Advice for Kate from an insider

Opinion: April 30, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

The wedding is the easy part. Or so says Princess Diana’s former chief adviser.

During a stop in Philadelphia last week, Patrick Jephson told me that barring something untoward from a security standpoint, he expected the wedding to be all that royal watchers hope for.

“The Brits can do these big events,” he told me. “The people — I know them — who run these things are all about military efficiency where this is concerned.”

What comes next is the question.

“From (Friday) onward, the monarchy will look different,” he said. “It will sound different. It could be 30 years before we have King William and Queen Catherine. That is rather sobering. What are they going to do for the next 30 years? How can they capture this atmosphere and make it last?”

In the late 1980s, Jephson was serving in the Navy when a senior officer asked to put his name forward to serve as Diana’s military aide. Jephson was flattered but dubious as to his prospects. Even when invited to an interview and luncheon with the princess at Kensington Palace, he thought that at most it would one day be fodder for conversation with his grandchildren.

Chief of staff

Instead it was the beginning of an eight-year stint as private secretary (chief of staff) to the Princess of Wales. Friday morning he was in London, serving as NBC’s royal wedding commentator.

But last week, he was in Philadelphia at a fund-raiser for Studio Incamminati, a not-for-profit art school founded by Leona and Nelson Shanks.

When I asked Jephson what advice he’d give to Kate Middleton, he noted that Diana was barely in her 20s when she married Prince Charles. Middleton is almost a decade older. He thinks that might play to Kate’s benefit.

Diana, he said, spent her 20s on the world stage, establishing herself as a supporter of a wide variety of charitable endeavors.

“Kate has used the equivalent period to establish her relationship with Prince William,” Jephson said. “It may well be for the future health of the institution of the monarchy that the eight years she has spent forming this relationship, consolidating it, proving it, often in the face of some quite unkind criticism in British press, might turn out to be as valuable as anything Diana did.”

Jephson believes that Kate will need to work hard on her marriage, establish a reputation for consistent public work, avoid conspicuous self-indulgence, and play straight with the media.

“Like Diana and Charles, this young couple will also carry a burden of hope, but it is tempered with experience and a new sense of realism,” he said.

He recently asked his 18-year-old daughter what the royal wedding meant to her and was heartened to hear her say, “‘Daddy, it is a wedding first and a royal event second.’”

“That is the voice of the William-and-Kate generation, a return to the things that matter,” Jephson said.

Jephson sees this marriage as crucial to the future of the British crown. And in order for Kate to survive her new duties in the House of Windsor, he advises her to “get the rest of the family involved.”

“If this dynasty is to survive,” he said, “it must adapt to the expectation and dreams and ambitions and hopes of Catherine Middleton.”

Does she need a project?

“She needs only two things: the uncritical support of her husband, a husband who can take delight in her successes and not regard them as mortal competition, and she needs to find a role which provides her with job satisfaction not for a week, month, or year, but forever.

“And by doing that she will be happy and perceived as fulfilling a useful role and nice things will be written about her.”

Consul Oliver Franklin echoed those sentiments.

A commoner

“I would advise her to be herself and continue to do what she is doing because the Brits are very impressed that a member of the royal family is marrying a commoner,” Franklin said. “She is an extraordinary woman from a wonderful family, but they are not aristocrats and that is very important for survival of the monarchy.”

One final word to the wise from Jephson: The sooner Prince William realizes he cannot control the media, the better it will be for both him and Kate.

Michael Smerconish writes a weekly column for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.