There's no doubt about it, on that incandescent spring day – gosh, has it really been a year? – 'Mrs Wales', as her new husband introduced her at their Buckingham Palace reception, gave a masterclass in poise and self-control. When Catherine smiled into the world's cameras all heaven broke loose. But there is a reason fairy tales end with the wedding. What next? Did Cinderella get bored with no housework to do, take up kick-boxing and amass a shoe collection? Was Mrs Darcy swallowed up by the dank protocol of Pemberley? There is no job description for a princess, only one rule: don't do anything wrong. Ever.
'Obviously, Kate gets nervous,' admits a friend who was in the abbey for the wedding. 'I think it's quite scary sometimes. She desperately wants to do everything right. I know she thinks about things very carefully, from her choice of clothes to what she says. Kate is very cautious and so is William. It can be pretty exhausting living in a world where your primary aim is never to put a foot wrong.' If that foot is wearing a certain brand of shoe it will sell out within hours on every high street; no wonder its wearer feels she has to be the soul of discretion.
A Kensington Palace insider confirms that Catherine is 'incredibly diligent. She comes to every event really well prepared.' During her first public speech at a children's hospice in Ipswich, although she did that telltale thing she does to steady herself – pressing the palms of her hands down – she was fluent and touching. 'I am only sorry William can't be here today, he would love it here,' she said in a cut-glass 1950s BBC announcer voice. By a quirk of our bizarre class system, Samantha Cameron, a baronet's daughter, has to talk like a middle-class mockney to be accepted, but, to be accepted, the middle-class girl has to talk like a baronet's daughter.
I'm not sure I buy the official line about Kate being a blushing ingenue in public. At school she was one of the best actresses of her generation; Marlborough friends recall a memorable turn she did as Cilla Black in a Blind Date spoof, complete with ginger wig and broad Scouse accent: 'Now then, luv, what's yur name? Have you cum fur?' Well, it could still come in handy on a royal walkabout.
All new wives have to find a way of dealing with the mother-in-law. For Catherine that problem is compounded by the fact that hers is dead, yet lives on in the hearts of millions. Comparisons with the late Princess of Wales were inevitable. Every time Kate's face lights up as she hugs a child, the headlines shriek: Is she the New Diana? No, is the short answer. Apart from both being very pretty, very tall, crazy about little kids and dolphins in the water, the two women could not be more different. 'Kate is quiet, stable, thoughtful and mature,' says a friend. 'She's a sort of anti-Diana. William loved his mother, but he hated everything to do with her public persona. The obsessive attention, the needy, destructive, on-off relationship with the media. He wants a life where that chaos is kept at bay.' Although he still gets hugely annoyed about press intrusion – such as the way the Middletons are a target for silly, malicious stories – they say his wife can soothe him like no one else. 'Kate is very calm. It takes a lot to wind her up.' The Duchess's default setting is serenity.
If there has been a single strategy for Kate's first royal year, it might be this: OK, think of what we did with Diana, now do the opposite. As William said during their engagement interview with Tom Bradby, 'Lessons have been learnt from the past.' Diana Spencer was practically a child bride when she married Charles, who was her senior in both years and education. As the world went bananas over Shy Di, no one thought to take care that the object of adoration didn't go bananas too. Kate and William, who have known each other since they were first-year students at St Andrews, are a team and better able to support and protect each other in their strange, overprivileged, overscrutinised existence.
Claims that Kate used Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, as a shoulder to lean on in the early months are dismissed by her friend as 'absolute nonsense' and 'PR guff from Charles's people'. It's William whom Kate listens to, and her own family. By and large, the couple's wish to keep everything as low-key as possible has been respected, at least for now. I was not surprised to hear it suggested that the pair didn't seek, let alone want, the ponderous title of Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Prince William and Princess Catherine (all right, Kate) is what everyone calls them, but the jealous intricacies of royal hierarchy mean that it would be a threat to Charles's pre-eminence if William's wife was known as Princess and his was plain Duchess.
'Royal protocol is like wading through treacle,' explains a friend of the younger Prince. 'There were so many tensions in the run-up to the wedding between the way William and Kate wanted to do things and the way things are traditionally done. Clearly, there are only so many fights William can pick and, when it came to the title, he probably decided to let that one go.'
One way in which William is uncompromisingly showing the way in which the Wills'n'Kate monarchy will work is in his relationship with his wife's family. Since they've been married, the Cambridges have been on holiday twice with the Middletons, once to Mustique, before William was posted to the Falklands, and over Easter they went skiing together in the French Alps. Passengers on an easyJet flight to Geneva were startled to find the royal couple among their budget companions (another sign of how different things will be in the Wills'n'Kate era). 'I know William is very fond of Michael and Carole,' laughs a friend, 'but what other bloke do you know who goes on holiday with the in-laws twice in four months? Plus he spent new year at the Middletons' place in Bucklebury.' The message being sent out loud and clear is that the Windsors, whether they like it or not, are hitched to the Middletons. 'There is no way William is going to allow Kate's people to be kept outside the tent as they undoubtedly would have been in the past,' says the friend.
Not surprisingly, given their penchant for privacy, the newlyweds are happiest when they're able to live as an ordinary military couple in north Wales, just as Princess Elizabeth did with Philip in Malta for a brief, heady interlude after she married her sailor. She must have been able to taste freedom, like salt on her lips.
'They like nothing better than to be in Anglesey, cook a meal, put their feet up and watch a film,' says one insider. William goes off to the base (where he's a helicopter pilot), Kate potters about the five-bedroom whitewashed farmhouse, does the shopping, walks the puppy, cooks dinner. Certainly, this will be the first Queen of England to have been photographed pushing a trolley across a Waitrose car-park. One source said they didn't think she would feel comfortable having people curtseying to her. It will be interesting to see what kind of monarchy they evolve.
If there has been any criticism of the couple over the past 12 months it is that Catherine has got far too thin and that she and William are – whisper it low – a bit boring. A schoolfriend points out that, even as a child, Kate struggled to keep weight on because she was 'a 100mph kind of girl'. None the less, the fact that she must have dropped from an athletic size 10 to a waif-like size six causes alarm bells to ring because of what we came to know about Diana's eating disorder. 'Catherine doesn't think she's too thin,' says the friend. Hmm. The general view is that there is nothing wrong with Kate that having a baby won't put right, while she might fairly respond that her body is her own damn business. So far the only patter of tiny feet in the Wales household is from the spaniel puppy, Lupo, but we all know dogs and cats are baby substitutes for couples ready to become parents. As William and Catherine are scheduled to visit the South Pacific in September, the smart money is on a 2013 pregnancy.
As for being boring, scratch the irritable surface of that complaint and what you reveal is media frustration that the glamorous newlyweds, who are global box office, are keen to do their duty, but are not remotely interested in the kind of celebrity circus that caused William such pain during his childhood. Shrapnel from the War of the Waleses, his parents' excruciatingly public divorce, is embedded deep in the Prince's psyche. He won't play the game if he thinks Kate can get hurt.
The problem is that Wills'n'Kate are spectacularly good at being in the very limelight they'd rather avoid. Back in July, on their first state visit to Canada (known as the 'moving-on tour'), Catherine personally set back the nationalist cause at least a decade. What Commonwealth country in its right mind would want to sunder a connection with someone who looks such a knockout in both a black lace dress and a white Stetson?
In Ottawa, amid the sea of waving Union flags and screaming teenagers, Kate did something no royal has done before. When she moved towards a barrier to greet the crowd, a young woman held out her phone and the Duchess leant her head in close so the fan could photograph them smiling together. I doubt they will ever let her do something that natural, that charming – or that risky – again, but we had come an awfully long way from stiffly waving a white-gloved hand. Moving on, indeed.
Next stop on the tour was Hollywood, where mere movie stars queued to bask in the stellar glow of Mr and Mrs Wales. 'If you brought Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable back to life, Americans would not be more excited than they are by the presence of the Cambridges,' said Stephen Fry, and he wasn't exaggerating. Rather less eloquently, Nicole Kidman summed up the goofy effect William and Kate have on otherwise sensible mortals: 'They make me smile. I love them. I think they are amazing.' The ability to make people smile may not be a degree subject or an Olympic sport, but it is a gift. That's why the Prince of Wales, a man about as accustomed to laughing at himself as he is to ironing his own shirts, was so cheery that day with the iron in Dulwich. It's quite simple: Catherine is a pleasure to have around. When she smiles, people want to smile back.
The Queen, a canny CEO of the Family Firm for six decades, was quick to grasp the value of the new recruit. She paid her grandson's wife the compliment of taking her to Leicester on the very first stop of her Diamond Jubilee Tour. Separated by 50 years and a good six inches, Elizabeth II and Catherine Elizabeth make a surprisingly good double act. They are said to share the same sarcastic, dry sense of humour. In Kate's company, the Queen looks happy and, frankly, relieved. 'Thank God,' you can almost see Her Majesty thinking. 'Finally those fools found me a reticent, lovely, dutiful brunette to keep my monarchy on track for another half century!'
Perhaps even more impressively, Kate, who got her gold Duke of Edinburgh award at Marlborough, now enjoys the golden opinion of the testy old Duke himself. A royal insider says, 'Prince Philip thinks Catherine is just great.'
The British public, I suspect, would agree with him. Mrs Wales done great. It's only been 12 months and already we wonder: how did they ever manage without her?
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