Meghan Markle has last laugh in Kate Middleton photo furore
The Princess of Wales has accidentally confirmed something that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have long been telling us.
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There are moments when humanity is tested and moments when humanity rises spectacularly to the challenge. For the first time since Mark Zuckerberg decided to create social media in a fug of acne cream and thwarted yearning in his Harvard dorm room, the normally mucky, murky depths of X and TikTok especially are today a joy to behold, a cornucopia of mischief, chinwaggery and drollity. Unleash the LOLs!
Billions of users gathered together on Tuesday to partake in the mutual joy of having a long, hard laugh at Kate the Princess of Wales’ expense after she was forced to publicly apologise for “experimenting” with and “editing” the first sanctioned photo of her since she underwent abdominal surgery in January.
This royal mea culpa comes after a bruising couple of days for the normally near-perfect Princess whose blow dries defy the laws of physics and whose children remain oddly spotless and uncreased in public.
And just to compound things, I’m here to tell you that the Princess has just accidentally also verified one of Prince Harry and Meghan the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s more damaging allegations about Crown Inc.
Not the claim that Kate was iffy about her sharing her lip gloss with a Suits ensemble player or that she was stingy with the hugs or that the Waleses had a much nicer sofa than the Sussexes, but that the royal communications machine cannot entirely be trusted to deal with the truth.
The Sussexes have been telling the world this for positively years, starting with their 2021 Oprah Winfrey detonation (did you mark the third anniversary last week?), their 2022 Netflix endurance test of feelings and iPhone filler content and then Harry’s 2023 memoir Spare.
Throughout these outings Harry and Meghan have generally stuck to beating the same drum: The royal family is suffering from a particularly pernicious case of unconscious bias; Prince William is something of a bully who gets hot and cold running preferential treatment as the heir; and that all stops are pulled out to only ever put the shiniest, most flawless faces on the Waleses publicly.
To this end, a supposedly certain Lord of the Flies-esque approach existed inside Kensington Palace, a place where the Sussexes were never allowed to hold the conch and were duly fed to the media wolves on occasion.
As Meghan told Oprah that after their 2019 wedding, “I came to understand that not only was I not being protected, but they were willing to lie to protect other members of the family but they weren’t willing to tell the truth to protect me and my husband.”
The Duke told the cameras for their six-parter that, “It’s a dirty game.”
“I have 30 years’ experience of looking behind the curtain and seeing how this system works and how it runs. I mean, just constant briefings about other members of the family, about favours, inviting the press in,” he said.
“You know, there’s leaking, but there’s also planting of stories. So if the comms team want to be able to remove a negative story about their principle, they will trade and give you something about someone else’s principle.”
In January 2020, Kensington Palace put out a joint statement, purportedly from both Harry and William, pushing back against claims that the elder prince had bullied his brother.
The Duke of Sussex writes in his autobiography of the statement: “No one had asked me permission to put my name to a statement like that. And I rang M and I told her, and she burst into floods of tears, because within four hours, they were happy to lie to protect my brother, and yet for three years, they were never willing to tell the truth to protect us.”
Likewise Meghan’s characterisation of the extent to which she was not protected by Crown Inc in the face of negative claims, such as that she had made Kate cry during bridesmaid dress fittings. (Ladies of the Flies?)
The Duchess told Oprah that the opposite had happened, a scene that left the Duchess, as Harry writes in Spare, “on the floor. Sobbing”.
All of these claims about the palace and the press, to some degree, got a bit lost in the slipstream given the couple’s other, more sensational claims such as that there had been “concerns and conversations” about their unborn first child’s skin colour.
But the events of the last 36 hours have cast all of this in a new light.
Big picture: William and Kate’s entire handling of the Princess’s sick leave since she underwent abdominal surgery in January, with her being sequestered away at their Windsor and Norfolk properties to recuperate like some wan 19th century damsel, has felt obdurate and blatantly disregarding of public feeling.
The Prince of Wales is simply protecting his wife, the palace line has gone, and will continue to do so, no matter how much the hoi polloi and their overworked scrolling thumbs angrily post and pout and get in a strop.
However, then, on Sunday, William and Kate released an official image of her with their three kids, a seemingly sweet move which instead blew up like a powder keg left next to one of Fergie’s ylang ylang candles. Within 12 hours of it being made public, five major news agencies (Getty, Reuters, the Associated Press and AFP and the Press Association) issued a kill notice on the grounds that it had been “manipulated”.
On Monday morning, UK time, the Princess was forced into the highly embarrassing – and never before seen – position of having to issue a public apology.
And just like that, there we have it. Cold, hard confirmation that what the royal family “feeds” the public is tweaked and fondled with and manhandled to suit them.
To some degree, grips must be gotten here. There is not a celebrity, politician or two-bit wannabe plant-fluencer who does not clean up images before they post them. We live in a perennially filtered age of media consumption.
So too, there have been instances before of the royal family putting out some pretty crude Photoshoppery that a wary or knowing eye could easily discern had been twiddled with. For example, the image of the late Queen and 10 grandchildren and great-grandchildren incredibly all looking at the camera or the portrait shared by the palace to mark Prince Philip’s 99th birthday in which Her late Majesty’s hand looks like it has been Uhu-ed on.
However, what this Kate rigmarole is all about is trust.
For weeks now, the trust in Kensington Palace has been being eroded, chunk by chunk, minute by minute, tweet by tweet. Presented with a vacuum and with a Easter Island-like resolutely silent royal outfit, the internet started to come up with their own dubious, extreme and preposterous conclusions about what was going on.
The Waleses have inadvertently only stoked these fires, again and again, with William ditching his godfather King Constantine’s memorial service and then the palace reportedly doing their best Gepetto and pulling strings to stymie the publication of an unofficial paparazzi shot of Kate and her mother Carole Middleton driving at Windsor.
The coup de grâce though has been the Kate Photoshop furore, which essentially serves as a corroboration from no lesser a source than the Princess of Wales of what the Sussexes have long said. Basically, plain dealing does not necessarily have a place in the palace snakepit.
It is only Tuesday and already this has been one of the strangest, most bizarre weeks in recent royal history.
We will still probably still be trying to wrap our heads around this weird, largely unfathomable episode when Princess Charlotte is off at university sculling her first pint of snakebite and black.
As Oscar Wilde wrote, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple” – and after this week I think it’s fair to add, rarely unfiltered.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
Originally published as Meghan Markle has last laugh in Kate Middleton photo furore
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