Robert Hardman has added new chapters to his royal biography Charles III: New King, New Court, The Inside Story, which came out in January. Hardman has basically provided those new chapters to the Mail to publish, and we can clearly see that King Charles and Camilla’s minions were doing a lot of talking. But it looks like Prince William and Kate’s minions wanted in on the royal rewrite too. Hardman devotes a good chunk of time to trying to reimagine what the past year has been for William and Kate, given all of the extremely weird sh-t that we saw with our own eyes. Remember the Mother’s Day frankenphoto? Remember how William didn’t bother to go his godfather’s memorial service in Windsor? Remember how the Sun completely fabricated a fake-Kate sighting? Hardman has explanations and complaints! Some highlights:
On Charles and Kate’s back-to-back health announcements in January: Royal aides now smile at some of the more outlandish theories, pointing out that the two medical conditions had, simply, been a coincidence. ‘It was not an issue of, ‘Let’s all make sure it’s on the same day’,’ says one of those involved. ‘There just happened to be a certain time limit in which announcements had to be made for logistical reasons.’
William also refused to go to a funeral in South Africa: At the last minute, however, the King had asked [Princess Anne] to fly to Namibia to represent him at the funeral of the former president, Hage Geingob. Traditionally it would have been the job of the heir to the throne to attend an occasion like this (monarchs do not, as a rule, attend funerals). But the new Prince of Wales, William, was otherwise preoccupied. Barely noticed by the media, the Princess Royal flew via South Africa on commercial flights to the Namibian capital Windhoek, returned to London overnight and was back in action for an engagement in Berkshire on the Monday.
William missed his godfather’s memorial service: The next day, however, the Prince of Wales was absent again. He had been due to attend a memorial service for his godfather, ex-King Constantine of the Hellenes, at Windsor Castle. With next to no notice, it was announced he would not be attending for ‘personal’ reasons. On social media and in mainstream media, patience was wearing thin. Given that he lived a short walk from St George’s Chapel, what could possibly have prevented him from spending an hour commemorating his godfather?
William’s bizarre behavior: It was well known that, like his father before him, the Prince was determined not to be dictated to by the monarch’s office. ‘William and his team like to police their own lanes. His father did exactly the same when he was Prince of Wales,’ points out one former member of staff. Even so, the Prince’s behaviour seemed hard to explain. And no explanation was forthcoming, from his office or the King’s team. In spite of the increasingly deranged speculation about the Princess’s whereabouts, the Waleses were sticking to their original strategy. The Prince continued to go about his official engagements while the Princess recovered in private.
Kate has no constitutional role: ‘No constitutional responsibility sits on the Princess of Wales and never will,’ says a senior aide to the King. ‘She is not in the line of succession. She plays an absolutely vital supporting role to the Prince of Wales and in bringing up their children who are in the line of succession. But she herself is not. Her situation is different and it can be treated differently.’
The Mother’s Day frankenphoto: This was not, aides insist, a response to noises off. It was something she had planned all along to mark Mothering Sunday. Rather than calm down the commentariat and the cyber-trolls, however, the image only set them off all over again. Some had spotted small inconsistencies with the photograph – a missing section of a child’s sleeve or blurring of a knee, for example. Clearly, the photo had undergone minor editing prior to release. The Waleses and their staff were astonished by what happened next. On the same Sunday, the world’s four main international photographic agencies issued a ‘kill notice’, industry jargon for retracting a photograph. ‘At closer inspection, it appears that the source has manipulated the image,’ Associated Press announced, declaring that the photograph had thus fallen short of its standards. Getty, AFP and Reuters said much the same.
The palace thought the outcry was exaggerated: While the industry’s concerns about the threat of artificial intelligence (AI) to the integrity of mainstream photography were well known, this seemed an oddly exaggerated, almost performative, response. ‘There were several factors,’ says one of the Waleses’ team. ‘Anything written or said about the Princess of Wales at that point was at fever pitch and front page news. It also spoke to the nervousness of the photography industry around AI and their future. Even so, the reaction seemed extremely disproportionate.’ As far as the Princess was concerned, says the aide, ‘this had just been a mother deciding to share a personal picture of her and her children on Mother’s Day to bring some joy to the nation. That’s all’.
Will & Kate weren’t worried about the dramas they caused: Within Kensington Palace and Adelaide Cottage, the Waleses’ home at Windsor, there was no great soul-searching the next day. ‘The Prince and Princess have agency in everything,’ says the Kensington Palace staffer. ‘They are the final decision-makers.’ If there was frustration that the media should be making quite such a meal of a well-intentioned, homespun gesture, there was no time to dwell on it.
Why Kate released a message before Trooping: The last-minute nature of her appearance was a reflection of that. ‘We wanted to give the green light that she was going to the parade when we knew, rather than to dangle the possibility,’ says one aide. ‘So it was very late in the day. But she was very keen on sharing an update on her progress.’
Months ago, Robert Jobson revealed the fact that Kate had to take credit for the frankenphoto because William and his staff tossed her right under the bus and refused to take any part of the blame for releasing an extremely manipulated photo. Now Hardman is pulling some kind of “the media overreacted, this was performative outrage!” The media did not overreact – agencies like Reuters and AFP went to Kensington Palace and asked for clarification or the original image, and KP refused. That’s why the Mother’s Day photo was killed on Oscar night. It wasn’t just some minor edits either.
The emphasis on Kate’s lack of constitutional role is fascinating too, because that really is William’s perspective and Charles’s perspective too. The Princess of Wales is expendable, unimportant, not constitutionally relevant. That’s why they bungled everything so badly throughout the year too – it never occurred to them that people might want a health update on Kate simply because they were worried about her as a person. It never would have occurred to them that a “simple, homespun gesture” like providing a health update through a completely manipulated photo would actually destroy their credibility and cause more confusion.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images, Kensington Palace.