Duchess under attack: Kate a 'plastic princess designed to breed'

An award-winning author has launched a blistering attack on the Duchess of Cambridge, declaring her a “plastic princess” whose “only point and purpose” is to “breed”.

Double Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel has never met Kate, but saw fit to attack her in a London Review of Books lecture at the British museum last night.

In her speech, Mantel recalled the moment Kate stepped into the spotlight as Prince William’s serious girlfriend, and insisted there was nothing special about her from the start.

“She was painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character,” Mantel said.

“She’s a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung. In those days she was a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore.”

Mantel said Kate compared unfavourably to previous royal wives Princess Diana, and Anne Boleyn because she has absolutely no individuality.

“She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture,” she said.

“She appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished.”

Mantel also reduced the Duchess to little more than a womb, saying her only purpose was to produce healthy heirs.

“A royal lady is a royal vagina,” she said. “They are persons but they are supra-personal, carriers of a blood line: at the most basic, they are breeding stock, collections of organs.

“The royal body exists to be looked at. Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment.

“But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.”

The comments are likely to upset pregnant Kate, who is reportedly still reeling from the publication of private pictures of her and William on holidays in Mustique last week.

The royal couple are now back in the UK and Kate is due to begin her first public engagements for the year tomorrow.

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