There is a photo coming this weekend. Oh, it’s going to be a good ‘un; a great one really; in fact, one that will automatically and unequivocally be labelled ‘iconic’.
Hell, here I am writing about it and we haven’t even seen it.
And this wunder shot will feature one woman and one woman only, a woman born into the sturdy middle classes and who, until fate intervened, seemed destined to marry a Fulham real estate agent and to spend her Januarys anonymously down the slopes of Courchevel.
On Saturday, UK time, Kate, the Princess of Wales is set to make her first public appearance since the beginning of her cancer battle, after revealing that she is set to attend this year’s Trooping the Colour.
In the next 24 hours, we will first see the 42-year-old appear first in the carriage procession with her three children before later joining King Charles and Queen Camilla and husband Prince William on the Buckingham Palace balcony for the RAF fly past. (And Princess Anne. Never, ever forget Anne in her full splendid colonel’s get-up.)
So let us now imagine this image of the Kate, smack dab in the centre of the visual of Buckingham Palace, her metaphorical and literal return to the bosom of Crown Inc. I have yet to exhibit any psychic tendencies, sigh, but I think we can say already, this photo is going to break the internet.
If the princess was a big deal before all of this then hoo boy, imagine how much bigger she is going to be after this, her rolling-back-the-rock resurrection to public life? We ain’t seen nothing yet.
Kate’s lengthy personal statement revealing her return for Trooping made one thing clear - she’s “not out of the woods yet.”
However, she is clearly on the up and up, overall, and making her way back to a very gradual resumption of normal operations. We are about to see the Princess of Wales dipping her toe back into the royal pond and it’s worth considering just how bonkers things are going.
Think breaking news alerts on every single news channel on the planet; think entire front pages given over to just enormous shots of her smiling face; think whatever she is wearing selling out faster than TayTay tickets or some Shein exec can yell down the phone as they give over an entire Guangzhou factory to pumping out polyester knock-offs.
Aside from the world-reeling, global-shockwaves triggered by the death of Diana, Princess of Wales at only 36-years-old, this moment, Kate’s comeback this weekend, seems likely to be one of the biggest happenings in royal history in terms of public obsession and the frenzy that will surround it.
2024 will go down as the year the world was starved, slowly, of the Princess of Wales and lost its mind along the way.
There is a meteorological oddity near the equator called the doldrums, a belt where the wind can die entirely, leaving vessels to directionlessly bob about the place. And for nearly six months now, we have been in the Kate doldrums.
But like a phoenix or a Spice Girl with a tax bill to pay, Kate will rise once again. And this time? This time the hubbub and the noise and mania surrounding her is going to be nothing short of messianic.
I think it’s also worth considering what happens after Trooping, after we slowly start to see the princess turning up in suburban business parks to highlight charities or popping up at Wimbledon to present a trophy.
Where will the chips fall and what will the landscape look like after she returns once and for all?
For one thing, will King Charles, also battling cancer, be wholly sanguine about his sainted daughter-in-law being feted and adored like the second-coming in Sandro?
Recently the Sunday Times’ Roya Nikkhah reported that, while “For years, those close to the King and his heir experienced the sensitivities as William and Kate’s profile sometimes overshadowed that of Charles and Camilla” however now, “something has changed.”
A friend of Charles told Nikkhah: “If there was ever a green-eyed monster or a sense of rivalry between [the King and William], that is a chapter of the past,” the friend said. “When you are monarch, you’re not counting the column inches.”
But what about if Kate, to quote John Lennon and a Gallagher brother, suddenly becomes “bigger than Jesus”? (And in a much nicer dress to boot.)
And what will be longer term consequences of her cancer fight for Kate herself?
Already, going into this health crisis, the princess was easily one of the most famous human beings on a planet of eight billion of us. However, this year saw a certain malignancy take over and there are still plenty of conspiracy theories and mad notions swirling around the depths of X (formerly Twitter).
The degree of obsession about the Princess of Wales went into hyperdrive this year and it is unclear if things will ever truly return to normal.
Last year, 4.1 million people viewed the Wales family’s Mother’s Day card on X; that figure was over 90 million this year.
Or take instances like the video shot by 40-year-old Nelson Silva who happened across William and Kate at the Windsor Farm Shop in March. If the tabloid market for these sorts of snippets of footage or images remains as strong (and surely, lucrative), especially in the US too, then could that put a new target on her back? Will the woman ever be able to spend a quiet morning nosing around Peter Jones again without ending up splashed all over TMZ?
And what will Kate 2.0 mean for the fortunes of Brand Sussex? Thousands of kilometres away from Windsor and anything resembling a decent cup of tea, Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and duch*ess of Sussex are still plugging away at carving out Hollywood careers.
After several years of their image being all about them turning up on screens to poe-faced list off the multifarious failings of Crown Inc, the Sussexes are trying to remarket themselves as producers and influencers. For this to be successful, people have to not just be fascinated by them and their soap opera but to like them as individuals.
It was only last year that Harry told the world, via Spare, that Kate had supported him dressing up as a Nazi and that her attitude towards Meghan was about as frosty as a forlorn Paddle Pop stuck to the back of the freezer.
So, what happens to their fortunes and public attitudes to the duke and duch*ess when the Great Kate Resurrection happens?
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What this all comes down to is that when Kate returns to public life it could well have long-lasting repercussions for not only herself, for her father-in-law the King, for Buckingham Palace and for the Duke and duch*ess of Sussex, the extent of which we can’t even begin to adequately predict.
So the countdown is ON. This weekend the greatest comeback since that of a certain beardy carpenter on a desert hill is about to take place. Buckle in, buckle up and hold on.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
