Julia Baird on Kate, cancer and conspiracies
Julia Baird: I was starting to get really, really annoyed and frustrated at the way the speculation about Princess Kate was just getting so feverish and so out of hand. We knew she was sick. We knew that she wasn’t going to be ready for public duties until Easter. And yet, and yet, and yet, it went on. And I wrote a piece thinking, okay, this is really going to make those people who think they have the right to every detail, every morsel of her life, angry. So I went to bed thinking, right, I’m going to be trolled tomorrow. I woke up, I check my phone and the first message I see is, oh crap.
Catherine, Princess of Wales: It has been an incredibly tough couple of months for our entire family, but I’ve had a fantastic medical team who have taken great care of me, for which I’m so grateful. The surgery was successful, however, tests after the operation found cancer had been present.
Julia Baird: She’s got cancer.
Sam Hawley: That’s Julia Baird, an ABC journalist and columnist, author and royal historian. Leading up to that revelation from the Princess of Wales, the conspiracy theories about what was really happening with Kate were running wild across social media and in some cases in the mainstream press. So who’s to blame for harassing a princess when she’s so seriously ill? Today, Julia Baird on what that really says about us. I’m Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. Julia, let’s start with a quick timeline, a reminder of how this all unfolded. January 17th, that was the first we knew that not all was well with Catherine, the Princess of Wales, wasn’t it?
Julia Baird: That’s right. That’s the date that they announced she’d undergone planned abdominal surgery and that she was going to be in hospital for about 10 to 14 days, which really indicates this is probably quite significant. This isn’t an in and out day surgery situation. They said she was going to need a period of recovery and that it was unlikely she was going to participate in any public engagements until after Easter, which of course is right now. So then on January 29, after she’d been in hospital for two weeks, the palace announced she was making good progress and she was going to return home to Windsor Castle to continue her recovery.
Sam Hawley: All right. So the public’s told of this abdominal surgery, although the specific type is not specified, and we’re told essentially she needs time to recover and to basically don’t expect anything more until after Easter. But we just can’t wait that long, can we?
Julia Baird: No. This kind of really intense speculation began. Where was she? Was she hiding? Was she in Europe? Was she having plastic surgery? A Brazilian butt lift? Was she having marital problems in hiding? Was she dead? Was one of the conspiracy theorists. They all kind of began around this time. And then when Prince William had to pull out of a public engagement at the last minute, they really ratcheted up. And people started to play with it like it was a Where’s Kate game. And it went on and on in a way that was kind of, I haven’t really seen that kind of speculation before when it comes to the royal family, which is they’ve given us a statement, they’ve told us what’s going on, but people just really won’t believe it. And so all of this stuff began to whirl with kind of cyclonic force. So the palace had to release another statement that the timeline had been made clear and that only give updates if something significant had happened or there was something significant to say.
Sam Hawley: And then, of course, came the Mother’s Day photo of Catherine and her three children and wowsers. That really sent us into a spin, didn’t it?
Julia Baird: The Mother’s Day photo, which Catherine released, which must have been to quell some of this insanity. She released a photo of herself and her three children. And then it turns out it’s been altered. She’s done a really clumsy Photoshop of it. Internet sleuths go crazy pulling circles around bits in the wobbly parts of the image where a sleeve doesn’t meet a hand properly and where hair is shaded incorrectly. It’s really just a touch up of colour, but people really get going about it. They’re thinking there’s something far more going on. People were saying, oh, they might have got a previous photo of her face from a Vogue cover and superimposed it on that image, which was pretty wild when you think about it because it’s just her face. I mean, it just looked like her face. But again, you can see how much speculation there was, how much a distrust that we were being told the truth about what was happening with her. And it really was kind of irrational and un-evidenced. I saw a lot of people in my circles beginning to engage with that. I do think there were some, you know, there’s some legitimacy in all of that. Firstly, people are curious and secondly, people have been worried about what happens to women in the royal family and a sense that often really grievous stuff happens for their mental health. We saw what happened with Diana and how much the palace was trying to spin and hide and cover up. And of course, Meghan and Harry have been doing similar things in trying to lift the all the intense and often really unhealthy attempts that they do to maintain a public facade. So a lot of that was feeding into it. But I was so struck by just a sheer lack of evidence that anything else was actually going on.
Sam Hawley: And as you say, you know, people in your circles were talking about it. People in my circles were talking about it. All around the world. You know, we’re all chatting about this photo that’s not real or it’s been doctored and oh, it’s just an absolute frenzy at this point. And then of course, that brings us back to that Saturday morning when we all realise that she has cancer because Kate’s released or the palace at least has released a video in which Kate’s revealed this.
Julia Baird: That’s right. It was kind of crushing watching that.
Catherine, Princess of Wales: This, of course, came as a huge shock. And William and I have been doing everything we can to process and manage this privately for the sake of our young family.
Julia Baird: Because you realise it has been very serious. She has actually been truthful without giving full details. And she’s been forced in the middle of all of this to not to endure speculation about plastic surgery, about her husband’s alleged infidelity, just really horrible stuff. And a real intrusiveness and prurience at a time when she’s had a diagnosis that will make her feel intensely vulnerable and that might actually be very uncertain. I do think a lot of people tend to think that it’s like, you know, a broken arm. If something like that happens, you say, I went to the doctor, I apparently have broken this bone and it’s going to take a few weeks to heal. With these diagnoses, especially when it comes to abdominal stuff, it can be quite complicated to work out what’s going on. She says that when they first went in for the surgery, they didn’t know what it was. So doctors can disagree on probably not so much diagnosis sometimes though, on prognosis, on treatment. And while you’re trying to digest all of that, there’s a lot of research about what a traumatic period that is and how it can go on to cause trauma and other issues down the track just because of your suddenly, dramatically, horribly facing your own mortality. So she’s got the stuff going with the doctors, the stuff with her own mental health. And then there’s the question of, well, how does she tell people? And obviously, primarily a moment like that, no one matters to you more than your own children, your own family. They’re young. She has to work out how to not freak them out because it’ll be almost impossible to inoculate those children from the broader speculation.
Catherine, Princess of Wales: It has taken me time to recover from major surgery in order to start my treatment. But most importantly, it has taken us time to explain everything to George, Charlotte and Louis in a way that’s appropriate for them and to reassure them that I’m going to be okay.
Julia Baird: And then there is the public. So the fact that people are saying, well, she should have found out and told us straight away and there should have been a statement, it is not that simple. It’s extremely fraught, period.
Sam Hawley: And the video is what, like a plea bargain where she’s had to give away personal health information for the conspiracy theories to stop.
Julia Baird: It’s hard, isn’t it? I mean, she was obviously forced into doing that and she looks like she’s pained at doing it and trying to be positive and saying thank you for the messages of support, which doubtless there have been. And there was a lot of people with egg on their faces. But yeah, I did worry about her and the intrusiveness of it and whether we kind of all stopped to think about do we have the right to know everything contemporaneously at the exact moment that it happened? Do we have the right to know what’s happening to them physically, mentally at the exact moment they’re trying to wrestle with it themselves? I’d argue not, partly because one thing the royal family, this generation have been trying to do is learn from what happened to Diana. We have Diana’s children, Harry and William, who have spoken about their own depression, their own anxiety, the intensity of being in the public eye and how that has driven them to very dark and despairing places and we should be smarter about that now.
Sam Hawley: So let’s turn now to what that really says, I think, about us as a society and, you know, what it says about the royals as well. Kensington Palace, it did lose control of the narrative, didn’t it?
Julia Baird: Look, it’s a new era. Previously it would have been enough to say she’s out of action for X number of weeks because of this reason. I mean we’re seeing distrust in all information sources at the moment from different kinds of media, government, institutions and that’s also the royal family obviously. They’re just not believed and I don’t think they’ve operated in such a febrile environment when it comes to disbelief around their own statements. They’ve also operated historically in a period when they haven’t had to engage with social media and the ferocity and the rapidity of the way things just get out of control on there. I think it would be a fool’s game for them to try to tap down or stomp out, what’s that whack-a-mole, like with everything that came up. They probably could have put out another statement along the same lines. I mean they did it saying we won’t put out a statement unless we’ve got something significant to say and they couldn’t say anything. I’m sure they’re being told we’re just trying to deal with what’s going on now. So could they put out another statement saying she’s still ill? They would kind of be repeating themselves but it’s true, they did lose sight of it and I think if you interviewed 100 communications advisors and specialists, 99 of them at least would have said they could have done better and should have done more.
Sam Hawley: I was sort of thinking about if the Queen was still alive, how this would have played out because, of course, she was always seen as this steady hand, you know, known for her calmness in times of crisis and, my gosh, hasn’t there been a lot of those for the royal family. Do you think it would have been any different if she was still alive today?
Julia Baird: No, because calm is not what’s required in this situation. Calm, that old-fashioned virtue is, you know, kind of redundant here. Look, we saw what happened when Diana died and she completely underestimated that fervour and that passion. We’re still seeing the remnants and the legacy of that period now. So no, I mean I think do they need a whole new strategy? Look, possibly. Does it mean a bit more communication? But I do think we also need to be taking a good hard look at ourselves and the way we reacted to this as well.
Sam Hawley: You know, one thing I noticed when I was a corro in London was how the British press really self-censors itself when it comes to the royal family and how it reports on the royal family and I think that really does spark from Diana’s death and the treatment of Diana, of course, by the paparazzi. So what’s your perception of how the British press and maybe the press more broadly covered this issue?
Julia Baird: Yeah, you could see them wrestling with it. I mean we knew that those people who were really in the know were not baying for more information. Those royal correspondents who seemed to know a lot about the royal family were saying this is serious and we’re backing off and that I thought was really fascinating. But it was the people beyond that that kept asking for more and more. I mean they tried to have restraint and not publishing paparazzi shots of Kate with her mother in the car. So a line was being held but beyond that, it was just so far beyond that. In a lot of ways the mainstream media was reflecting what was happening on social media.
Sam Hawley: And one of the awful things about this as well, Julia, is that we know that there’s this investigation into whether workers at the London Clinic, where Kate and also King Charles is being treated for cancer, tried to access her records but, by the way, they didn’t try to access hits.
Julia Baird: Isn’t that appalling? I just feel very sickened by that. And it’s been one place, the London Clinic, which has treated the royals for many, many years and has always prided themselves on their discretion. But you can imagine. I’d really like to know the results of this investigation, the money being offered, the role of the media reporters, tabloids in this, who was pursuing that information and for what reward. And that we really need to know and whoever was doing that really needs to be held to account. I think we do need to continually come back to the question of do we value privacy? Is it a right? Is it a favour? And who gets it? And why does it matter? Why would it matter that during a time that you’ve had a cancer diagnosis that you haven’t got a million people pounding on your front door, demanding you come out and perform wellness for them? I think that’s really important.
Sam Hawley: All right. Well, interesting too, Julia, to look at the history of this, the privacy of the royals when it comes to their health. And you, of course, are somewhat of an expert on this matter because in your biography of Queen Victoria, Victoria is the name of the book, you shared your discoveries about a major medical issue that she had. So just tell me about that journey and how you revealed that.
Julia Baird: Yeah, like I think, I mean, that’s the other side that I come at this from, which is that I spent years researching my biography of Queen Victoria, absolutely loved it. But one of my major problems was getting access to the royal archives. They’re not transparent about who they let in, about why they let them in. There is no actual index of the documents they keep there. It’s kind of a wild chase trying to get to the truth of some of these things. And as a biographer, you’re trying to work out the full human being, you know, kind of warts and all. But I got a whole bunch of material from her doctor, James Reid. He was a doctor for the last 20 years of her life. It was found that on her deathbed, she was examined for the first time physically by her doctor and found that she had a prolapsed uterus. It does seem invasive, but on the other hand, it provides so much context and explanation for how she was in the final years of her life, how she didn’t get out of her carriage at the Jubilee. It was just she sat in her carriage in the street as the service was held inside the church and the crowds milled around her. It explains why she had to be carried so much towards the end of her life. Maybe it explains why she was in so often in a bad mood. The pain of that. I think that for me it was important because the royal family has often been a marker of what’s shameful. So there’s discretion and privacy on one hand and on the other, there’s just secrets and shame, and that’s what I think we need to explode and challenge now. There’s no shame around that when you think about half of all women between 50 and 79 have got some degree of uterine or vaginal prolapse.
Sam Hawley: And she had a lot of kids. Yeah, exactly. But basically the revelation of her prolapsed uterus gave context, you thought, to her behaviour, which is why you included it in your book. But I guess the question to put it back to today is did the public need to know that information at the time or is it okay to find out that information later?
Julia Baird: Imagine the horror of having, you know, the state of your pelvic organs discussed at a time of immense ignorance, by the way, and let alone misogyny in the medical profession, about what that meant. If she was absent from the public eye for a long time and refused to open parliament for a long time after Albert’s death, if any of that was medically related, I think you would want to know without knowing exactly what it was, and I’m not saying it was the prolapse, if there were any medical reasons, although I think she actually just had grief and depression and protracted grief, which is now on the DSM. But I think knowing it now is what gives us a deeper understanding of her struggles.
Sam Hawley: And maybe, as we mentioned before, Kate didn’t want the world to know that she was having cancer treatment right now.
Julia Baird: Who knows when she was going to say that? I actually have little doubt that she was going to say it. She’s just coming to terms with it. It’s so fresh and it’s so horrific. And there’s a period, as I said, where she had to work it out herself and with William and then with the children, and all those things come before the public. And she’d already said that she had significant issues. So she’s said it now. The question is going to be how she’s treated from this point. A lot of people stepped back. There’s been a lot of apologies and some concern that she was pushed too hard. It’s not just women in the royal family. It’s women in the public eye. And we’re looking now at the, you know, going back and looking at what happened to Britney Spears or people like Tonya Harding or Sharon Stone and a range of women who have been paraded and often sexualised but also many, many demands made to know every single bit of information around them. So we have come to assume that everything they do is ours and we have watched them dissolve mentally. And that has become the next part of the story. And that is I think we need to learn from what we demand, what we expect, and how we behave ourselves.
Sam Hawley: And so what do you think then, Julia, have been the lessons from the treatment of Kate’s diagnosis? And as you say, is anything actually going to change? Because I can see the conspiracy theories, they’re still out there. They haven’t gone away.
Julia Baird: The thing is there’s conspiracy theories all over the place now. It seems to be much more than ever, although I know they’ve already always existed. The point is not to report on them, not to swallow them whole and regurgitate them. The point is to remember that whoever it is in the public eye is actually a human being, that there are important reasons for privacy and also to be careful before you post on social media. And I also think fundamentally to try to have a better understanding of chronic illness and what that means and what we might demand of people who are currently in a situation of pain or acute stress or potential trauma and just step back.
Sam Hawley: Julia Baird is the author of Victoria, the Queen, and an ABC broadcaster and journalist. This episode was produced by Bridget Fitzgerald and Nell Whitehead. Audio production by Anna John. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I’m Sam Hawley. I hope you have a lovely Easter long weekend. ABC News Daily will be back again on Tuesday. Thanks for listening.
