Tatler have written a mainly positive piece about Kate, but it had some strange and seemingly passive aggressive bits (about Kate, William, Carole, Pippa and Meghan).
Very odd, especially as Kate is friends with the Tatler editor (from either St Andrews or Marlborough).
These are the odd bits:
‘Kate is furious about the larger workload. Of course she’s smiling and dressing appropriately but she doesn’t want this. She feels exhausted and trapped. She’s working as hard as a top CEO, who has to be wheeled out all the time, without the benefits of boundaries and plenty of holidays.’
while toning down her own rigid body language
Is the royal once dubbed the Duchess of Dolittle because she had so few public engagements stealthily establishing herself as kingmaker – the person to save, and salve, the monarchy?
It’s difficult to get a true sense of the real Duchess of Cambridge – so determined does she seem to project an aura of blandness as part of her regal persona. When I broach the subject, I hear the same sentiments from others, from royal insiders to society figures: ‘I just don’t know who she is.’ One member of the young royal set says: ‘I’ve spent quite a lot of time around Kate and she is impenetrable. There is nothing to like or dislike. She has a ruthless survival streak. It’s why she is so well suited. She keeps her head down because the prize of being queen is so great. She models herself on the Queen and now speaks like the Queen.’
while there [Marlborough] she had a poster of Prince William on her wall
when she speaks, in her carefully modulated voice (coached with the help of the late Anthony Gordon Lennox – friends say that Kate’s accent became ‘posher’ at Marlborough and that now she sounds ‘even more plummy than William’), she says all the right things. But where is the passion? Maybe this is a defence against appearing like Diana, Princess of Wales, who put The Firm’s backs up by being over-emotional... vulnerable... But God, she was loved for it.'
you never see her out lunching with girlfriends
‘Kate is one of us in the sense that all her friends are Sloanes and aristocrats,’ says one of her group. ‘She’s very much decided that that’s her tribe, even though she wasn’t actually born into that background.’
‘William and Catherine really wanted to be hands-on parents and the Sussexes have effectively thrown their three children under a bus. There goes their morning school runs as the responsibilities on them now are enormous.’ More’s the pity.
Both William and Kate consult psychics. A medium who went to Kensington Palace to ‘channel’ for them found William to be ‘open-hearted and lovely’. Kate, while scrupulously polite, was more ‘shut-down’.
‘I’ve heard that Prince William is obsessed with Carole. She’s the mummy he always wanted.’
Carole, with what some call her Hyacinth Bucket aspirations of grandeur, who, rumour has it, puts people’s backs up in a way Kate does not. Some people have apparently found her exacting. A skilled craftsman who worked on Anmer Hall, William and Kate’s country home, and is used to a roster of prestigious and potentially tricky customers, said that he found Carole ‘the most difficult client’ he had ever worked with: ‘She was exceedingly demanding, fussy and questioned everything.’ Carole has put her stamp on Anmer decor-wise. Far from being a typical aristo abode, with threadbare rugs...like, say, Windsor and Balmoral, it is, according to a visitor, ‘like a gleaming five-star hotel, with cushions plumped and candles lit’. Another adds: ‘It’s very Buckinghamshire.’
‘Carole is a terrible snob,’ alleges a friend of Donna Air, ex-girlfriend of Kate’s brother, James. ‘Donna is a really lovely girl, but Carole got quite grand.’ She adds: ‘Carole is the masterminding force between those girls.’