Is Duchess Kate Plastic?

Hilary Mantel has commented on the Duchess of Cambridge:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-21502937

No surprise there: she was giving a talk about 'Royal Women.' I've read her talk. It's very long and quite complicated. In fact, Duchess Kate doesn't get as much space in the talk as HM the Queen, Princess Diana, Marie Antoinette or the wives of Henry VIII. One of her conclusions is that the difference between Diana and Kate is personality: Diana had one, whereas with Kate, who knows? If there is one, it's buried under her appearance: she is fashionably thin, has the perfect plastic smile and is obviously well aware what her role is in the UK royal family: perfect wife and soon to be perfect mother. She has a couple of interesting comments about that first portrait of Kate, the one we saw before Christmas, the one with the dead eyes. She also has some quite insightful comments to make about the Queen and Marie Antoinette. And she has a theory about Henry VIII's inability to produce healthy sons.

So why are Hilary Mantel's comments about the Duchess so important that the Prime Minister of the UK feels he has to wade into this and defend the Duchess?

Well, he's a nob, same as the royals and he's married into a family of nobs.

But more to the point, this is all about bread and circuses. The Roman ruling class worked out 2,000 years ago that in bad times you had to make sure the plebs had food in their belly and something to entertain them, so step up the bread allowance and fling a few more Christians and lions into the ring. Otherwise the masses, who were given to rioting at the drop of a toga, would be out there raping and pillaging.

Duchess Kate is our equivalent of the circuses. We've watched it all: the courtship, the engagement (with Diana's ring front and centre), the wedding and now the pregnancy. They help to keep us from focussing on what should really matter in the UK right now. Here's a list:

- the bedroom tax - only applicable to those living in council houses
- dismantling the Disabled Living Allowance - a special round of applause for the work of ATOS
- demonising the unemployed
- blaming immigrants for most things
- falling wages - except for the very well off
- rising fuel prices
- unpaid taxes - company taxes, not yours and mine
- unpunished (and unreformed) bankers.

And we're so easily diverted from these by the likes of Duchess Kate. Of course, there were riots on the streets of London in 2011 but we all know from the newspapers and TV they weren't about poverty, unemployment and deprivation but about people who wanted new trainers for nothing. The only real demo in recent years has been the one against the Iraq War. Of course, our soldiers shouldn't be over there but why aren't we out on the streets about the war here in the UK? The one between the UK government and the poor, unemployed, old, immigrant and disabled?