Here are more photos of Prince William attending the Commonwealth service on Monday, after which he attended an Earthshot event. Surprisingly, William didn’t look overwhelmed or like he had been in a blind panic for the previous 24 hours. Probably because he had settled on a course of action after he f–ked up so thoroughly with the “Mother’s Day photo” debacle. His solution? Blame everything on his wife, blame Kate for editing the photo and send out courtiers to provide a false narrative about what happened behind the scenes to create an intricate web of lies which could easily collapse under close scrutiny. Behold, the Times of London’s palace-approved narrative of how KATE screwed up so badly.
The image was the first time the princess had been formally photographed since her surgery in January. However, PA, Getty Images, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Shutterstock, Reuters and the Press Association “killed” the image from their databases, noting an “inconsistency in alignment of Princess Charlotte’s left hand”.
Yet none were spotted by aides before its release and information regarding the editing process was not believed to have been shared by the princess with her team before it became public. It had initially been greeted with praise by courtiers.
The first red flag might have been that the seemingly perfect image was shot in just a 40-minute window on Friday in Windsor, a source said. Time constraints meant that the picture had to happen once the children were back from school and once Prince William was back from London, where he had been attending an Earthshot event at the Oval cricket ground. There was only a limited amount of time because the family was also due to fly off to their home of Anmer Hall in Sandringham for the weekend.
The following day, Kate circulated the image to her team. At no point did anyone realise that it had been subject to an unfortunately clumsy attempt at editing. Looking back, alarm bells might also have started ringing when courtiers realised that it was William, not necessarily known for his camera skills, who had taken the picture. The time frame in which the image was taken would also suggest that, without editing, the Waleses had been extremely lucky for an amateur like William to capture such an engaging picture.
A PR plan was put into place for the image and its corresponding message to go out at 9am on Sunday morning. Within hours, theories were circulating online that the photo had been doctored. A shocked Palace assessed the situation and went back to the Prince and Princess of Wales. Kate confirmed that it was her and is understood to have thought that “honesty is the best policy”. She wanted to “own up” and acknowledge the mistake.
A Palace insider said that she felt “awful” about it and said that she had just “tried to make it the best it could be” because she knew how important it was for it to be “a nice picture”. They added that she was also thinking of her own children, hoping that they looked good for their own sakes. The princess released a new statement, apologising for “any confusion” over the picture. Kensington Palace refused to go further and explain what software was used in the editing of the picture or the way in which it was changed.
However, Sky News said a technician at the broadcaster had analysed the photo’s metadata to reveal that it was saved in Adobe Photoshop twice on an Apple Mac on Friday and Saturday and the picture was taken on a Canon 5D mark IV, which retails at £2,929.99 and used a Canon 50mm lens, priced at £1,629.99. The first save was made at 9.54pm on Friday and the second was at 9.39am on Saturday. It is not clear if the two saves were on the same device. Quite how it could have ended up to be such a PR disaster for the princess can, in part, be explained by the changes under way in the Wales household.
William and Kate’s Palace team is in a state of transition after restructuring. It has advertised for a chief executive but is yet to announce a successful candidate. The widely respected Jean-Christophe Gray, a civil servant and former spokesperson for David Cameron while he was prime minister, was private secretary to Prince William until he recently transferred back to government.
Instead, both William and Kate have new private secretaries, both well respected but new to their roles. Ian Patrick joined the household for the Prince of Wales last month as Gray’s successor. A former private secretary to Lord Ashdown, Patrick has an exemplary track record and sits on the board of trustees for the charity Chron’s & Colitis UK. Kate, meanwhile, has hired Lieutenant Colonel Tom White, filling a role which had been vacant for at least a year following the departure of Hannah Cockburn-Logie.
As you can see, the new-to-the-job palace officials are thoroughly briefing the Times about Kate’s screwup and putting it all on her shoulders, but the Times can’t even keep up the facade of pretending to believe that no one in the palace “saw” the mistakes, or that everyone really believed the photo had been taken on Friday, or that the photo was taken by William. Lie on top of lie on top of lie. You’ve got to wonder how Kate feels about being thrown under the bus this way. Man, that actually does make me feel sorry for her – for more than a decade, the palace machinery has done the most to protect and coddle Kate, and now… they’re not.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images, KP.