Ok, so let’s pretend we’re not talking about the royal family for a second.
Your ex-wife Diana dies years after you’ve divorced and, 10 years after her death, after having remarried, you are expected to attend a memorial in her honour, organized by your and Diana’s sons. Would it be appropriate to bring your current wife?
This is a no-brainer – the answer is, of course. She’s there to support you in a sad and important moment.
So what gives? Why is everybody slamming Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, for having considered attending the memorial? In my view, she is not the person responsible for Charles and Diana’s marriage falling apart. All kinds of things factored into that disastrous union – Diana’s immaturity, Charles’s inability to connect emotionally, the unseemly pressures that come to bear on any person marrying into the royal family. Yes, Camilla hung in there for the duration of the prince’s marriage but let’s make Charles just as responsible for that – and he went to the memorial.
I’m not here to trash the memory of the people’s princess. She was obviously a complex person, shamelessly promoting her own celebrity, while doing a ton of good works and being an excellent mother to the two young princes. But this syndrome of idolizing Diana and demonizing Camilla is just ludicrous and hopelessly superficial.
I’ve read commentary after commentary suggesting Camilla showed poor judgement by even thinking of attending. The old tired story of how she haunted Diana and Charles’s marriage has been dredged up by people who just can’t let the past go. And let’s be real – Camilla would not be getting this kind of rough ride if she had just a tiny bit more glamour on her side. The whole thing is repulsive. And Charles just looks ridiculously weak by bending to public pressure and allowing his wife to choose to remain absent.
Now that the memorial has taken place, it’s clear that the only people who showed a modicum of class on this one were the two princes – who invited Camilla, personally.
A nice touch but, after all, they do have a relationship with her. She is their stepmother
