There’s an irresistible circularity in the Daily Mail making a front page story out of Hilary Mantel’s sinuous essay on the public scrutiny of the Royals’ most intimate bodies. 5,500 words of sharp, considered prose in the London Review of Books becomes a one line bitchfest on the cover of the Mail: “‘A plastic princess designed to breed’: Bring Up the Bodies author Hilary Mantel’s venomous attack on Kate Middleton”.
Though she never singles out the Mail by name, the Mail is one of the primary producers of the kind of Royal scrutiny Mantel anatomises. The Mail has tugged at the threads of every outfit that Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge has worn, hungrily anticipated her pregnancy from the moment she got married, sniffed at the fertile perfume of princessly nausea, and snorted derisively at the Middleton family – especially Kate’s sister, who has been cast as both a grasping middle-class arriviste capitalising on her sudden accession to quality, and as the princess-a-like you can wank over without landing yourself in the Tower.
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