“In another age, a brisk official bulletin would have sufficed,” said James Marriott in The Times. “Or an impassive silence.” But people expect more these days, and the Princess of Wales duly obliged last week by releasing a glossy video to mark the end of her chemotherapy treatment and her tentative return to royal duties.
Filmed in the woods and dunes of north Norfolk, it’s a video of “remarkable editorial slickness and personal candour”. It shows sepia-toned glimpses of family life – the young royals playing on a pile of logs; Kate leaning against a tree, her upturned face lit by sunshine; her and William cuddling. Meanwhile, the princess, in a voice-over, describes her healing process and hopes for the future. With its “filtered, Instagram-worthy look”, said Sophie Gallagher in The i Paper, the film could be “a Center Parcs advert or a reimagining of The Famous Five (with a dash of Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’)”.
It’s wonderful news, of course, that Catherine has finished her gruelling cancer treatment, said Anna Pasternak in The Independent. But as powerful as this video is, was it really the best way for the princess to communicate her message? You can only imagine “the howls of derision” had Meghan and Harry released a soft focus film like this. A simple official statement from Kensington Palace, or “happy-family snap”, might have been more appropriate. Or, for something more in-depth, a sit-down interview with the BBC. It is a curious video, said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. It’s hard to see what it was meant to achieve, or why it needed to be quite so long, given its minimal content. “I’d have preferred, myself, to skip straight to the bit where we could simply be delighted that Kate was back looking incredible in black at the Cenotaph.”
The video was a “little saccharine” for my taste, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail, but that didn’t bother me much. I’m more concerned about the thinking behind the film: the way that William and Kate are seeking to circumvent the media by taking control of their own image. They may feel that, in the social media era, they can give people what they want by releasing carefully curated content and ignoring the traditional press. But most of us “aren’t TikTok aficionados” and don’t want “a supposedly perfect, make-believe monarchy”. While it’s great that Kate is on the mend, Kensington Palace must remember that “the royal family survives, and is justified in the public mind, because it is scrutinised”. If it seeks to “repackage itself as a wholly sanitised yet untouchable institution”, it tempts disaster.