Heather du Plessis-Allan: Princess Kate was let down by her own team

I'd have to say, the cancer diagnosis of the Princess of Wales, Kate, was probably the biggest news over the weekend, wasn't it? Absolutely shocking. 

There are a couple of things I reckon most of us will already agree on.

The first is obviously just what an awful diagnosis cancer is for someone as young as Kate. And particularly for a mum of wee kids, this must be very scary for absolutely everybody in that family.

And also, I reckon most of us will agree that some of the behaviour around her absence from public life has been pretty appalling- most especially paparazzi taking her photo and publishing it.

But I'm not sure if it’s necessarily occurred to you yet how badly she’s been let down by her own team.

This whole period of nasty rumours being spread and hounding of Kate could have been avoided, I'm 100 percent sure, if her people had handled her diagnosis the same way that King Charles’ people handled his.

Remember, King Charles and Kate were discharged on the exact same day from the same hospital. A week later, he announced he had cancer.

He was actually praised for helping people out, he drove people who had cancer to find out more information about it.

She disappeared from view, and as a result she was hounded.

I fully understand there are different considerations for Kate. The shock is probably much bigger, given how much younger she is, and there's the fact that she wanted to protect her kids as well.

But I think what her staff haven’t actually understood is that it's 2024. There is social media out there. You can ask the media to be responsible and back off, and the vast majority of legacy media will do that.

But you can’t control social media. No-one can control social media.

If you leave a vacuum, and the media leaves a vacuum, it will get filled by people on social media nowadays. They're not necessarily being horrible, sometimes they're just curious, sometimes they're just concerned, in a few cases they're nutty- and in some cases, they're trolls.

And if you leave that vacuum long enough, it gets so wild even people like Stephen Colbert can’t ignore it anymore.

I'm not making excuses for the trolling, but it does exist, we all have to acknowledge it exists and the job of those palace staff who help Kate and William and all the royals with the media is not to pretend it doesn't exist- but to acknowledge it and respond accordingly.

If they had handled it properly, Kate would not have been hounded. Just ask King Charles, who also has cancer - and wasn’t hounded.

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