The Duchess of Cambridge hasn’t done any events since returning from the Pakistan tour. That’s pretty normal for Kate – she usually takes a few weeks (even a few months) off after a tour. In this case, the return from Pakistan coincided with a break in George and Charlotte’s school, so Kate took the kids to Anmer Hall for a few weeks for some country time and quiet time. Because of the way William and Kate have organized their lives, we really don’t know where William is most of the time, so I have no idea if William joined Kate and the kids at Anmer.
Instead of billing this school-holiday as “Kate has a light schedule, like always,” the Sun did a cloying story about how Kate is super NORMAL because she spends time at the country house, occasionally does her own grocery shopping, and picks up cheap Halloween costumes for her kids. Honestly though… that’s her brand as a duchess. She’s always done “just like us!” normal-person stuff, it’s just that NOW it’s paying off spectacularly because everything is a subtweet of Duchess Meghan. In any case, it does appear that Kate and the kids returned to London this week, and Kate even had a “meeting” on the Court Circular:
The Duchess of Cambridge quietly resumed her royal duties this week as her eldest children Prince George and Princess Charlotte returned to school after the autumn half term. The Court Circular states that Kate, 37, held an Early Years meeting at Kensington Palace on Tuesday.
Last year the Duchess convened a steering group of experts, including practitioners, academics and charities, for a lifelong project to highlight the importance of early intervention to highlight the importance of early intervention. Prince William and Kate’s charity venture the Royal Foundation added an update to its website recently about the royal mum’s initiative, adding: “This has been a major body of work and will be unveiled later this year.”
A source previously told HELLO!: “She [Kate] has found work that she’s really passionate about. She spent a lot of time at the start of her royal life learning about social issues and challenges like addiction, homelessness, mental health. It became clear to her that one of the main causes of it all was things not going right in the early years, so she knows the potential advantages to doing things in this space. It’s about solving much bigger problems but doing it early. She has spent a lot of time with a lot of experts and professionals and has learned from them. She has also done an enormous amount of reading on her own.”
I totally forgot that Kate had keen-baited us about the Early Years thing. Remember that? The Cambridges have revamped their foundation’s website and in an effort to make Kate’s vague meetings sound like *something*, the site claimed that Kate would launch the Early Years project/initiative later this year. Less than two months until the end of the year! When will it be unveiled, you guys?? Also: I truly laughed at “She has also done an enormous amount of reading on her own.” Does reading count as an event?!!?
Also: William and Kate are this year’s royal attendees for the Royal Variety Show. Last year, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex got to go. William and Kate have attended before, in 2014 and 2017. It’s a revolving commitment – usually the same royals don’t go two years in a row, and it’s just Will & Kate’s “turn” this year. That will happen on November 18th, a Monday.
Photos courtesy of WENN and Avalon Red.
PW was at BP knighting people on behalf of the Queen this week.
And one of the recipients was the founder of SmartWorks.
Sure, will believe it when it happens.
So Kate can read on her own – give her a cookie already. If I were her PR I would not be happy about articles like this infantalising my client. In fact if I were Kate I wouldn’t like these types of articles but saying all that I do get the sense that Kate likes been treated like a child.
Praising her for reading is so dumb. She was originally billed as the most educated royal bride ever but has never demonstrated any significant intellectual abilities. It’s not going to change at this point because she never puts in the work. She doesn’t have to when she gets credit for just showing up to the meeting.
They probably mean that she reads a lot of “academic papers” — wasn’t that one of the nonsense claims last year when they first announced this? But I mean yes, of course it’s ridiculous to praise her for reading, but they need to work with what they’ve got! (And I doubt she’s ever read an “academic paper” in her life.)
these articles about her are so bad. Like I said the other day, they really just remind us that Kate isn’t doing anything.
We get releases from their staff that she’s going to go to a meeting, a month or more before the meeting. She shows up, less than an hour, goes home. Many articles spun about it. They have very little to work with with Kate, but they’ve been stretching credulity for years now.
I just get so annoyed that these behind the scenes meetings count in the CC for Kate but not Meghan. Because with all of Meghan’s projects, she must have so, soooo many of them.
If she wanted to, Meghan could blow the other three’s numbers right off the CC chart in meetings alone. How many Hub meetings, Smart Set meetings, magazine editorial meetings? Maybe she’s holding back for Harry’s sake?
Yes Kate likes to be presented as a child, not an intelligent capable 40 year old. She feels this makes her look enduring and her PR people are lazy so they go along.
She’s the eternal ingenue. Really stuck in that golden era at St Andrews where she caught his eye.
St. Andrews is when Kate became famous. Hence why she is stuck eternally learning and keening.
Celebrities stop maturing at the age they become famous. This is why the royals are ALL emotionally immature.
Only a sucker like William would be fooled by her. Women can see right through.
Kate was able to play the ingenue when the only other women getting some press attention were 70 plus year old Camilla and 90 plus year old the Queen. Now that Meghan is there, she’s the same age and you see the obvious differences. Sophie and Anne have always been doing more work but the media ignores them most of the time.
This is very much like the line her parents set up for her at Party Pieces: ‘First Year’. Pippa got the newsletter, James got the cake kit, Kate got first year. She probably asked her mom for ideas.
Early intervention is key to most anything and the issues she “supports” are very important. However, I just think her press people or the press, in general, make such mockery of those issues every time they try to paint Kate as a central figure/contributor when it comes to talking about such waity issues—especially when there isn’t much follow through.
She should do the same as Meghan – only present an initiative when it is ready. This keen-baiting (which has gone on for a year with this project) is just odd.
@Chelle, yes— they make it sound as if Kate and Kate alone is the one who made this connection, which is insane since it’s basically common knowledge and has been ever since I can remember.
@ArtHistorian I agree but then we’d be left with the cloud-gazing log and absolutely nothing else.
Kate on her ‘Early Years’ crusade….
Eugenie on her ‘anti-slavery’ collective crusade …..
Bill on his mental health kick and being worried about how fragile his brother seems.
Hiding in plain sight never looked so good when you need to hide a pedophile and gas light your own sibling / cousin who is not playing ball as the family scapegoat….
“Major body of work”. Work that is to be performed by other people, yet who gets the credit?
We’re still waiting on the Broken Britain project girl.
It is all part of the same Keen umbrella. Early years, garden, all to address the children of Broken Britain. We’ve been told, ad infinitum, this is her passion project she’ll work on the rest of her life.
So in other words, next year we will get a rock table to go with the log chair, or maybe a fountain to imitate a babbling brook. Maybe the babbling part will appeal to her:)
So that explains why everything takes so long. Gotta string this out for the next 40-50 years, huh? No need to rush things…..
I hate how a lot of reporters frame “quiet” and “quietly” as something good. Sure, there are times when quiet is great. A memorial…listening to someone else talk. But “quietly resuming her duties” is nothing to be admired.
This is, in part, how the notion that women should be “sweet” and “quiet” remains persistent in our society.
@Stepup this is a great point. I agree. And especially in Kate’s case, the entire reason for her “work” is to draw attention to causes by being out there in the public, actually supporting them.
Yes that really irks me too. Quietly, yet we’re writing an article about it and it’s on the cc 🙄 Unlike Meghan who was actually quiet and produced something tangible.
All the hopes people had about her being a queen with a degree are just out the window. All she seems interested in is collecting dresses and trying to game the press by teasing whether she’s pregnant or not (see top picture with the pretend baby bump cradling). If I ever meet her I’ll tell her she’s a prize plum.
I’m sorry, I can’t help but notice that she’s touching her crotch in a lot of pictures. Its weird.
That’s one of her typical poses
She likes to show off the one thing she’s good at: birthing babies from the Royal Womb.
While I get that’s her role, I just can’t stand how they keep pushing she’s anything more than a stepford Wife.
I’m sorry, I can’t help but notice that she’s touching her crotch in a lot of pictures. Its weird.
“The Duchess of Cambridge quietly resumed her royal duties this week as her eldest children Prince George and Princess Charlotte returned to school after the autumn half term. ”
Quietly is code for “not doing anything substantial as per usual”
Reading in her own. I mean, I’d you have to tout reading as an accomplishment it goes to show how stupid and lazy she really must be. And she has a post secondary education! Did Lori Laughlin help her get into University? Staged pictures at the library, making sure she isn’t holding one of the books upside down?
So a few years ago, the late, great Defamer site had an open threat where people could discuss run-ins with famous people. A person who spent a semester at Saint Andrews wrote in and said they were in a seminar with Kate and Kate allegedly would just copy people’s notes and assignments. I don’t know how that worked – you would think in a seminar the work would be done outside of class and submitted during it – but that was the person’s story. Take it for what it’s worth.
Given that she has shown absolutely no curiosity, intellectual or otherwise, in all the years she’s been in the spotlight, I suspect she spent most of uni majoring in William.
Seriously though she had a degree in art history, her boyfriend could have gotten her any job in any museum or auction house or even at a palace to apply this degree, and she didn’t even bother to get a job until the Queen took note of her laziness and then it was a few days a week at her parents’ friend’s company.
@Mumbles I remember that! I miss Defamer. And I still miss Gawker every single day.
I remember that! But from the Lolalove (?) site.
Didn’t whoever it was write “1066” as a clearly incorrect answer to some other question and say Kate just copied it straight out?
I recall reading those comments as well. She was apparently tricked according to this person when the person she was copying from put in an incorrect answer.
If she had provided any substance since then it would discredit these stories but we are almost 20 years from when she finished her degree and she still gets praise for reading and talking. It’s absurd the way she’s been infantilized.
Rusalka – yes! I remember that, and then the poster actually told Kate, hey, I saw you copy my answer and just FYI, it’s wrong, and Kate blushed and batted her eyelashes and said something very wannabe-posh like, “Whatever do you mean?” Or some such crap.
I’m glad you guys remember this too!
I remember that – the story I read was that one student said they deliberately wrote down the wrong notes which she (Kate) copied from her as Kate was sat next to her during the session. Apparently it was well known with her classmates that she copied from others. There was several stories alleging plagiarism that got covered up by the faculty as she was living with William at the time.
The press got a lot of gossip from a St Andrews student online chat room that was shut down after the university realised the press had gotten access. That’s how we got juicy gossip about how the girl William was seeing at the time he started hooking up with Kate called them out on it during a play she was performing in when she saw they were in the audience.
Have you got a link for any of that?
What makes this even more inane and self-defeating is that they are determined to promote Kate as some sort of brilliant mind, when in reality, it’s absolutely fine that she’s not.
Not everyone is super-intelligent and academically gifted. Diana was famously considered to be not particularly book smart, but she had so many other qualities which made her effective and wonderful and beloved. Same with Harry.
But they just keep pushing Kate as this serious scholar who reads academic papers etc. and all it does it set her up for failure when inevitably nothing comes of all of these glowing articles.
It sounds like total bollocks to me. An arts degree with some sort of weekly quiz with one word answers doesn’t seem likely. I went to a much less prestigious Scottish university and our tutorials involved giving presentations and lengthy discussions about the topic. Marks came from essays and a final exam (also in essay format). I can’t imagine that St Andrews are running their degrees like some sort of pub quiz.
The person posted the story in the comments on Jezebel too. It wasn’t an arts-related class that I remember, but a history class everyone was required to take as part of undergrad.
The comments from one of the teachers at Marlborough said she wasn’t anything intellectually noteworthy and anyone saying something else was lying for posterity. Uncle Gary’s comments about how Kate had always had to work much harder at school and things coming much easier to Pippa. Public comments of Can you test the smell by smelling it, an art history major not knowing the history of Faberge, her inane comments about Tom Hiddleston and beards. It doesn’t prove the comments from the fellow student at St Andrews, but they make it more believable.
@Janetchant if it’s true my suspicion would be that it was a history elective of some kind.
Her copycatting ways haven’t slowed down since. Ha!
@spookie – something is probably buried here in the LoveLolaHeart site – I hope posting links is okay, admins 🙂
ETA the post in question was called Impressions of Kate and is here on Tumblr now:
https://heavyarethecrowns.tumblr.com/post/141943433839/love-lola-heart-impressions-of-kate-november-14
I read it and don’t believe any of it. It refers to Kate texting smugly at a class in uni. Kate graduated in 2005 long before texting was a thing. Also Kate wasn’t especially skinny back then but is referred to as the skinny brunette. Judging from pictures Kate’s plastic surgery transformation took place after university around 2006. Her weight plummeted drastically before the wedding.
I don’t know about the UK, but I spent a semester in Spain in 2003 and texting was DEFINITELY a thing. We texted all the time, we never actually called people. It was weird to me to return to the states where texting took a bit longer to catch on. So I don’t think that part of it is weird. And Kate WAS thin in college. Its only in comparison to her current weight that you wouldn’t call her “the skinny brunette.”
Ah good to know Becks. Perhaps there was some truth in it. The bit about her mooning boys was…ahem…interesting. 😏
@Mego
I went to highschool in canada staring in 2004 and texting was definitely a thing, when Blackberrys were the most popular phones with my peers at the time.
I was texting through BBM by 2004 because that’s when I got my first blackberry. But you could text other ways too. It just took longer.
I feel like I should maybe break a couple of things down (as a Brit who went to a British university, although the similarities stop there):
– Texting was a thing and in the UK a lot of us grew up texting on the 3310s – but BBM was the big thing in 2004/5/6, especially with rich kids
– The tutorial ‘Tina’ mentions sounds like an elective to me. Maybe history or something that would complement Art History. Lots of Humanities degrees require an elective alongside them to get the required points, especially in your first and second year. Languages and history are usually popular. Otherwise I can’t think why a question requiring a date response would be in an Art History class.
– the “girl in the pashmina” thing is hilarious because… it’s true. The pashmina has died off a bit but at one point it was ubiquitous among middle-class girls who were trying to get into publishing or something equally genteel.
Kate was NOT thin at university. She was easily a size 12 UK. She was more curvy and not really skinny. If you think she was thin back then I can only imagine what you look like.
I remember when this was going to launch at the beginning of the year.
I also remember when it was first announced, coincidentally at the same time as the Together cookbook and… 15 months? before its actual launch!
Three days before the completed Together cookbook was launched. Did the staff at KP and/or W&K only learn about the cookbook then? Quick, push a story about how Kate is dedicating her entire life to a huge, long-term project, the results of which cannot possible be quantified for decades. Don’t look at the brand new royal completing big projects in secret with tangible results.
Nota, exactly. They’re trying to trivialize Meghan’s work, which has already impacted so many people. The Grenfell kitchen, Smart Set, and the second location of Luminary Bakery which opened last week. That was said to be a direct result of all of the business they’ve gotten through their association with Meghan.
I have no idea how anyone could think that this amorphous, decades-long project is the better way to go.
I wonder what her salary would be if this “work” could be translated into a real job….
Actually, I think she would “owe” money when you factor in all of the perks and benefits.
Lol
Lol…..a little mean, but bullseye.
Don’t laugh. The DM put out some garbage last week about how , given her experience 😂😂😂, she’d be an Administrator. They said her annual salary would be around 23,000 pounds.
Chelle — no! Seriously? 🤭
Can I just say…
She would NOT survive in my environment. She’d probably struggle to work the coffee machine.
Admin is no laugh (although we do like a laugh in my workplace – something else she’d be rubbish at, given how she freezes out people and is apparently “cold, dull and serious”).
I am still waiting for something substantial to be done with all this besides fluff.
Really, she’s done an enormous amount of reading on her own as if she needed assistance in the past. The more they try to praise her the more it backfires.
Don’t be so hard on her. She can launch the how-to-change-university-and-stalk-a-prince campaign quite successfully I heard.
I just cringe maximally whenever there are quotes bolstering Kate’s projects, they are just so transparently overwrought and vapid.
I enjoy how they work in that it is a lifelong project, that idea is always put forth to justify sluggish progress and lack of deliverables for her.
She’s read about the subjects (‘on her own’, no less!). GOLD STAR!
Kate never really worked a job in her life (other than landing William which was a multi-year project indeed) other than doing some light assisting of her mum for the Party Pieces business and that laughable brief part-time accessories buying gig at Jigsaw working for her mum’s Mustique pal. It really shows with stuff like this, sounds like a student asking for an extension for a tardy school project.
I am glad I am not the only one who balked at the need to reference a 37 year old woman reading. And meanwhile 14 year old princess Leonor of Spain has been making appearances and speaking in four languages and can clearly run rings around her.
So right, the child royals of other families put her to shame! Not to mention royal women like Queen Maxima who is smart as the proverbial whip. The bar is quite low with Kate, as long as she stays very svelte and has glossy hair (and doesn’t mention gender equality, or feminism, or anything “controversial” in her “work”) she is the GOAT to many…
Whatever the outcome of this initiative is, I predicting that the press are going to pretend as if it’s the cure for cancer.
I bet they’ve already even written the articles, extolling the virtues of such long term, mega impact, humanity changing projects like Saint Duchess Kate’s initiative. Unlike the narrow, shallow, low impact effort by that *other* duchess.
The article uses adjectives like ‘Major’ and ‘Enormous’ to describe the initiative obviously trying to play up the significance of the project. I must say her PR people suck and in this Information Age, Stevie Wonder can see through that strategy. Their modus operandi is straight out of the propaganda for the gullible playbook.
Bella, the press will be instructed to praise it like it was the cure for cancer by KP but I don’t think there is much chance there will be an outcome. Just dribs and drabs of inanity like the star gazing garden log chair.
“It became clear to her that o̶n̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶i̶n̶ ̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶g̶o̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶r̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶e̶a̶r̶l̶y̶ ̶y̶e̶a̶r̶s̶, so she knows the potential advantages to doing things in this space.”
I think what they really mean is, “It became clear to her that 𝒔𝒉𝒆 𝒓𝒆𝒄𝒆𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒔 𝒑𝒓𝒂𝒊𝒔𝒆 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒏 𝒑𝒉𝒐𝒕𝒐𝒈𝒓𝒂𝒑𝒉𝒆𝒅 𝒘𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝒄𝒉𝒊𝒍𝒅𝒓𝒆𝒏, so she knows the potential advantages to doing things in this space.”
I’m starting to wonder if the recent spate of Kate articles is a shift in pr strategy. The jig is kind of up around the smear Meghan and tangentially Harry strategy so now we keep pushing the pro Kate puff pieces on a daily basis and see how that sticks.
Wow, she’s finally reading on her own? She better watch her back, I hear her nephew is already learning to talk. He works more than her. 😂