Kate Middleton was filmed stepping off a cheap flight. Photo / TikTok
OPINION:
Generally to see a member of the royal family up close you need do one of the following: Be a Middle Eastern or Russian billionaire willing to part with plastic bags full of cash for a charity donation; have a senior role at one of the select charities various HRHs are aligned with; breed racehorses; play polo; or spend an inordinate amount of time wandering around the Peter Jones department store in Sloane Square.
There is one other option that will only set you back $82 and only comes once a year – book a ticket on a budget airline for the flight from London to Aberdeen in northern Scotland.
For the second time in the last three years, the future Queen of Great Britain and her kidlets have been caught on camera disembarking from a cheapie flight at the regional airport as they head to the Queen's nearby vast estate, Balmoral. The 15-second clip, shared via (where else?) TikTok, had already garnered 1.8 million views in a matter of days despite it being a video of people walking.
Kate, wearing sunglasses (did someone say holiday mode?) can be seen holding Princess Charlotte's hand while the Cambridge family's longtime nanny Maria Turrion Borrallo and Prince Louis follow behind them. A man in a suit, who may be a private protection officer, hurries behind carrying a bag that looks to contain a tennis racket.
What is remarkable is how no-fuss and low-key the whole situation is, no genuflecting ground staff or curtsying stewardesses.
And this simple moment could not have happened without one person, and one person only: Diana, Princess of Wales.
There is a certain moving symmetry that as we approach the 25th anniversary of her death next week, her son Prince William, daughter-in-law Kate and three grandchildren are living a life that only she could have made possible for them, a life that only a generation before would have been completely unthinkable.
What I always find so astonishing is that when Diana married Prince Charles with all the mandatory bells, whistles and frippery, the Queen and co thought they knew what they were getting. Here was a nice docile gel of excellent stock who had ignored the sexual revolution and had kept herself, in the parlance of the time, tidy.
It is so deliciously ironic that the royal family assumed their new recruit would be a pretty, tractable foot soldier slash womb-on-legs, only for her to turn out to be the most powerful modernising force in modern royal history.
Unlike centuries of women before her, Diana refused to suffer inside a miserable marriage and a claustrophobic institution where, back then anyway, she was expected to take on a smattering of ladylike causes and keep her lips demurely zipped. (According to Richard Kay, a journalist who also happened to be one of Diana's confidants, on multiple occasions various Windsors had voiced their disapproval of her commitment to HIV/Aids organisations, saying "Why can't you do something nice?")
But Diana's revolutionary approach to royal-dom extended far beyond her work to how she raised her sons. Sure, she had 24/7 nannies who cared for the children like any good upper-crust woman would have, but by and large Diana's approach to parenting a future king was completely and utterly unorthodox.
On the day William utters the words of the coronation oath inside Westminster Abbey, the 63rd person to do so, he will be the first monarch the UK and the Commonwealth has ever seen who has happily eaten inside a McDonald's, regularly done his own supermarket shopping and religiously does the school run.
In between stocking up on grana padano at Waitrose, fighting London traffic in the family station wagon and finding lost sports kit, William's life circa 2022 far more resembles that of an Islington architect than the future ruler, defender of the faith and chief of the armed services.
All of this is, of course, down to the very deliberate way Diana went about raising two princes, not as pampered Little Lord Fauntleroys terrorising the footmen or like generations of royal children before them trapped inside the Palace peering out at the world from afar, but as two very 90s kids.
Diana would feed them sausages for dinner, take them to Kensington High Street to spend their (limited) pocket money and ferry them off for go-karting sessions.
The princess was also intent on making her boys understand how fortunate they were, taking them with her when she made incognito visits to Centrepoint, the homeless charity she supported.
(Okay, the glaring exception here was her propensity to do her sons up in sailor suits and positively Edwardian matching coats on occasion was straight out of the Queen Mary playbook.)
Diana was likely flying by instinct but what she might not have realised was how shrewd this sort of royal child-rearing was.
For one thing, when William takes that famous oath and tries not to let the Imperial State Crown slide off the top of his head, he may very well be the most content and settled man to rule. While William might have tragically lost his mother when he was only 15 years old, Diana taught him and Harry what a parent's love looked and felt like, something they have both replicated with their own families. As Harry said in a 2017 documentary about his mother, "She smothered us with love, that's for sure."
She also taught them naughtiness and joy and fun.
And, for another thing, what Diana's commitment to burgers and Tower Records visits ensured was that her two princes grew up with an unusual world view for two princes.
As William himself explained it back in 2017: "She was very informal and really enjoyed the laughter and the fun. She understood that there was a real life outside of Palace walls."
Prince Charles might deserve oodles of credit for his longstanding commitment to environmental causes but do we ever think he has washed his own socks or knows how to acquire yoghurt without ringing for his butler? ("In the cold aisle you say? And it's called a super … market? Fascinating!")
Hell, his former valet Michael Fawcett used to squeeze out his toothpaste onto his brush for him.
Pampered, coddled and indulged in every material way possible, Charles will likely be the very last sovereign who has never stepped foot inside a Sainsbury's store.
William, by contrast, in 2014 became the first king (or queen) in waiting in British history (at least that I'm aware of) to actually hold a paying job outside the institution, not including in the military.
What this means is that from William onwards, the men and women who sit on the throne will simply be better at the job because they will be connected to the people they are tasked with "ruling" over. (Let's be real, regal power is only symbolic at this point in time.)
Currently, pretty much every time we see the Queen, one of her children or one of her cousins in conversation with the public during an official engagement, generally while the royal press are pack on hand to observe, it is all reserve and politeness, two alien worlds oh-so-briefly colliding for a photo moment.
However, William is another breed of HRH entirely. When the 40-year-old father-of-three sat down with two emergency service workers to talk about mental health last year, it was as a man who had also worked on the frontline, first as a search and rescue pilot with the RAF then later for the East Anglian Air Ambulance Service.
Without Diana, we would never have seen Kate open up about the loneliness of new motherhood or have seen William record a podcast where he got close to tears talking about his time with the air ambulance. ("I felt like the whole world was dying … You just feel everyone's in pain, everyone's suffering," he said.)
We would not be at a place in time where it is par for the course for a future king and queen to regularly and willingly make themselves vulnerable and share who they are as people with the wider world.
And we would not be at a point where Kate can happily jump on a budget flight to Scotland with the kids and her tennis racket in tow.
Diana might never have become queen, obviously, but the royal family of today is one indelibly shaped by the princess. At times in the 90s there were fears that the Princess of Wales would bring the monarchy to its knees but somewhat ironically, 25 years on, it looks like she might have been their saviour without them even quite knowing it.
Sure, William will lead technically lead the House of Windsor but really, in so many ways, it will really be the House of Spencer.
- Daniela Elser is a royal expert and a writer with more than 15 years' experience working with a number of Australia's leading media titles.
Diogo Riedi's grandmother taught him to make bread in a wood-fired oven in Brazil.