For the last few days, it has been impossible for any of us glimpsing a newspaper, television or computer screen not to have seen at least one image – and probably a video – of Catherine, Princess of Wales, disclosing that she has cancer. With figures suggesting that as we lead longer lives one in two or three of us will have a similar diagnosis, this brings it close to all our homes.

I had a leukaemia diagnosis nearly thirteen years ago, and remember as if it was yesterday that my main worry was not for myself but for the effect on my family. Catherine made that point movingly. She was simply unable to issue a stark bulletin at the point of diagnosis, because her primary duty as a parent was to comfort and reassure her three children.

All cancer experiences are unique. In my case, I had no symptoms at all until I mentioned to our GP when taking a child in to the surgery that I’d sustained a bruised big toe after a galumphing footballer stood on it at my weekly five-a-side, and after six weeks it was still black and blue. I thought nothing of it when he suggested a blood test, and even, somewhat dimly, nothing more when asked to come into the RD&E at 8am the next morning for the big news!

The most challenging moment – for me at least – of the entire two years that ensued was when our four children returned from school that next afternoon and we sat as a family of six and discussed it. They were all wonderful, supportive, even good-humoured. But to me, I’d just loaded them up, and especially my amazing wife, with an awful burden. All I had to do was get treated, and thus had a lot of control over what was happening hour by hour. For them, they might lose their dad or their husband about forty years early if it didn’t go well.

Because of those experiences, I wish to express my sincere admiration for the way Catherine has dealt with her own diagnosis. It can be all too easy to berate the press, especially the tabloid end, but this needs to be said. Yet again, the proprietors have allowed editors to be wildly inaccurate, intrusive, unkind, tasteless and inflammatory. Where the role of an editor is to guard journalistic standards, in this case they have knowingly re-published hare-brained conspiracy nonsense from the outer reaches of social media.

Then, to crown it all off, those same papers and some broadcast sources having had their cake and are now eating it. “Leave Kate Alone”, they cry, after months of doing the precise opposite. They have taken a family crisis and made from it an exemplar of purest hypocrisy.

By utter contrast, Catherine sat herself down on a bench, spoke straight to camera, and explained what had happened. In many ways she had been bullied into this, but clearly she and William had given it immense thought. It was a truthful as could be. Now, instead of torrid speculation on radio phone-ins, the lines have been alive with people telling similar stories, especially and most movingly about the effect on closest loved ones.

Of course, the world will keep spinning and the media proprietors will never change their spots. But in a country with a monarchy and not a republic (where a “President Johnson” might have ended up as head of state), Kate and Will have yet again proved how superbly they cope with their unenviable roles.