Where, and How, Is Kate Middleton? The Internet Knows

The royal family wishes the story of Kate Middleton’s doctored family photo would just go away, and that everyone would remember and respect their stated timeline of Kate, having undergone abdominal surgery in January, intending to return to royal duties after Easter. Who has not touched up a photo for cosmetic purposes, her supporters say. But if that is the case, why not publish the original image, as Kensington Palace has so far resolutely refused to do?

Prince William and Kate's disastrous social media post to mark U.K. Mother’s Day has unleashed a crisis unlike anything the royal family has ever seen, with allegations of fakery, body doubles, spousal abuse, divorce, and even concealed death mushrooming online after Kate admitted the image had been altered. A source told the Evening Standard: “It is all very sad. She is still recuperating from abdominal surgery. She was just trying to make the photo look better.”

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The official explanation, as leaked to the London Times on Monday evening, seems to be as follows: William snapped the photos on Friday (a claim supported by the picture’s metadata), Kate edited them on photoshop and sent them over to her aides on Saturday morning, with instructions to send them out on social media channels on Sunday. The aides didn’t check the photos carefully enough and sent them out. After the pictures were denounced as having been manipulated, Kate felt awful, thought it was best to “own up” and took the blame in her follow up social media post.

Unlikely as it may seem to casual observers of the royals that Kate is personally editing photographs for global distribution which are not carefully checked by an army of staff, to seasoned observers of the royals this had the ring of truth for a couple of reasons.

First, ever since the birth of Prince George, Kate and William have taken many photos for the worldwide media of their kids themselves, specifically to give themselves greater control over such images.

Secondly, Kate fancies herself as a photographer and editing software is now part of that.

Thirdly, they have a reputation for hiring yes-men and women who agree to everything they suggest.

“Two words you don’t hear at KP are, ‘No, Sir,’” one former courtier told The Daily Beast while discussing the debacle. “I absolutely believe they sent the pictures through and said, ‘Send them out,’ and there wouldn’t be a culture in Kensington Palace of saying, ‘Well, maybe not, Sir.’ It’s not that they are mean and bullying, they have just hired people who won’t disagree, and the people who did put up a fight were got rid of long ago.”

Some reports have also pointed to the fact that William only recently hired a new private secretary (the closest equivalent to a chief of staff role) and Kate currently doesn’t have one at all as another possible cause of sloppy office discipline. It is also relevant that the pictures were apparently only sent to their staff on Saturday, meaning fewer people saw the pictures than might have been the case on an in-office weekday.

These factors have not, however, convinced the internet, where more complex theories about what is going on are flourishing, especially after Kate’s statement which sought to dampen the furore—unlikely as the image, apart from its technical manipulations, showed her not wearing either her wedding or engagement rings.

Her statement read: “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother's Day.”

This nothing-to-see-here-folks statement naturally sent internet sleuths into a renewed frenzy; the most common theory online is that the picture was stitched together from many different pictures, and that what was sent out on social media bears very little resemblance to any picture that may or may not have been taken on Friday afternoon.

Indeed, Tina Brown, the founding editor of The Daily Beast, made this claim in a discussion with CBS, saying she believed that there was no “original” picture, just a “jigsaw” of pictures. Brown said she was “deeply skeptical there was an original” after the host said the palace’s refusal to release the original after the controversy blew up had given her second thoughts.

The Daily Beast has asked William and Kate’s team if they are able to confirm the picture was only lightly edited, but they have not responded.

It is certainly striking how polished Kate looks in the picture when we have been told she is recovering from surgery, and not well enough to make even a very brief public appearance for three months. Her perfect hair and make-up could, of course, have been the result of attendance by a small team of experts summoned to her Windsor abode. A glam squad is never far away from a rich or famous person needing to look their best, asap.

As a palace insider told People: “She might be a member of the royal family, but she’s also a human being. If you've just had an operation, you want to look your best with the first photograph that’s published for the outside world.”

The insider told People that the controversy was a “bump in the road, it's not an earthquake,” adding that “Kate has apologized and graciously so. She has done something that 99% of us do—and we don’t have the scrutiny that they do. Think of the level of scrutiny of pictures of her, as people pore over them. You’re always on display and always got to be perfect.”

Indeed, so perfect that one very popular theory doing the rounds on social media claims it could be that her face has been grabbed from an image used for a Vogue cover story in 2016.

One video showing just how easy it would be to do has been viewed looks set to get 50 million views on Twitter.

Time will tell if it will surpass the 83 million views the original image posted by Kate has received, which would be a graphic illustration of just how much these kinds of social media clips matter these days.

An alternative variation on this theme claims that the image was taken in November last year, when Kate and her children visited a charity baby bank.

More outlandish claims include the February story by a Spanish journalist that Kate had been in a coma near death (denied by the palace), and theories that Kate is dead and the palace are using a body double. The body double theme first came up when Kate was photographed in a car with her mother last week, with others pointing out that the Kate in the car looked very different to the Kate in the picture.

This one received a new jolt of life when Kate was photographed Monday being chauffeur-driven with her husband in the back of a car—her face turned to the side and obscured. William was going to the Commonwealth Day service, and the palace said Kate was attending a “private appointment.”

Online skeptics have now argued that photo is fake. Established photojournalists have however pushed back against such claims.

But the reality is that claims that would usually be dismissed without a second thought are now getting millions of views on social media—and the royal family only have themselves to blame. Ever since Kate’s absence from public life was announced, the palace—most likely under the instruction of Kate and William themselves—have done an appalling job of maintaining to the media and public that there is nothing strange going on at all.

The irony of their approach—after William mysteriously pulled out of a memorial service for his godfather, King Constantine of Greece, at the last minute for personal reasons, and the doctored photo debacle—is that a lot of people are now convinced that there is something very strange going on indeed.