Kate's chance to show her stiff upper lip
William's girl can prove she's a class act, writes Sarah Caden
Sunday July 26 2009
WHEN the marriages of the Windsor princes, Charles and Andrew, ended, there were those who tut-tutted that that's what happens when you marry a non-royal. And now, in the footsteps of Diana and Fergie and their assorted issues, comes the skeleton in the family closet of Kate Middleton, the girlfriend of Prince William, who has hitherto managed to rise above all the media sound and fury with a certain, well, nobility, even if she is a commoner.
Not that the skeleton's in the cupboard any more. Last weekend, a British newspaper printed the story of how Kate's maternal uncle, Gary Goldsmith, chopped out the coke with a pair of journalists, offered to get them some prostitutes and boasted about his connections to the royals. The accompanying photographs -- taken at Goldsmith's Ibiza villa, La Maison de Bang Bang -- showed him shaven-headed, tattooed and overweight, his belly hanging over the waistband of his underpants, his jeans hanging off him. Not a pretty sight, that and the snorting cocaine through a €100 note.
Kate's uncle, it has emerged since, is a guy with too much money and too much time, since selling his IT recruitment business for millions several years ago. His fiancee jilted him, sick of his out-of-control lifestyle, and was begged by Kate's mother to go back to him and he is, essentially, a worry to everyone. Even, apparently, Buckingham Palace.
But what's a princess-in-waiting to do? Stage an intervention with the queen? Ask Prince Philip to do some straight-talking with her uncle? Enquire as to whether Diana was really killed by MI5 and if they could help her with something? All Kate can do, surely, is keep standing by William, smiling, endeavouring to prove she's cut from a finer cloth than her uncle. After all, maybe, by keeping a stiff upper lip through this scandal, Kate will show herself to be a commoner worthy of being given a chance.
- Sarah Caden
