At Party Pieces, the mail order company run by Carole and Michael Middleton which brings fairy tales to life, becoming a princess is easy. Order online and with one click of a mouse your child can have a tiara, a pink tulle dress and Cinderella-style glass slippers. If only it were so simple for the Middletons’ 24-year-old daughter Kate, who is being talked about as a future queen, a consort for Prince William, her long-term boyfriend.

There is nothing easy about the path she is taking as she makes her perilous way through young adulthood while the world’s media looks on (and joyously photographs her lovely long legs in fishnet tights). Where will her journey take her: to the palace; to a gilded life where tiaras, frocks and dainty shoes come with the job, not out of a catalogue; to the throne as Queen Catherine? Nobody yet knows. But what is clear is that 2007 looks like being the year of Our Kate. It is perhaps too early to think of her as the new People’s Princess, but her elegance, dignity and beauty certainly make her the People’s Choice. Kate is what we need, providing a much-needed injection of glamour, that breath of fresh heir for the royal gene pool.

She is also what the royal household desperately requires: a touch of normality after the marital mishaps of the Queen’s children. In her case, beautiful does not mean bonkers. She is unlikely to throw herself downstairs, tell all to a tabloid reporter, become a phone pest or watch her lover perform heart surgery.

The time is ripe for the announcement of an engagement and what better start to the new year than the prospect of a royal romance, officially sanctioned? Christopher Wilson, the royal biographer, said: “It’s not a question of if, but when. They have been in a long, serious relationship for four years and they are in effect man and wife already. It’s a done deal. Kate is more grounded than Diana was and she comes with no emotional baggage as she did. And she is much better prepared than (Diana) was for the onslaught ahead.

“The couple’s relationship is extremely strong, so why not let them get on with it? They are young, but some among us find the people they need early on in life. It’s entirely instinctual with them. He is comfortable with her, she is comfortable with him and she is as solid as a rock.”

Robert Jobson, the royal correspondent and author of a biography of Middleton, William’s Princess, agreed: “Whenever you see the couple together she always looks immaculate. And that’s even when she comes out of nightclubs at three in the morning with him. I think she is determined not to ‘do a Fergie’. She keeps herself poised.”

Jobson believes the most important moment in their relationship was her appearance at William’s passing out ceremony at Sandhurst this month. It was the most high-profile public event she had attended as a guest of the prince since they met at St Andrews University.

With the Queen and Prince Philip, the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall, Middleton and her parents watched the 2nd Lieutenant Wales march past. At one point she is said to have turned to other onlookers and uttered something that was interpreted by an ITV News lip-reader as “I love the uniform. It’s so, so sexy”.

A lip-reader? We may need a mind-reader to find out what is going on inside Kate-world. Therein lies her strength. Her discretion and dignity, which could so easily be interpreted as dullness, is a respite from all the over-excitement of the Diana and Fergie years. As someone who lunches with the Queen confided last week: “What one wants in a monarch is passive intelligence. In other words you should know everything that is going on but not interfere in anything.”

Such is her discretion that we know little of her everyday life. She lives in an £800,000 flat in Chelsea bought for her by her parents. She has allegedly turned down the offer of royal protection from Buckingham Palace. Fond of taking the No 137 bus, she also spends a lot of time shopping with her mother in the Sloane heaven of Peter Jones. She has flashes of humour: one of the few things she has said about the relationship is that “he’s lucky to be going out with me”. For his part, William has said that he does not envisage marrying until he is “28 or 30”.

Last month Tatler magazine published a feature called “25 things you didn’t know about Kate Middleton”. It revealed, among other things, that she drinks Jack Daniels and Coca-Cola and that the couple like to eat at La Famiglia (an old haunt of Diana’s) round the corner from her Chelsea flat.

She does not appear to have a proper job, although she was recently reported to have been employed as an accessories buyer for Jigsaw. From bags to riches perhaps? She has found that despite her determination to build a career there is too much interest in her private life for her to operate in the commercial world, as the Countess of Wessex discovered to her cost. So Middleton is biding her time, her freedom curtailed.

All of which, according to Geordie Greig, Tatler’s editor, makes her perfect princess material. She is both patient and private, polished and photogenic. “She is the epitome of an effortlessly stylish English rose,” he said. “She has qualities you can’t create or manufacture. Her unaffectedness makes her particularly attractive. In many ways that makes her a Diana II. Kate had planned to set up a children’s clothing company and that shows an interest in children and family. I think she wants to be an old-fashioned wife.

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