Juliet Dunlop: Doing our breast in a difficult situation

Dear Pippa

I hope my letter finds you, and your much-admired bottom, well. It was good of you to send those cuttings from Hello! Just what I needed. They always did know how to take a nice lady-like picture – unlike some other magazines I could mention…But as Zara said in her text, no good crying over spilt milk – or was it something about trying to shut the stable door after the horse had bolted?

Anyway, William and I are now safely back home from The Big Trip, thank goodness. Things were all going so well too. Big crowds wherever we went, smiling faces, sunshine and then… Boom! What an awful, terrible mess. As William put it yesterday, the honeymoon is well and truly over.

Pa is furious of course and Mummy is very annoyed. They just don’t understand how it could have happened. “What were you thinking Kate!” over and over again. And they’re right. I’m the future Queen of England – sorry, I mean Great Britain and Northern Ireland – and I really ought to have known better. It was just so lovely and hot and David and Serena’s villa is so private – at least that’s what we thought. And it’s not as if we were taking any chances with security either – Big Dave and Gary were just around the corner. (Gary says hello by the way Pip, and would like a signed copy of your new party-planning book.)

And we were miles away from the road. It never crossed our minds that some vile oik with a long-lens camera was lurking in the bushes. But, yes, it was very silly indeed to take my bikini top off and now those horrible pictures are everywhere – France, Italy, Ireland, Sweden and now Denmark. I could weep just thinking about it! I had no option other than to carry on with the tour. I was mortified to say the least and William was terribly angry.

The worst of it was, they kept putting us in canoes on top of lorries – and then when we met some of the locals, well I just didn’t know where to look! (Very relaxed about clothes in the Solomon Islands.) The funny thing is, just the day before we found out about the pictures, William told a little boy in a children’s hospice that if he had a superpower he’d like to be invisible. How ironic!

One small crumb of comfort has been the swift response of the palace. They’ve come down like a tonne of bricks on the people at Closer. When we were in Tuvalu, we found out the French courts had banned the rag from re-publishing the pictures and they’ve been told to hand over the originals. If they don’t, they’ve got a big fine on their hands. The problem is, we still don’t know who took the pictures and they have copyright – which means it might be impossible to stop them appearing in other countries.

Thank goodness the British press have taken such a firm stance. Poor Harry was quite upset when The Sun published those pictures of him in Vegas (“What will granny say!”). Thankfully, they seem to like me a lot.

It’s almost funny really, when you consider how much female flesh is on show in the tabloids. I had a look through some and lost count of the plunging necklines, bottoms and breasts, thankfully not mine.

Even Richard Desmond, who used to publish Asian Babes, has been rather sweet about things. He suspended the editor of the Irish Daily Star this week after the paper ran my pictures at the weekend. I’m very glad indeed that the British public are up in arms over my breasts. I keep reminding myself I’m a “young woman, not an object”. That’s how my lawyer put it. Nice chap, shame he’s French.

Anyway Pips, I’ll let you get back to your chums in New York. Quite prudish about nudity, the Americans. (Please try to keep them off the internet!)

Your loving sister Kate, (Duchess of Cambridge.)