Has Kate been sending Meghan stealthy public messages? Photo / Getty Images
Has Kate been sending Meghan stealthy public messages? Photo / Getty Images
OPINION:
There is a certain irony to the Queen: She is the head of the world's oldest institution, bar one. (The Pope and his millennia-old church beat her there.)
British Prime Ministers, all 14 of them, have throughout the course of her reign turned up weekly like docile schoolboys (and on two occasions, girls) for their weekly annual audience with Her Majesty. (Which amounts to 3536 hours of PM-level confabs.)
She has met 12 American Presidents who I think we can confidently assume were left appropriately awe-struck by the diminutive leader.
Her Majesty's lesser job requirements also include being the head of an army, navy, air force and church.
Yet despite all this, the Queen is far from an out-and-proud feminist.
In fact, I'm pretty sure if we crept into her bedroom we're hardly likely to find an "I heart Emmeline Pankhurst" sampler hanging on her wall. The unfortunate reality is that there is hardly much of an overlap when it comes to feminism and the house of Windsor.
Which is what makes the latest theory about Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, and a possible stealthy campaign of sisterhood solidarity so damn tantalising.
Let me catch you up. On Wednesday night, The New York Times published an essay written by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, in which she revealed she had a miscarriage earlier this year.
Penned with incredible honesty, it is a deeply moving and raw exhortation for all of us to help one another heal after a year of such collective, global suffering.
The royal family is reported to have been told about the Sussexes' loss at the time back in July. Yet in the wake of the release of Meghan's piece, which has set off a tsunami of public support for the 39-year-old and has started a global conversation about pregnancy loss, the Firm's official communication channels have totally and utterly failed to acknowledge this week's news.
The Queen's office told the Daily Beast's Tom Sykes that they would not be commenting on the "deeply personal" issue while Prince Charles' spokesman likewise said he would not be commenting given it was a "private" issue.
However, get your deer stalker and pipe out old chums because here's a theory: Kate has already shown stealthily-but-public support for her sister-in-law.
In October, the Duchess of Cambridge visited the Institute of Reproductive and Development Biology at Imperial College London which is home to a gaggle of dedicated boffins who study miscarriage, premature birth, and stillbirth.
There, she met women affected by this issue and told one mum who had experienced the unthinkable: "It's so brave of you to be able to talk so openly.
"A lot of the research, a lot of the support for organisations, is being driven by parents who have been through this experience, and want to help others. It is so inspirational."
Now sure, the visit did coincide with National Baby Loss Awareness Week but Kate has never before marked this annual week with an official engagement before now.
The thing is, the royal family never, ever does anything accidentally. Spur-of-the-moment decisions and spontaneity are bred out of Windsors the same way any memory of the fact they are all really German is precisely excised at some point during childhood.
Photo / Getty Images
Therefore, for the Duchess, this would have been an outing months in the making at the very least which would mean… July or August at the least.
In January this year, Kate launched her massive early childhood project Five Big Questions, all part of her overarching, legacy-defining quest to create a number of interventions for children 0 to 5.
(The thinking is pretty savvy: If you address mental health problems and provide emotional support to tots and parents throughout this formative time you will be able to prevent a score of people developing drug addictions, becoming homeless, becoming alcoholic etc in adult life.)
However, before Kate's October visit to the Institute, miscarriage and pregnancy loss had never really figured as part of her work in this area.
Could Kate, having found out in July that her sister-in-law had lost her second child, decided she wanted to make a significant gesture of public support without actually revealing to the world what Meghan had gone through?
Now, the timing of Kate's institute visit could have been purely coincidental but let me present you with another piece of compelling evidence: She is someone who is a dab hand at trafficking in meaningful gestures.
In August this year, Finding Freedom, the much ballyhooed book about the Sussexes that could very well be the most obsequious, toadying royal biography of a generation, hit shelves. It made the case that essentially Kate failed Meghan by not doing enough to show her the royal ropes when she arrived at Kensington Palace.
And yet even Freedom, a title hardly likely to be overly generous towards Kate, did reveal that when the two women were first introduced, "The meeting ended with Kate letting Meghan know that she was always welcome to contact her if she needed anything.
Photo / Getty Images
"Having been through the experience of being a royal girlfriend herself, Kate knew how trying it could be to suddenly have one's personal life laid bare."
Later, when Meghan joined Queen and co in Norfolk for her first royal Christmas, a daunting feat for even the hardiest of souls who also happen to be au fait with the curious ways of the aristocracy, Kate went out of her way to cook special meals for the newbie.
Later, when the relationship between the two Duchesses faltered, Vanity Fair reported that Kate sent Meghan flowers to "rectify the situation." (However "Meghan … told Kate in no uncertain terms that flowers were not enough" which raises the question of what would be "enough"?)
The point of all this being, Kate like a good upper-class gal seems largely unable to muster up any sort of Californian touchy-feely, lay-it-all-out-there, emotional share-a thon – but the woman knows how to more subtly demonstrate her feelings.
Thus it would make sense if the Duchess of Cambridge's October lab visit was a calculated, secret show of support for Meghan. As a mother-of-three herself, she would understand all too acutely how much the loss of a baby would hurt.
Here's my caveat to all this: Kate might have stayed up into the early hours, feverishly drinking black coffee and trying to work out how best to send her sister-in-law a clandestine yet public signal in the wake of her miscarriage.
She might have planned her charity engagement meticulously, all with a view to sending her Los Angeles-based fellow royal WAG a powerful show of support.
But this in no way makes up for the abject official silence from both she and husband Prince William on the subject of Meghan and Harry's heartbreak. They could have easily shared a simple post via their Instagram or Twitter accounts addressing the tragedy and then have linked to the charities who had supported the women Kate met in October.
If the various royal houses can use their social media channels to wish one another a happy birthday or Merry Christmas, surely they could say something – anything – at this point in time to show their outward support for the Sussexes.
Their failure to do so will not be forgotten in a hurry.
I, for one, truly hope that Kate was indeed staging an exercise in demonstrating trans-Atlantic solidarity with Meghan. This would at least mean that while the current Queen might not have done much for her gender, at some point in the future we will get one who knows a thing or two about helping out the sisterhood.
Daniela Elser is a royal expert and writer with more than 15 years experience working with a number of Australia's leading media titles.
