It seems Kate Middleton has finally decided to spend Christmas with her family in Scotland rather than accept the Queen’s invitation to Sandringham.

Katie Nicholl in the UK Mail on Sunday, reports that a friend of Kate has made clear she won’t spend Christmas with the Royal Family until she is married to Prince William. The source continues :

“Kate has said she won’t be going to Sandringham until she’s a part of the family. She has made it quite clear that she will only be at a Royal Christmas if she and William get married, and that’s not yet on the cards.

“We all know it’s going to happen but it’s not going to happen this Christmas. Kate and William find all the speculation hilarious and they have a wall chart with a tally of how many times the papers predict they will marry.

“Kate would love to be with William on Christmas Day, and it was a huge honour for her to be invited, but she is very close to her family and wants to share Christmas with them.

“The whole family are leaving Berkshire this week and heading for Scotland where they have hired a house in the countryside for all the extended aunts and uncles and the Middletons’ friends to be together.

“Carole, Kate’s mother, wants it to be a week-long celebration. Although Kate isn’t a wild party girl, her parents love entertaining and really know how to throw a bash.

“They have rented a farmhouse in Perthshire and have arranged several days of shooting and big family dinners followed by nights of drinking around a big log fire.”

Friends also said that Kate wants to spend Christmas with her family following the recent deaths of her two grandmothers. “Kate was incredibly saddened to lose both her grandmothers and this will be the first time the family will have gathered since their deaths. It’s a bit of a Middleton Christmas and there’s no way Kate would not be part of it.”

I’m sure the Queen, who lost her mother and sister recently, would understand that.

We’re hearing tonight that there will be no engagement announcement of a match between Prince William and Kate Middleton over the Christmas period, and probably not for a while yet.

However, the appearance of Kate and her mother and father at William’s passing out parade at Sandhurst, in the presence of the Queen, suggests that it is only a matter of timing for that news to break.

Kate was accompanied by Prince William’s Private Secretary, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, and she and her parents joined the Royal party for a family lunch for the first time.

The whole event displayed a public acceptance of Kate’s permanent role in William’s life, and what will unfold in the future.

We will, of course, keep you informed here at Royal Anecdotes.

Prince William has passed out from Sandhurst in a ceremony presided over by his grandmother, the Queen.

He will now become a second lieutenant in the Household Cavalry’s Blues and Royals, where his title will be Cornet Wales. His younger brother, Prince Harry, joined the regiment after passing out of Sandhurst in April.

Prince William will train to become a troop commander in armoured reconnaissance units as his brother has before him.

The Queen was joined by Prince Phillip and the Prince of Wales at the parade, but many eyes were for Kate Middleton, Prince William’s girlfriend, who made her first public appearance at a Royal event. She was dressed in a red coat and sat in the general stands.

On a lighter note, Junior Under Officer David Robertson, who won the Queen’s Medal, recalled the Prince throwing potatoes during a training exercise. “I will be able to tell my grandchildren I hit the future Monarch round the head with a 2lb potato.”

Not many of us can say that.

We’ve heard parts of this story before, but it’s now emerging that Princess Diana believed not only that Prince Charles wanted to murder her in a car crash, but that he was also planning to kill Camilla — now his wife — so that he could marry Tiggy Legge-Bourke who, she thought, was carrying his baby.

The bizarre “plot” was revealed by Diana’s own divorce lawyer, Lord Mishcon, and is published in Lord Stevens’s report on the road accident in Paris in 1997 in which Diana, Dodi Fayed and driver Henri Paul died.

The transcribed note reads : “This particular phase of my life is the most dangerous — my husband is planning an accident in my car, brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for him to marry.”

She also said that Camilla would be similarly “put aside” so that he could marry Tiggy. The Stevens’ report says that the proposed marriage partner was not Camilla, “but another woman”. The report declines to name the woman, but it is widely assumed to be Tiggy, now married and living in Crickhowell, South Wales.

Diana even confronted Tiggy at a party with the words, “So sorry about the baby”, which she presumed Tiggy had lost.

The entire story was later revealed to be a complete fantasy, which even her lawyer, Lord Mishcon, didn’t believe, although he passed it on to police.

Lord Stevens comprehensively refutes all these claims and wild accusations from both Diana and the self-serving Mohamed Al Fayed, who personally ordered Henri Paul to drive the car that night, thus setting in train the tragic course of events.

The report proves yet again that Diana was deeply disturbed and had distinct paranoid tendencies.

It also rakes over old ground for the Prince of Wales and makes it even more unlikely that Charles will ever become King.