

And we remained interested in her life simply because so much of it was compelling.

And she in fact did become a strong, fascinating person in her own right.

She wasn’t a perfect person, nor a perfect princess.  But we could relate.

Even though I personally think that Diana’s Panorama interview was a grave error and a fatal misjudgment, she had the courage to tell her story, and sell her story.  And what a story it was! She wrote, in effect, her own autobiography.  Whether it was fully “true” or not.

And the one thing that can be easily seen is that, imperfect as they all were, her family of origin, The Spencers and the Fermoys, did not owe their titles or their businesses or their wealth directly to their associations with Diana’s husband or mother-in-law.  Diana’s family of origin was far more independent than the Middletons.  Unlike the Middletons, there was no taint of drug or prostitution scandal in Princess Diana’s life, or in the lives of her family, except for perhaps her brother’s first wife’s cocaine addiction.  But by the time Diana’s brother even met his first wife, Diana had been Great Britain’s Princess of Wales for many years, she had produced two beautiful sons, and promoted the Royal Family everywhere in the world, to resounding acclaim.

All this before age 25.

Ciderman is right when he says that Kate Middleton “is no Princess Diana.”

No, she’s not.  Nor are any of her family.

What worries the British people is that Kate Middleton and her “family support” seem to be making a financial fortune off a marriage that the heir to the throne evinces little enthusiasm for.  “Party Pieces” paper plates and plastic junk may come from China and other mass production places, but what turns cheap imported paper and plastic into gold are the Middleton’s royal connections.

The Middletons are not the Spencers.  Indeed.

Nor is Kate’s newly-minted pregnancy anything like Diana’s.   We see no public evidence of intimacy between Kate and William of the quality we saw in the early days of the Wales’s marriage.  What we see instead is Kate deliriously writhing all about a stone-faced, stern William in public, while her family members hover all about.  The effect of the en masse Middletons, whether they are coming out of church or out for a birthday event is frankly stultifying and suffocating.

Trying to spot William in their midst is like playing, “Where’s Waldo?”

While we all remember Charles’s disappointing “Whatever ‘in love’ means” remarks at the beginning of his marriage to Diana, we also remember the giddy early days when he kissed her hand so sexily that we almost forgave him for wearing all those tweedy and kilty fashions.  We remember Diana appearing in public regularly, blossoming in her first and second pregnancies, her ever-growing, gloriously rotund belly covered by charming tentish coats that hid little from the public eye.  We remember photos of Charles and Di on the beach in Eleuthera, she in a tiny bikini with her swollen, pregnant belly, and Charles scooping her up in his arms from the waves and carrying her into their beach house for an afternoon of activities from which Camilla was surely then far from his mind.

What do we know of Kate the Limpet?

Her allegedly leaked honeymoon photos with William make her look like a walking ironing board.  They do not seem to be a couple “in love, whatever that means.”  She appears to be ecstatic that her ten years of waiting for the marriage proposal paid off, but William seems far more opaque.  Kate now claims she’s pregnant.  She claims she’s suffering from rampant morning sickness, yet she still finds the wherewithal to make television appearances dressed in a rather tarty manner, and go look at a portrait of herself that shows her full-face to be markedly similar to a smirky shoplifter’s mug shot.  A nurse in the hospital ward caring for her hanged herself under mysterious circumstances, and the inquest into her death has been postponed.

Kate’s family surround her and William so constantly and cossetingly that we wonder whether they are a new branch of Scientology.  We are regaled with the oddest reports from her high school girlfriend in Australia that Kate is eating avocados, the Queen sends her chutney, the Queen is gifting Kate a Sandringham mansion as an apology for the Queen’s allegedly vile behavior towards her, that Kate is undergoing “hypnotherapy,” that Kate is shopping at the GAP, sipping coffee at StarBucks, nibbling snacks at Pret-A-Manger, and wants her mother, Carole, to raise the child who just may become an heir to the throne.

What else do we know of Kate the Limpet?

She’s apparently never had a serious job in her life, nor has she made any significant effort to undertake the kind of charity responsibilities that solidified Princess Diana’s reputation as a humanitarian.

The British are far from impressed with their new “duchess.”

And they are concerned about the fitness of the male heir apparents as well.

It might be that a new royal baby will make all this negativity go away, but this seems unlikely if Kate and William hand the baby over to Carole Middleton to raise.  A nanny, for better or worse, is not a mother-substitute nor a grandmother but, ideally,  at least an independent observer of the scene whose job is to safeguard the child and make independent, professional assessments about its needs.  What kinds of children has Carole Middleton already created with her mothering skills?  A clinging, jobless limpet; a woman known mostly for her curvy backside and a ridiculous book; and a son who, well, wears his fishnet stockings proudly.

One royal nanny, coming right up!  Where is Mary Poppins when we most need her?

The fact that pressure is now being placed upon the Queen to ennoble the Middletons with titles is shocking to many.  Once upon a time in the Kingdom, it used to be that titles wear earned through some kind of genuinely distinguished service to the Crown.  Knights were elevated and emulated because they symbolized something, allegiance to the monarchy and allegiance to people who had somehow achieved a splendor in the public mind–who had become greater than themselves.

Ciderman Julian Temperley is right.  Kate Middleton is no Princess Diana.

Nor is she likely ever to be.

http://www.bayoubuzz.com/top-stories/item/287321-sorry-kate-middleton-youre-no-princess-diana