Shame on the ghouls who spread lies and rumours about the Princess of Wales. And the idiot conspiracy theorists who wondered if she might be dead or getting divorced. And the tragic social media sleuths who squealed ‘That isn’t her!’ when a video showed her shopping at a farmers’ market. And all the rest of you who knew Catherine was ill, and knew she’d had serious surgery, and knew she was craving privacy, and yet who wailed ‘WHERE’S KATE?’ on a loop, like lunatics, for weeks.

For now we know the truth. She’s not in hiding. She’s not in a coma. She’s not fleeing ‘the Firm’ in a huff over something William did. No, she has cancer. Cancerous cells were found following her abdominal surgery in January and she’s now undergoing preventative chemotherapy.

In her darkest moment, the mob hounded her. Truly it was a sick spectacle

A wave of shame should be washing over Britain this morning. For the woman that some people feverishly defamed as a sinister faker who was putting out doctored photos to throw people off the scent of her whereabouts is in truth just a young mum facing what will likely be one of the toughest battles of her life. In her darkest moment, the mob hounded her. Truly it was a sick spectacle.

There is something profoundly sad about the video statement in which Catherine reveals her cancer diagnosis. It isn’t only the fact she has cancer, which is always rough, especially in someone who is only 42. It’s also the feeling that this is an involuntary statement. At least in part. It feels like a forced confession, a public declaration of intimate pain made at the behest of a scandal-hungry mob.

There’s a medieval feel to it: a woman jostled into the public square by baying halfwits and pressured to confess to her sickness. Catherine didn’t want to do this, did she? She wanted seclusion. She wanted to recuperate quietly, away from the unforgiving glare of the media eye. But the mob wouldn’t allow it. Something’s up, she’s lying, it’s weird, they cried. And in the end Catherine clearly felt she had no choice but to reveal all in the hope that it might scotch their lies and blunt their pitchforks. Extracting a confession from a young mum who’s suffering – even by the standards of the digital mob it’s a whole new low.

We can now see the authoritarian streak to therapy culture. These days everyone is expected to make a public spectacle of their lives. To get emotional on social media, to ‘open up’ about their mental troubles and moral foibles.

And if you don’t? If you prefer, as Catherine initially did, and as many of us do, to maintain a firm line between your private life and your public life? You’ll be hounded. You’ll be branded ‘secretive’ and possibly ‘in denial’. You might find yourself broken on the rumour mill, made into an object of unhinged speculation by people who can’t believe you are refusing to furnish their sad little lives with information about yours.

This is what the medieval dragging of Catherine into the public eye really represents: the humiliation of a woman for daring to desire a private life. Yes, she is class personified in the video statement. Clear, resolute, generous. But her composure in the face of frenzied demands for revelation should not distract our attention from how strange it is, how sick it is, that our society refuses to let people be.

A dark irony of this wild prying into the life of a princess is that much of it is coming from the self-styled ‘Sussex Squad’. Not from Harry and Meghan themselves, who have sent warm wishes to Catherine. No, from their obsessed fans online. From the kind of people who think Meghan is the most oppressed woman on Earth, and that wicked William and Kate enable this oppression by forever briefing (allegedly) against the persecuted duchess and her poor hubby.

These are the kind of people who think that Meghan getting papped in California is an outrage against morality and yet they have happily spent the past few weeks defaming and shaming a princess who only wanted to convalesce at home following serious surgery. What epic levels of hypocrisy. What rotten double standards.

The harrying of Kate represents one of the worst invasions of private life of modern times. It should worry all of us, republican and royalist alike. For if even the future Queen can be coerced into the cult of confession, what hope is there for us mere citizens who also prefer the free and peaceful life to the dystopian hell of ceaseless revelation?