The Daily Mail has made absurd claims about the Duchess of Cambridge (the former Kate Middleton) based on a couple of photographs of her taken in a London street.

Beneath its front page close-up of her face on Monday was the headline: “Feeling the Xmas strain, are you Kate?”

On page 3, the Mail answered its own question with a piece by Sarah Vine headlined: “No wonder she looks shattered!” To put it kindly, it was one of the most risible and childish pieces of journalism I’ve ever read, even by the low standards of royal “reporting”. But it was also unnecessarily personal and nasty.

It began with a typical Mail riff about a woman’s appearance: “With her normally lustrous and bouncy hair scraped into an updo and her eyes puffy and lined …”

Then, using another familiar journalistic device designed to distance herself from delivering a particularly cruel remark (wrapped around a fashion note), she wrote:

“Some online critics unkindly suggested that Kate - wrapped up in a £325 houndstooth coat from Reiss – looked closer to 40 than 30.”

Really? I hold no candle for the royal family – I’m a republican after all – but I know unfairness when I see it. It really was below the belt.

Vine (working to the Mail’s agenda) went on to justify this unpleasantness by feigning concern about the duchess’s supposed heavy “work” schedule, which amounted to “three official engagements … whilst being a hands-on mother.”

She then rattled on about the pressures of motherhood: “plenty of women manage it, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. And, of course, few of us have to do it in the full glare of the cameras.”



The gross hypocrisy of that remark – given that “the full glare of the cameras” was trained by a paparazzo on a woman out shopping and then gleefully published by the Mail – is breathtaking.

More nonsensical speculation followed: “For all the outside scrutiny, Kate’s biggest critic is, I suspect, herself. She’s a woman of extreme drive and determination … The idea that she might cut herself some slack after an exhausting week and curl up in front of the telly with a plate of crumpets and a cup of tea is inconceivable to someone as personally uncompromising as Kate.”

And Vine, having entirely invented insights into Middleton’s state of mind, then concluded with some specious advice:

“These pictures might just show her - and be the wake-up call she needs to finally do what everyone is probably begging her to do: slow down, stop being such a perfectionist and have a well-deserved rest. It is Christmas, after all.”

Pass the sickbag, Alice. The venomous Vine ought to be ashamed of herself.

It goes without saying that there was not a shred of public interest justification for publishing the paparazzi photographs by Topstar (slogan: “Britain’s newest celebrity picture agency”).