It had all started to die down, the embers still smouldering but surely not for much longer. The Great Mother’s Day Photo Scandal had been ‘explained’, in a charming tweet signed by ‘C’.
The snap of Catherine and her three children was not some flipped Christmas photo, nor was it a head shot lifted from the cover of Vogue. It had simply been tinkered with by a Princess of Wales who possibly has too much time on her ringless hands as she recuperates from surgery.
But then, on Monday, Kate was seen in a car with William, heading away from Windsor.
The two press photographers outside the gates were taken by surprise, so managed to snap only the back of her lovely head as she turned away from them. The line from the Palace was that she was getting a lift with her husband – he was on his way to the Commonwealth Day service in London – to a private appointment.
Suddenly, bellows were being used on those embers, and social media didn’t just catch fire, it exploded in a new nuclear mushroom of speculation.
Kate turned away, not smiling and waving to photographers as normal, cadging a lift to a private ‘appointment’ when Prince William was on his way to the Commonwealth Day Service at Westminster Abbey on Monday, says Liz Jones
Some of it was just plain silly. The bricks on the wall didn’t match through the car window. Why on earth are Kate and William suddenly a one-car family? Why wear false eyelashes and your hair in a chignon for a private ‘appointment’?
Was it even her head? It was surely taken from her profile during the walk to church on Christmas Day 2023 and ‘they’ have merely erased her earring. Indeed, her hat brim can clearly be seen. ‘They’ are really bad at this.
Or is the shadowy profile in the car someone else altogether – just look at the jowls!
Preposterous. But the image did ring alarm bells. For some it confirmed that Kate had nothing to do with the photo debacle and that there is something serious going on.
How had the happy, open, not-a-worry-in-the-world woman seen in that Mother’s Day shot transformed into this aloof enigma. She knows those snappers outside Windsor like she knows her own cleaner – why didn’t she wave and smile for one second as the car pulled out?
That is what startled us most. It just wasn’t like Kate – the sudden withdrawal of the beaming, stoic goodwill we are used to.
That was the moment anyone with any sense would blame the Palace – again – for failing to have a joined-up strategy in place, with everyone on board.
But it was the moment that told me that Kate is not co-operating and that she didn’t have a hand in photogate but took the rap for it.
It is her PR and communications team who’d have chosen it and released it with its bland, cheery message, doubtless carelessly done because it was a weekend and perhaps they don’t really do weekend working.
The Palace has had decades of knowing whatever they say will be believed. The late Queen was trusted. This has made them arrogant. But today they are up against an army of millions of keyboard warriors: it is the wisdom of the crowds, made real and dangerous, instantaneous.
The now notorious photoshopped Mother’s Day image of the Princess of Wales and her children – the first public image of her released since her surgery
What has made me particularly angry are the headlines suggesting the public has got it in for Kate. The Sun gave over its front page to the order ‘Leave Kate Alone’. On X, we started to see more and more Tweets such as: ‘The press killed Diana. Now they are after Kate!’
But no one is bullying the Princess of Wales. We are all on her side, merely puzzled and worried.
It is the Wales’s communications team who have thrown her – and to some extent William – under the bus.
Didn’t anyone think to remind him that on his first outing with Kate since her op and Photogate that he should look attentive and loving in the car. As for his appearance at the Commonwealth Day Service, he didn’t even acknowledge the dancers and musicians playing merrily outside.
If the Wales’s public relations team had completed their media studies and IT course at community college they’d have known that the way to lay this to rest was for William to have addressed the furore on Monday evening when he gave a speech for the Earthshot Prize Launchpad. He could have included a few jokey references to the doctored family snap and we’d have gone: ‘Phew, everything’s fine!’
William’s seriousness at the moment, the shoulders-slumped exasperation, the refusal to acknowledge us minions, to make light about his wife’s editing skills or reassure us fondly and warmly about her health, are fuelling the wilder social media speculation.
This could all have been averted, our worries laid to rest, by a PR team that knew what it was doing – and Kate wouldn’t have been dragged into it at all but left to continue her convalescence. Just come clean with the people who bankroll you. It’s the least we deserve. This isn’t going away.