STEPHEN GLOVER: If William and Kate feed us a fairytale narrative about their lives, I fear disaster’s likely to follow

The Princess of Wales’ new video revealing the end of her chemotherapy has rightly been welcomed by many.

The message that Catherine is on the road to recovery is positive, even though she makes it clear that the road ahead will be long.

One or two observers have criticized the video for its soft sentimentality – cornfields, sun shining through trees, heartbreaking background music – and have suggested that we are being manipulated.

What we think of the three-minute film may not be of the utmost importance. I personally found it a bit saccharine, but was prepared to put my reservations aside for the uplifting news that Catherine is getting better. You’d have to be a hard-hearted and rather mean-spirited Republican to disapprove so much.

And yet I have great concerns – not so much about the video itself, but about the way in which the Prince and Princess of Wales have taken control of their own image and replaced the traditional media. This development seems to me to be potentially dangerous for the future of the monarchy. Let me explain.

Catherine has a passion for photography and has long been publishing photos of her family that in a previous generation would likely have been taken by professional photographers, if they were taken at all.

Not surprisingly, these photographs are very sympathetic to their subjects, to the point of idealizing them. At least once, they are “photoshopped” – that is, edited to benefit the children photographed.

On Mother’s Day in March, Catherine produced a photo of herself, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis – all looking radiantly beautiful and incredibly happy – which aroused the suspicions of several photo agencies. The Princess of Wales quickly admitted that she had doctored the photo and apologised.

Two weeks later, she released a video announcing with some dignity that she was in the early stages of treatment following a cancer diagnosis. Until recently, such information would have been delivered to the public in a blank voice by Royal media advisers.

William and Kate have taken control of their own PR and offer an idealised, almost fairytale version of themselves, argues our writer Stephen Glover

Kate’s video was certainly moving, as it contained terrible news, but it raised even more doubts about the authenticity of the photo from two weeks earlier, in which she and her children seemed so happy.

And now we have another video in which Catherine, William and their children look utterly confused – as if they’ve eaten too many magic mushrooms they’ve discovered in their enchanted, mottled wood. At one point, a smiling William even plants a kiss on his wife’s cheek.

In a sense, the video is intimate, as we are briefly invited into the heart of a seemingly perfect family. But of course, the invitation is entirely on the terms of the Prince and Princess of Wales themselves. They do not begin by answering the question that such intimacy surely raises, namely, what exactly was wrong with Catherine and how long the ‘path to healing and full recovery’ is likely to be?

What is happening is nothing short of a revolution. William and Kate have taken control of their own PR and are offering an idealized, almost fairytale version of themselves and their family. The traditional media, which you might expect to ask some probing questions, has been virtually written out of the script.

Of course, you can understand why the Prince and Princess want to ‘own’ their story, to be able to put it together as they see fit. That’s what modern celebrities like to do. Moreover, it’s not unreasonable to speculate that the heir to the throne and his wife have a deep distrust of the established media.

Before her marriage, Catherine was sometimes harassed by the paparazzi. William – like his brother Harry – is convinced that their mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, was followed to her death by the paparazzi before that fatal crash in 1997. William has no love for the media and will likely be drawn to a strategy aimed at relegating them to the sidelines.

In their desire to present themselves to the world on their own terms, William and Harry are surprisingly similar. The difference is that while the hot-headed Duke of Sussex rails against the press, the wiser and calmer Prince of Wales keeps his counsel – and merely quietly avoids the media.

It is ironic that Harry criticizes both his father and brother for being too close to the press, while in reality William and Catherine try to neutralize the press.

Will it work? In a celebrity-crazed world, where TikTok and the like rule and many young people have the attention span of a gnat, the Prince and Princess of Wales’s approach seems likely to succeed. Why bother with accepted media when Wales can present themselves however they want on a billion smartphones?

Nevertheless, I believe this is a dangerous trick. Most of us are not TikTok fans. In fact, the British people do not want a supposedly perfect, fictional monarchy. They expect members of the royal family to be real, down-to-earth, relatable people who do not live in a fantasy world of endless smiles and eternal laughter.

Ultimately, the royal family survives and is vindicated in the public eye because it is controlled. And that is what the traditional media has done, no doubt not always honestly, but generally rigorously. If the royal family is allowed to repackage itself as a completely sanitized but untouchable institution, disaster will probably follow.

Harry and Meghan are richly comical, and also frustrating, figures as they painstakingly craft their own image of California perfection. Yet it doesn’t really matter what they do, because they’ve become so peripheral to the monarchy. But the Prince and Princess of Wales are the future.

Perhaps their strategy is not entirely calculated. Perhaps they are genuinely moved by the sentimentality of our times. At the end of her voiceover in the last video, Kate says, “To everyone who is continuing their own cancer journey – I will be with you, side by side, hand in hand.” This cannot be true. It is too much.

Am I a grouch? A dinosaur even? I hope not. I doubt the British people will cheerfully accept a magical monarchy that values ​​sentiment over common sense and promotes a false image of itself, one that is imbued with happiness and laughter.

I am glad that Catherine is getting better. She is a gifted woman and we are very happy to have her. We are also glad that in William we have such a balanced and dedicated heir to the throne.

But the monarchy will be weakened if the public comes to believe it is being fed a fairy tale nurtured by the Prince and Princess of Wales and beyond the reach of the media.