Congratulations to Will and Kate on the eve of their wedding. Kids, you’re doing a fantastic job. Your duty is to be pretty, peppy, well-groomed and boring. Well done!
The groom is the son of the world’s most famous drama princess and a jug-eared philanderer given to hysterical lectures on modern architecture and global warming who nevertheless finds Islam to be a marvelous engine of peace in the world — and infamously told his mistress he’d like to “live inside your trousers.”
The bride and future queen is the first commoner in 350 years to marry a prince close to the throne, the child of self-made millionaires Carole and Michael Middleton. Unlike the family they’re marrying into, the Middletons actually did something useful for their country by founding a highly profitable supply company called Party Pieces.
William, a dashing Royal Air Force helicopter pilot, is in a race against time: If he jogs down the aisle, he may just get to the altar before his receding hairline joins his bald spot. He passed directly from handsome youth to stolid middle age — and that’s exactly as it should be.
Prince William and Kate Middleton face a thankless task as the world’s prize clownfish. We need them to look good, be silent and not try to bust out of their fish tank the way his vulgar parents so often did. So brilliantly have the youngsters succeeded that it’s hard to find a picture of Kate in which she isn’t smiling for the paparazzi as if it’s delightful to be mobbed every time she goes out to buy undies.
Peter Whittle of Britain’s Standpoint magazine was startled to realize that, though she’s been a public figure for more than seven years, he hadn’t heard her voice before their joint press conference last fall. “Quite a posh voice, but not ‘objectionably’ so,” was his ruling.
In a similar vein, US magazine declared, “Believe it or not, Kate’s favorite shop in the UK is TK-Maxx [the UK version of TJ Maxx]. She loves to shop for bargains, mixing and matching high street clothes and designer. She has a great eye for that.”
Sustained soap-bubble triviality like this is what the royals need to return to Britain’s, and the world’s, good graces after 30 years of scandal.
William and Kate’s private conversations will be ransacked for information, her outfits will be analyzed with CSI-level intensity and their lifestyle will be called extravagantly inappropriate in the age of austerity. But as long as they remain cheerful, well-meaning and uncontroversial, it’s impossible to picture them being subjected to anything like last December’s (rather gigglesome) attack on Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles: Their Rolls was pelted with burgers and milkshakes and someone poked Camilla with a stick.
A London-based American woman named Jerramy Fine, author of the book “Someday My Prince Will Come,” told The Guardian that princesses “continue to obsess us because it is truly, deeply what all little girls want. . . . We’re told it’s something we have to grow out of, that society doesn’t approve. We don’t grow out of it, of course. We simply submerge a secret adult longing until a royal wedding is announced. Then what happens? It all comes out, and everybody goes crazy.”
The princess illusion gets shredded when the royal coverage is about adultery and suicide attempts and taking up residency in trousers. One more great push of public loathing could do in the monarchy for good.
But you can’t loathe a sweet woodland creature or a paper doll. As long as Kate and William stick to the playbook, they’ll do wonders for the image of the firm they’ll someday lead.