Why the royal family’s christening photos bother me so much

Yesterday I was irked enough by Wills and Kate’s smug family christening photos, shot by Mario Testino, natch, that I left a snarky remark on Netmum’s Facebook post. Cue a barrage of abuse from sycophantic online royalists. I bit back, because I’m hot-headed like that, but because I’m also someone who like to self-analyse and reason far too much, as well as to poke my nose into things that don’t concern me. So I wanted to give a fuller response as to why the photos got my goat, quite so much, so to speak.

Once an ardent royalist, I gorged on scones in the rain at the Queen’s Diamond jubilee, and there are pictures of me on Kate’s and Will’s wedding day, partying along with the rest of a spumante-fuelled nation, decked out in a dark wig and my own wedding dress, that with some minor adjustments, looked not unlike (except for the hundreds of thousands of pounds no doubts spent hand embroidering it at the house of McQueen) Kate’s own. Mine was a vintage number that cost less than £200 quid. But, that’s, of course, is just details.

Kate and I have history, you see. Not least the physical similarities (I’m a blonder, slightly more well worn, at times well-rounded, version). We are round about the age, and save for a fluke on an examination paper that could have got me a scholarship to Marlborough College – I would have been in the year above her there – I always felt that in some parallel universe, it could have been me.

I always said I wanted to marry Prince William, but of course, given my background, a product of a broken home, grammar school education, despite my father’s triumph over adversity tale that saw him drag himself up by his working class bootstraps to become, these days, a multi-millionaire, much, it seems like Kate’s own family – I would have been discounted early on. I was bright enough, don’t get me wrong. It’s just, having never been to prep school, I didn’t have the experience, at 15, of writing multiple essays discussing the intricacies of the 19^th century industrial revolution to be able to ace an examination paper affording me entry to one of the most expensive public schools in the country, at something in the region of £30,000 per year. Back then, my father had yet to make his first million, and I would need another year, at least, of publically funded education before I knew and could discuss at length, the meaning behind the word ‘epoch’.

Deciding not to take the Marlborough scholarship exam – although spending an awkward, angry, rather more affordable summer at one of their holiday schools for over privileged children, gave me an early insight into the barriers to entry to the highest levels of society. Given my background, I would never be one of them – one’s fate is decided much earlier than 15, no matter how much my father might go on to earn.

Little matter though. I went on to go to Bristol anyway, where I had another opportunity to have my nose rubbed in the armpit of privilege, and despite leaving with one of the best grades of my year, I knew by then it was who you know, not what you know, that really makes a difference in life success, especially when you come armed into adulthood with an arts degree.

Unlike Kate, whose undergraduate experience no doubt was debt-free and family-funded, I worked my way through Bristol Uni dancing round poles, (by then, my father and I were estranged due to what he felt was an undue influence by my Canadian (and therefore entranced by British elitism) mother, who, he felt, had attempted to get me to live with her by bribing me with the idea of a scholarship to Marlborough College. But though I could never have made the grade there, even had I taken or passed the exam; she did, nonetheless help me fight my way onto the London housing market, by hook, crook and five years of my own sore shins.

I always find it amusing that working as a lap dancer has afforded me a far more privileged way of life than any opportunities thrown in my path by my degree, or even my family, though no doubt I have negotiated the rocky waters of a depressed employment market all the better because of it.  I met my husband there too – a banker, which in itself, opened at least financial and social doors I might not have had otherwise, despite what many would call a privileged childhood of my own, at least in material terms. But the fallout from my childhood – my parents’ early divorce, my own mental health problems, my quirky, inherited ingenuity – proved as much of a barrier to entry to ‘polite society’ as anything else.

I washed up in East London, where generations of my mother’s family lived before me – another anathema to any royal ambitions (although look back far enough to our clannish Scottish origins near Glamis Castle, and you’ll see not a passing resemblance among my forbears to the erstwhile Queen Mother) – and I now have a foothold in one of the biggest growth areas in the country. My house earns more money than me, and I don’t do too badly these days: my education finally coming into its own, after a few wilderness years of childbearing and its aftermath.

So when, last year, Kate deigned to visit the East London scout troop my children go to, I half fancied it was fate, though part of me felt concerned that the conspiracy websites to which I’d been party recently, might be coming back to bite me on the ass.

As she turned up, that December night clad in low key black hoodie and surrounded by security and  clipboard Nazis (not least real ones – you do know the real history of Prince Phillip’s family?) to grace us with her favour, I couldn’t help feel it was a cynical exercise in the politics of obeisance that smacked a little of PR desperation, tinged with a little personal fear that perhaps, I had found out too much, and was being given a subtle, public warning.

You see, at the time, the news of the elite child abuse ring that appears to have been operating at the highest echelons of society, in particular during the 80s, but no doubt throughout history, and, I rather suspect, continues apace today, albeit on an even more surreptitious scale – had reached the public domain. The more I read, the more it felt as though the crown was implicated in the hushing it up – from the ennoblement of its most vile suspected perpetrators – Sir Jimmy Savile, Lord Janner – to this year’s New Years’ honours list that saw many of the people supposed to be involved in its enquiry, such as the QC Dame Fiona Wolfe, who resigned over her links to some of the accused, firm up their already quite comfortable place in the establishment.

I’m not going to risk my neck by treacherously suggesting the royals themselves are implicated – though shortly afterwards, Prince Andrew got embroiled in an elite child slavery scandal of his own, but depending how deep you dig down the conspiracy wormhole – and when you consider how far the church – even the Scout movement itself – has already been implicated – there is plenty of evidence that this abject abuse of power has corrupted, if not emerged from – the very top.

The christening of this child, whose more interesting grandmother, Carole, is, by the way, a Goldsmith, will by her virtue of her birth never have to dance round a pole to make ends meet, though no doubt will have to cut a fair few ribbons, has been born within an family that’s been involved in, or at the very least tolerant of, abuse of the very worst possible scale imaginable.

This turns my stomach; and whose family secrets, though it may wear an attractive, aspirational, friendly female face of sugar spun hats and pastel frocks – the men are by and large bedecked in medals of unknown origin save for the initiated few, will likely never fully be known; not least the pyramid hierarchy of privilege they represent which means those at the top can continue to wield power and judgement over the lives of ordinary people, seems to me a grotesque, outmoded expression of feudalism that has no place in a modern democracy, and only the brainwashed can’t see through the pageantry.

So bow and scrape and cluck and coo if you want, to this family of hypocrites, who keep the rest of us in indebted servitude to the invisible hand of the market (perhaps swayed a little at Bilderberg?), but believe me when I say Kate’s rise was no happy accident, any more than Diana’s death (who, so the whispers say, was a Goldsmith also) nor was it a triumph over adversity, rags to riches tale that we’ve been spun by the press. Dark forces may never harm that child of hers (and praise be for it), and the hands that blessed her (with water shipped in from the River Jordan) may give her sanctity, but rest assured she will learn to walk among those who one way or another, are implicated in the suffering of others not much older than she, but who had much less power to prevent it.

All I can say is I’m grateful, in a nation increasingly being bought by stealth by Qatar, that I’m allowed to say these things in public at all. I don’t doubt, as the thought-police find increasing ways to brand anyone who indulges in beliefs other than the official line, mentally ill, that it may well be more worth my while in the long run simply to agree the pictures look splendid, and only remark, ‘how did she lose her baby bump so soon?’ – But then I might give rise to a new conspiracy theory of my own.