Kate’s Tourdrobe Crushes Scotland’s Hopes of Independence

We have shied away from fashion on Bella for far too long now, but faced now with the constitutional challenge of the Daily Telegraph’s Royal Twitterstream we feel the need to don our Barbour jackets and take to the catwalk. The road to a Scottish democracy is littered with many obstacles but we never saw Posh Girl in a Frock coming. The Telegraph’s wonderful @TelegraphRoyals twitter handle tells us: “The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have spent the week in Scotland, deployed on a charm offensive to help quell growing independence sentiment. Fashion is a potent tool in Kate’s diplomatic armoury.”

It so is.

Come with us “Inside the Duchess of Cambridge’s £8,445 Scotland ‘tourdrobe’

 

 

First up it’s Monday and she’s already quelling us with a Zara blazer …

I don’t know what happened to Tuesday but on Wednesday hopes of a functioning independent country were dashed by the arrival of Kate rocking a tartan trenchoat and a pair of diamond earings …

By Thursday it was “land yachting” (wtf is that?) and a pink jumper to really quash you dirty thieving Jocks …

I think we can all agree that the insurrection has pretty much been suppressed by now. How can you aspire to self-governance when someone is trolling you with Hamilton and Inches earrings?

I hadn’t realise it until now but there’s a whole sub-culture of media slavishly dedicated to Kate’s fashion tips, and presumably people who read it. Tamara tells us in an exclusive “The Duchess of Cambridge’s new trousers are the grown-up alternative to skinny jeans” (a huge relief to that dilemma I’m sure we can all agree) and Bethan Holt, the papers ‘Fashion News and Features Director’ (?) covered the breaking story explaining: “The Duchess of Cambridge has pulled out all the stops for her Scottish ‘tourdrobe’ this week, debuting a series of carefully considered new wardrobe additions which not only pay tribute to the country she’s visiting (lol) but should be staples for years to come, from a ‘Saltire blue’ pleated skirt worn on Monday to a pink jumper from Campbell’s of Beauly worn for land yachting on the beach on Wednesday.”

Tamara and Bethan’s unknowing self-confidence is a wonderful thing to behold, but who knew we could be ‘quelled’ so easily?

 

Comments (26)

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  1. Cathie Lloyd says:

    And there we were happy in our lockdown pyjamas forgetting about £1k+ diamond earrings.

  2. SleepingDog says:

    Should we read anything into a Next outfit?

    1. SleepingDog says:

      What about: does my ambassador look big in this?

      1. SleepingDog says:

        Or perhaps a single and inexplicably bulky velvet glove?

  3. Neil MacGillivray says:

    Who is this person?

  4. Gavin says:

    And then they met Gordo Broon, Scots very own Mary Quant of —faux, “wear once, then toss away” constitutional commitments.

    Broonie will tell them of the in and outs of ” Devo max; federalism; Home rule and other fancy Dan waffle”. And how, even though they are to be entrenched and nailed to the mast of a new Union—they simply disappear–vanish overnight—they same politicians and their media platforms never mention them again.

    And the Prince, Earl, King-to-be, Duke or whatever title he wears today will probably buy Broons “bridge for sale”. Like so many other southerners, he regards Brown as “talking for Scotland”.
    When you are totally ignorant of your northern kingdom, and trust in hucksters, then you are well on the way to losing that part of your royal inheritance.
    Oh well, you will just have to concentrate on the England footie and rugger teams. King of England suits you better.

  5. john burrows says:

    Monarchy is a cult in Britain.

    Saves having to engage your brain about the banal evil that surrounds us if you get to live in the world of ‘The Princess Bride.’

    Pure escapism.

  6. Squigglypen says:

    Yawn…….

  7. Wul says:

    Eight and a half grand for holiday clothes?

    There’s people here trying to feed and house their families for a year on less than that.

    Still. She looks pretty. Whoever she is.

    1. Colin Robinson says:

      You think, Wul? She looks more like she could do with a good feed. A rickle o banes…

  8. Wul says:

    It’s hard to fathom the mind that could write that drivel from the Telegraph.

    Is it all “just for fun” or does it give some insight into how the authors view the roil fambly? Do they, themselves, have some kind of infantile attachment these people? Do they experience a warm-fuzzy when they think of the queen’s spawn and assume that us Jocks can’t help but feel the same when we see them walk ( or land yacht ) amongst us?

    It’s a different cuntry for sure.

  9. Graham Ennis says:

    YUK.

  10. Robbie says:

    Doon in Ingland them twa shout oot bingo numbers for the auld fowk

  11. Nelson says:

    Reading that was a waste of life. Is this a fashion shopping blog? Is it going to be how much Egan Bernal’s Giro d’Italia kit will cost u next? (It’s free for Mr Bernal, but it’ll cost u over £800).

    1. Colin Robinson says:

      No, such blogs will continue to be in its own way an observance of the royal family, a participation in its political ritual.

  12. Tom Ultuous says:

    Once they proof read Rupert’s wish list the Telegraph top brass are more or less finished for the day so have plenty of time to come up with drivel like this.

  13. James Morton says:

    Project Fear left them with nothing to work with. It was scorched earth campaign that tried to destroy Scotland as a nation and portray it as being too poor, too stupid and too wee. From getting into a queue like all the other “foreigners” to have sick kids seen at St. Ormonds. Scotland would become a haven for terrorists and we’d have to start bombing it. There was a Union before Scotland was “merely” allowed to take part, but contributed nothing to its success. We need the UK to be able to know how to spend money. We need the UK to protect our economy. We need the UK to be part of Europe. We can’t independent because we have no language, history or culture of our own.

    All that pish, was their positive case for union and better together turned to ash in their mouths with Boris Johnson and Brexit. The tories are trying to have a wee culture war down south and realised that once again, their appeal stops north of the border. The destroyed their own, albeit anemic, defense of union with Brexit.
    One wee word. But a catastrophically destructive one to the very fabric of their precious UK. When casting about for new ideas to save the union, they came up absolute howlers like:

    Take power and money the Scots did not vote for us to have.
    Stick union jacks on everything

    and now – they are going to weaponise and politicise the royal family. In such a way that they seem like a party political broadcast on behalf of the conservative party.

    The gushing over Kate Middleton in an expensive frock and how it will quell independence, shows you the gulf between their vision and reality.

    Project Fear almost cost them the union. The vow narrowly saved it. Brexit will destroy it and when it does, we’ll see if her majesty “purrs” then.

    1. Agreed James, pitiful stuff, but somehow encouraging too?

  14. Colin Robinson says:

    Progressives are inclined to be critical of the royal family. However, they might be missing the point. They fail to perceive the emancipatory dimension of the form that the royal family takes in this country, which is that of the big public ritual that socially links us as a community. Such ritual is the highest form of the republic.

    A republic is the lived relation of private individuals to the whole in which they live and to the shared values that make such a common public identity or ‘solidarity’ possible. That is, it’s the lived relation between citizens and the law.

    However, the solidarity that law alone creates is merely coercive; citizens conform their behaviour to the law (i.e. act in solidarity) to avoid being penalised. The solidarity that rituals like the royal family create, on the other hand, enacts a sensual human embodiment of the law in which citizens can actively participate and which they don’t just passively obey. Such ritual creates a more positive and stronger solidarity
    .
    The ritual of the royal family is, of course, quixotic. As Mike has often pointed out, it enacts a past that ‘haunts’ us in an idealised form. Intellectually, the royal family is fantastic.

    However, performatively – as ritual – it works. In and through its theatre, the royal family successfully represent the res publica, the public realm. The evidence for this is our mass participation in its drama, the sheer popularity of its spectacle, the fact that it can generate such strong passions, both for and against, and the fact that it can mobilise such mass actions of jubilation or grief.

    The public doesn’t simply assert through its representatives what it wants, as liberalism imagines it does. The public only becomes aware of what it wants through the act of representation. Even when that representation is democratic, the public elects leaders to lead it: to tell it what it wants, to take responsibility for and give measure to its desires.

    The royal family represents the republic because it works through its ritual to give measure to the public’s desire for (for example) beauty, continuity, dignity, elegance, majesty, order, righteousness, taste, etc. It also elevates those measures above the mundanity and, more especially, the struggles and contingency of our private day-to-day lives.

    It also provides a core around which our solidarity as a public solidifies. Whether we ritually love it or loathe it, the royal family is a ritual that preoccupies us all, as the frequency with which that ritual is played out on even Bella Caledonia’s stage bears witness.

    Politics isn’t just about pursuing one’s own private interests, whether material or ideological. That’s neoliberalism At a more basic level, politics is about emancipating ourselves from our private interests and participating in the communal identity – the republic – that defines the frame of our private interests and, indeed, is constructive of our private selves.

    The royal family as ritual fulfils that emancipatory function in spades; it’s a vehicle for the republic’s affirmation of itself over the bourgeois individualism of life’s marketplace. Criticise it as much as you want, but don’t overlook the radical possibility in what its ritual achieves.

    1. Tom Ultuous says:

      You surpassed yourself there Colin. I merely scanned your post yet I still feel totally drained.

      1. Colin Robinson says:

        Crikey, Tom! You’re a glutton for punishment. If I were you, I wouldn’t even bother to scan it.

        1. SleepingDog says:

          It seems that competition is already hotting up for Charles III’s Groom of the Stool.

    2. john burrows says:

      I regret to inform you but Republic’s don’t normally employ Monarchs. Indeed, they normally try to rid themselves of the delusion of the divine right of kings as a first principle.

      Thus ‘We the People.’ You do know that isn’t the royal ‘We,’ right?

      The theater you revel in is no unifying force. It is no more than an outward display of a deeply entrenched caste system, whereby the citizenry is reduced to spectator within their own demos.

      Your effort to marry the two concepts of government does not convince. It does though provide an insight of those who embrace the anachronism of misgovernment in the UK.

      A deluded state that looks to Eton and Oxbridge, those bastions of privilege, to provide its ‘democratic’ leaders.

      1. Colin Robinson says:

        Who mentioned monarchs, John?

        And yes; the royal family is an aristocratic spectacle. That’s what I’m saying. And the evidence of its success as such is, as I said, ‘our mass participation in its drama, the sheer popularity of its spectacle, the fact that it can generate such strong passions, both for and against, and the fact that it can mobilise such mass actions of jubilation or grief.’

        1. john burrows says:

          Your current government describes itself as a Constitutional Monarchy. Without a written constitution that codifies the rights of its own citizens. Indeed, it does not even acknowledge their citizenship. Only their thralldom.

          Your British passport reminds you that you are a subject in this society. Not a citizen. Your existence in such a society is not based on freedom, but servitude. The real irony of Brexit is the decision of the same electorate to sacrifice it’s European freedoms to re-embrace this servitude.

          To paraphrase Voltare, base is the slave who reveres his chains.

          The local butcher’s shop has more political agency than you do in this system. It generates more tax revenue

          Because now all polical agency is derived from the Parliament in the UK, all subsidiary agency is devolved from this institution, and can be removed at a whim. In the name of whosever’s backside sits on the throne of Edward the Confessor.

          An institution designed and built to maintain the power and dominance of the aristocratic faction whose members fills its halls and chambers. You are willfully ignoring reality by singing the praises of such a system of governance. It is a peasants mentality.

          The pomp and circumstance of royal ceremony is a poor price to pay for the sacrifice of personal freedom to a degenerate, aristocratic state.

          1. Colin Robinson says:

            This is true, John: that the UK’s political regime is that of a constitutional monarchy is part of the constitutive myth of our republic; this is evident from the language of the rituals through our enactment of which we assert our solidarity and realise that republic.

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