At 41, the princess once dismissed by some as a glorified clothes horse is emerging as a more substantial figure on whom a monarchy rocked by scandal elsewhere can increasingly rely. The vitriol of the backlash against Mantel may partly explain why few would say such things now – but only partly. She was, Mantel wrote in a long essay on the royal body politic through the ages, “as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character”. It’s a decade now since the late novelist Hilary Mantel described the then duchess as a “jointed doll on which certain rags are hung”, almost too smooth and plastic to be real. The Princess of Wales at Kirkgate Market in Leeds.
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