Catherine, Princess of Wales during Trooping the Colour in June. Photo / Getty Images
OPINION
Catherine, The Princess of Wales, by Robert Jobson, is grimly fawning, embarrassingly written, and devoid of insight into the real woman.
In 2013, Hilary Mantel caused outrage with a lecture, subsequently published in the London Review of Books, in which she seemed to criticise Catherine Middleton.
Mantel called the Duchess of Cambridge, then-31, who had been married for two years to Prince William, “as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character”.
The Wolf Hall author wrote: “She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture”.
The backlash was immediate, with even David Cameron, the Prime Minister at the time, calling Mantel’s remarks “hurtful” and “completely wrong”.
That Catherine herself could respond was, of course, impossible. Being a member of the Royal family, she could never complain or explain.
The difficulty faced by Robert Jobson’s new biography of Catherine, now 42 and Princess of Wales, is that it must fill its 300-odd pages with an account of a life that has been both eventful and strangely airless.
Brought up in an affluent middle-class household and privately educated at Marlborough College, Catherine met her future husband in 2001, while the pair were studying at the University of St Andrews.
The relationship briefly foundered, but recovered after a reconciliation at a party – “She arrived dressed as a nurse,” Jobson tells us, “and William made a beeline for her” – before they became engaged in 2010, and were married in 2011.
They have since had three children, William has become heir to the British Throne, and if this were a fairytale, they would be living happily ever after.
Reality does not quite conform to such schemas.
The Princess of Wales has continued to be one of the most discussed, and photographed, women in the world. She has largely avoided controversy – save what has been portrayed as an uncomfortable relationship with her sister-in-law Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.
Camp Sussex have levelled accusations, albeit through proxies such as the downmarket biographer Omid Scobie, that Catherine made Meghan cry during preparation for the latter’s wedding, was generally cold and aloof before the Sussexes’ self-exile to America.
And even – in a tortuous development that involved a mysteriously revelatory Dutch translation of Scobie’s 2023 book Endgame – had asked what skin colour Harry and Meghan’s first child was likely to have. There has never been much evidence for any of this invective or innuendo.
Yet Catherine can’t possibly have as composed a personality as the one we see in public.
You might recall her wry smile and side-eye to the now-Queen during Harry and Meghan’s wedding, as the American bishop Michael Curry delivered a histrionic sermon. (That wedding is still, somehow, only six years ago.)
If there are more such human moments to share, Jobson doesn’t include them here, although he does spend plenty of time on the innumerable other occasions that Catherine has been in the public eye.
The spotlight reached a particular intensity earlier this year when, after a spell out of the public eye, a clumsily edited picture of the Princess and her children, released on Mother’s Day, had its integrity questioned by major photographic agencies.
This bounced her into revealing, in a public statement, that she was undergoing treatment for cancer. She has subsequently withdrawn from official duties, with no timetable set for her return.
Jobson does mention this unfortunate episode, albeit briefly, which suggests that it was incorporated in a last-minute rush. (Her welcome, if equally brief, reappearance at Trooping the Colour last month didn’t make it in.)
Even so, were it not for the events of 2024, Jobson’s book would be nothing but a desperately dull and often comically overwritten hagiography, which portrays Catherine as little less than a secular saint who was put on this earth to steady the troubled House of Windsor and to make a stuffy monarchy appear more compassionate and sensitive.
Jobson clearly admires Catherine enormously, and always seeks to present her in the best possible light. (Less so her husband, who emerges as grumpy and petulant.) From the perspective of a dutiful subject, this may be admirable, but it makes his role as an impartial biographer rather suspect.
For instance, I would suggest that no serious book, for which money changes hands, should begin like this: “She may not have had a glass slipper that only fitted her slender foot, but in many ways, hers is a modern-day Cinderella story. Catherine was not a downtrodden youth exploited by her wicked stepmother, and there is not a fairy godmother in sight, but her rise has been none the less meteoric.”
Jobson’s prose suggests a second-rate real estate agent fighting a valiant but doomed battle with the English language.
If anything, it worsens from here. Did no editor point out the grammatical infelicity of such sentences as “While at Sandhurst, William made a point of retreating to the Middletons’ five-bedroom home in the Berkshire village of Bucklebury every Friday evening, finding solace in loving Catherine’s arms”?
If you’re looking for gossipy detail about how loving those arms were, forget it.
Jobson gives the prurient short shrift – “Catherine and William have sadly been subjected to many vile and unjust attacks and false accusations, particularly from the so-called Sussex Squad” – and instead prefers to refer to people by single-word descriptions.
This mode of eager tabloid-ese reaches its nadir when we hear of “the charismatic King Charles”, but there are plenty of other low points before we get there.
Jobson does include the odd interesting nugget, albeit they’re mostly cribbed from better books.
It would be a revelation to discover that it was Catherine who insisted on Elizabeth II including the phrase “recollections may vary” in a statement responding to the Sussexes’ allegations of racism in the Royal family; but Jobson – as he admits – takes this information from Valentine Low’s Courtiers.
On a basic level, there are also fleeting pleasures to be had at the bathos herein – “If she was handed a parking ticket, she reacted with dignity” – but such committed sycophancy reveals less about its subject than its author.
I was reminded, reading this book, of the scornful jibe made by Oxford don Maurice Bowra at John Betjeman’s purported love for Princess Margaret: “Green with lust and sick with shyness, / Let me lick your lacquered toes. / Gosh, oh gosh, your Royal Highness, / Put your finger up my nose.”
That said, Betjeman was subsequently knighted. If Jobson, a prolific royal chronicler, continues in this vein, he may be in similar luck.
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