So whose side are you on - Will or Kate?
A middle- class girl with a mother on the make? Or a victim of appalling snobbery? Our jury divides...
KATE says Amanda Platell
Daily Mail columnist
Whether he was too young to commit or she was too cool to excite, the break-up of Prince William and Kate Middleton was aided and abetted by the appalling snobbery of those the young Prince counts as his closest friends and advisers.
The sneering behind the back of this decent, loyal young woman was disgraceful. And no one would have been more distressed than the Queen, who has spent her long reign promoting a meritocratic Britain, where the qualities of hard work, ingenuity and integrity count, not the length of your lineage.
She understands that, so why do those around the royals still sneer at such values?
I cannot be the only one who winced reading about how William's friends made cruel jokes behind Kate's back about her 'lack of breeding', and would greet her arrival with a whispered chorus of 'doors to manual', a cruel reference to her mother being a former airline hostess.
Kate or Will? Everyone has an opinion about who is to blame for their split
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So rich, so privileged, so separate from the real world, William's group of aristocratic brats probably don't have a proper working mother between them. It does the Prince no credit that he allowed it to go on. Nor that he ultimately was influenced by it.
What did Kate Middleton ever do to deserve the contempt of our so-called aristocracy other than to fall in love with William - and be from a middle-class background?
Elegant, poised, bright, kind - and most importantly normal - Kate could have had a fine influence on the dysfunctional royals.
But, as William's idle friends and obsolete courtiers were quick to remind him, Kate was 'common'.
Among the Prince's louche friends such as Guy Pelly, Kate was deemed unworthy. She was middle class.
How ironic that what would have been her greatest gift to the Royal Family, her common touch, was the very thing that mitigated against her.
And it wasn't just Kate they looked down on but her parents. Kate's father, Michael, was an airline officer. Her mother, Carole, came from Durham mining stock. They set up a successful online children's party business and became millionaires.
They are aspirational and entrepreneurial. Like most decent people, they wanted to do the best for their children.
But, according, to royal sources, "the mother was a problem".
Palace courtiers considered she was 'not the thing', 'pushy, twee and incredibly middle class', citing her meeting with the Queen at William's passing-out parade at Sandhurst in December, when she failed to use the 'proper etiquette' and greeted the Queen with a cheerful 'Pleased to meet you'.
Having met the Queen, and despite a proper session just moments before on 'the etiquette' I can assure you most people fail to say the right thing.
The sense of the occasion, our respect for Her Majesty and those blue eyes, are enough to make any person go soggy in the brain meeting her.
Courtiers cite Mrs Middleton's use of words such as 'toilet' rather than lavatory and 'pardon' rather than 'what' as further grounds of her vulgarity. If only half of this is true, it's still shocking.
To think individuals like this are still allowed to advise and influence the young princes.
And yet William wasn't always like this. In the beginning, Kate's background did not matter.
He fell in love with the middle-class girl.
But when he met Kate, William was a student at St Andrews in Scotland, surrounded by people from all walks of life, real people, who would one day have to work for a living to pay the mortgage.
It was his first real taste of normality and to his credit he flourished. It was only when he left university and rejoined his set of sneering, privileged, spoilt friends that he started behaving like them, binge-drinking and groping girls in nightclubs.
The young Prince who celebrated his freedom on Saturday night, at a posh London club where drinks cost up to £100 each, and shouted "I'm free, let's drink the menu!" was a far cry from the lad who left university.
Britain is now a marvellously meritocratic society, open to people of all classes and colour who want to work hard and, yes, to better themselves.
Yet there is still a tiny minority who believe whatever their character, whatever their achievements, they are better than the rest of us simply by virtue of their birth.
In her wisdom, the Queen understood this was utter and offensive nonsense. We can only hope, for the sake of this country and the future of the monarchy, that in time her grandson will come to believe that too.
Kishanda Fulford
WILLIAM says Kishanda Fulford
The wife of Francis Fulford, whose family has lived in their stately home for 800 years.
It's marvellous news that Prince William has chucked Kate. Like most mothers, I am already dreaming about the wedding.
I am going to arrange for the family tiara to be brought back from the pawn shop so my Matilda, who is 14, can start practising for her special day in Westminster Abbey. I think I will wear something in green.
But my joy is Kate's loss. The carriage has turned back into a pumpkin and the dashing white horses shrunk to white mice. Cinderella has lost her Prince and is left at the hearth of the Jigsaw empire.
Certainly, many believe Prince William has had a lucky escape. A few more weeks and the factory making the commemorative cups and plates for his wedding to Kate would have been in overdrive.
I am sure, though, that Prince William ended the romance for no other reason than that it had run its course.
For four years he has happily put up with sniping remarks about his girlfriend's bloodline but, if he had wanted to marry her, he would have done so, despite opposition from courtiers.
How they would have choked on their breakfast if they had been told the heir to the throne was going to marry someone whose mother chewed gum in public. Though, like me, she is probably trying to give up smoking.
To be honest, though, I am a firm believer in people marrying into the same class. There is no confusion over what time 'dinner' is and what to call the 'loo', or vice versa.
After the endless reporting of Mrs Middleton's apparent social faux pas, it seems that she and the Queen do not call a spade or the toilet by the same name.
There are many pretty girls from the lower and middle classes who have married into the aristocracy and, indeed, duchesses past and present have bloodlines which could be considered as ordinary as Kate's - but they never ended up Queen.
In a romantic world, we would all like our Prince to marry the girl he loves, regardless of her breeding, but most would, I am sure, secretly prefer it if our future King fell for a foreign princess.
After all, they know just how to behave and what is expected.
It is in a princess's breeding to know which knife and fork to use to peel a banana, to disguise boredom for hours on end and not to cry as the pins keeping the tiara on draw blood.
I fear that in the end, that's where Kate would have been found wanting.
And as a fully paid-up member of the aristocracy, I have to say we can't have that now, can we?
Carol Sarler
KATE says Carol Sarler
The newspaper columnist
She might be 'only' middleclass, she may have a mother who chews gum and a father who (heaven forfend!) works for a living.
Still - and here are the real echoes of Diana - what William and his family have failed to recognise is that for five years it has been Kate who has lent him respectability.
His snobbish cohorts mock how she 'mothered' her lover; the way she turned him out in tweeds when the boring occasion demanded and pursued the respectable goal of marriage and children, as befits an heir to the throne.
What they fail to see is that a decently pretty, passably bright and properly loving girl from Berkshire has prevented the world realising that William has more in common with his brother Harry than Clarence House would prefer us to know.
Just like Harry, William enjoys the inexplicable charm of the Hoorays, thinking nothing of binge-drinking sessions where the bill runs into four figures.
Just like Harry, despite public distaste, he flaunts an appetite for the slaughter of animals.
Just like Harry, he thinks he has a way with the ladies - though given that his chat-up line is said to be "Hi, I'm going to be King; d'ya fancy a pull?", you have to wonder about the kind of 'ladies' he encounters.
Only with the discreet Kate as diversion and discipline have we been spared more of the grotesque detail of his courtship etiquette.
Just like Harry - and, it is said, their father - astonishingly, William is greatly given to selfpity.
Of course we are sorry he lost his mother; nevertheless, his apparently repeated whine about the 'burden' of his future job is ridiculous.
If William doesn't want the job, his independently wealthy mother left him rich to the tune of more millions than he can ever spend - so he doesn't, actually, have to do it.
Another maudlin king-in-waiting who won't put toothpaste on his own toothbrush is the last thing we need.
But the humbler Kate - and, yes, perhaps her mother, too - understands far better than William that the privilege of his destined role outweighs any of the pain of dealing with it.
Unlike him, she has a taste for the extra beyond the call of duty.
When William has been exhausted by a safe little stint at Sandhurst, he has gone home after midnight to collapse upon the waiting knee of devoted Kate.
Yet in 2003, as many of his contemporaries went to fight in Iraq, he spent Remembrance Sunday not at the Cenotaph but in front of a Buckingham Palace TV.
The excuse? He didn't 'have' to be there.
With the more grounded Kate as his wife, I bet he would be there: 'have' to, or not.
Kate was more than a girlfriend, more than a bride-in-waiting; she was his best chance of becoming the acceptable face of royalty - thanks to her hard work, not his.
If William has a quarter of the sense he should have, he will realise this and ask her to take him back.
Then again, I'd predict a reconciliation leading to a lifetime together still being her hard work, not his.
So, if she has a quarter of the sense she has already proved to have, she'll tell him to shove it.
WILLIAM says Denise Robertson
TV's This Morning's 72-year-old agony aunt
I groaned when I heard the romance between William and Kate was over - not for the blighted lovers, but at the thought of the welter of recrimination being showered around like confetti.
Blame seems to be equally distributed between William and Kate's mother, Carole, who is seen as a latter-day Mrs Bennet desperate to offload a daughter onto a man of property.
No one is blaming Kate because there is nothing to blame. She has not put a foot wrong in five years and I expect her to behave with decorum in the months ahead.
The emerging villain of the piece seems to be Prince William and there are undertones of
droit du seigneur - a maiden dishonoured and then discarded.
But that is unfair.
He deserves no censure. The reality is that a relationship which began as a teenage romance has come to its natural end.
That's it.
It's simply a royal version of something which happens to thousands of other young Britons every year.
I get the tear-stained letters - from young men as often as young women - all the time.
Those heady first years free of the confines of home are magical. First sex, first nest-building -is it any wonder they think it's forever?
It's a wonderful illusion which, for the lucky few, weathers the storm.
For many it doesn't and when that happens the brave and honest thing is to say so.
So when people accuse William of leading Kate up the garden path, I have to say "No", they trod it together and for five years.
He should take pride in having done the right thing by a very special young woman.
Margaret Cook
KATE says Margaret Cook
The agony aunt, 62, was unceremoniously dumped by her Cabinet minister husband Robin Cook for his secretary.
Surely Kate has had a lucky escape. For it must be crystal clear to her now that being envied and adulated on the one hand, and neglected and humiliated on the other, is but a foretaste of Royal Family life.
Good for her if she's told them where to stuff it, and if she was the one who was ditched, she should appreciate she's well out of it.
For she deserves more. She is no fluffy-headed Shy Di reincarnated, looking forward to lonely TV dinners as she incubates the next generation of dysfunctional heirs to the throne, while her man plays away with no fear of repercussions.
She's modern, feisty and has something between her ears. And just think of the power she has.
How eagerly Buck House tells us the split is amicable. It had better be: they are the ones who will be embarrassed most by any kiss-andtell revelations.
She will be the gainer if she can hold this ace up her sleeve. Just think what invitations and privileges could come her way if she plays ball, smiles mysteriously and doesn't spill the beans.
In future years, when Kate attends Wills' wedding to some bland and brainless beauty, it will be oh so apparent how wise she was to break away, and how typically dumb and fossilised the Royals have been to let her go.
Imogen Lloyd Weber
KATE says Imogen Lloyd Webber
The 30-year-old daughter of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber is author of The Single Girl's Guide.
Kate may have been dumped by her Prince, but now she gets to become princess of her own destiny.
She needs to forget the door that has closed; as a 25-year-old single girl, Kate has a myriad of opportunities to explore that would have been impossible had she remained within the stuffy confines of court.
For the first time in five years, she gets her life to be all about her - not about a protesting Prince or pushy paparazzi.
With her buyer's job at Jigsaw and natural fashion flair, she has the chance to excel in her work, with nobody complaining that she has exploited her connections. And her money will be all her own.
In the future, Kate will be able to spend her hard-earned cash as she desires and take pride in the fact that no taxpayer can complain that she is wasting their money.
For the first time in her adult life, she has the freedom to have fun her way, without protocol preventing her playing where and how she wants.
On impulse, she can giggle over cocktails with her genuine girlfriends, rather than be obliged to force a smile at a dull Army function.
Believe me, she is well rid of those snobs in William's set shouting "Doors to manual" every time she appeared, in a cheap jibe at her mother's former career as an air hostess.
Instead, Kate can spend time with and celebrate her functional family, rather than being forced to live with one of the most dysfunctional families in Britain, one that surrounds itself with people with enough bad manners to care that a girl doesn't have five titles and three surnames.
Kate's conduct throughout the relentless intrusion she has been subjected to over the past five years shows she's far classier than they will ever be, and she deserves better than that.
It cannot be long until suitors will be vying for the marvellous Middleton's attention.
So arise Queen Kate, the newly anointed princess of all single girls. We are privileged to have such a figurehead.
WILLIAM says Susan Quilliam
The 56-year-old relationship psychologist and agony aunt.
Of course William was right to end his relationship with Kate. Every happy love affair begins with passion - but we know that has a sell-by date.
In compatible couples, the 'in love' feeling naturally gives way to more stable emotions, a serious 'better or worse' commitment.
But if a couple isn't compatible, when initial passion fades they see the problems. They can - and should - acknowledge when 'it's not right', then make a sensible decision and act on it.
It's no coincidence that scientists reckon this love shift occurs around the four-year mark - which is just a little less than Kate and Wills have been together.
So the tipping point for their relationship was probably not family pressure, class divide or William's need for freedom - important though those factors may have been.
No, what caused the break-up was that they were past their 'in love' phase, and he had moved onto the next phase of assessing their longterm future.
She decided they were compatible. He decided not.
William is not married, he's not a father; he is a young man who has realised that he and his partner aren't right for each other. He had to act on that conviction.
The alternative would be to keep Kate hanging on for a few more years or to marry because he daren't admit to having made a mistake - and what could be worse than that?
It is courageous rather than cowardly of him to admit that love is lacking, wise rather than cruel of him to call a halt now.
So I'm glad that William was not tempted to walk down the aisle, unsure whether he loved his bride heart and soul.
In that, to be frank, he shows much better judgment than his father.
Vanessa Lloyd-Platt
KATE says Vanessa Lloyd-Platt
A leading London divorce lawyer, who has practised for more than 30 years.
How could anyone be on William's side? I find myself feeling overwhelmingly sorry for Kate.
She's been treated so shabbily by the Royals and William in particular.
She has had to face the public humiliation of being dumped so spectacularly, and the cruel sniping and crowing of William's friends about her parents and suitability to be Queen.
The Royals shouldn't have allowed her expectations to rise by inviting her to official occasions with them. It's no wonder she - and we - thought she was 'the one'.
The Firm don't seem to have taken into account how detrimental the end of such a relationship would be to her - not just because of the heartbreak but because the rest of her life will be lived in the shadow of what might have been.
From a divorce lawyer's perspective, Kate may even have a financial claim for her spectacular fall from grace.
She was effectively encouraged to believe that she would become part of the Royal Family, and changed her life accordingly, to her detriment.
She worked only part-time so that she could be on call at all times for William, and thus suffered financial loss by putting her career on hold.
So she could be compensated for this loss.
In law, this is known as the principle of estoppel.
Given the discretion shown thus far by Kate, it is highly unlikely that she would ever make such a claim.
She was led to believe her position was much stronger than it was, and as a consequence she has suffered emotional and financial loss which will be impossible for her to replace.
So whose side are you on - Will or Kate? | the Daily Mail
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