How Princess Kate turned a crisis into a PR masterstroke

Catherine, Princess of Wales has demonstrated she’s Kensington Palace’s smartest strategist. In this 2023 image she is leaving a Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey. Picture: Adrian Dennis / AFP

From the twisted innards of a palace PR disaster, the future queen has plucked a solution – a simple apology – that tells us she’s the smartest strategist the House of Windsor employs.

What’s Kate recovering from?

Maybe a hysterectomy. Possibly something gastrointestinal.

This 42-year-old mother of three – who’s always displayed sunny tolerance of the global ­obsession with her reproductive character arc – believes this, finally, is nobody’s business.

But think about it.

The Princess of Wales has a well-known history of serious pregnancy complications, and in February had planned abdominal surgery so serious it required 13 days’ recuperation in hospital and a further three months off work.

Catherine’s wish to keep that detail secret suggests – to me at least – it’s gynaecological; something she doesn’t want every mummy blogger chiming in on.

The Prince of Wales’ picture.

The Instagram apology.

But this future queen’s request for privacy is something the world has not been able to handle – and her illness has filled a void for ­content-creators who’ve run out of vaccine conspiracies, Amber-and-Johnny deep dives and opinions about Gaza.

Last week, when Kensington Palace belatedly realised it had to address the social media rumour and confirm Kate was in fact still alive and not in a cryogenic chamber or detransitioning from werewolf, someone came up with the idea of a simple family photo.

And then Kate got busy with Canva or Google Pixel or one of the other many ways in which we can edit photographs with artificial intelligence these days, and came up with a shot that made the second, third and fourth in line to the throne look like funsize Frankenstein’s monsters.

Charlotte’s crazy arm. Louis’ wonky fingers. AI can produce terrifyingly convincing deepfakes but can’t yet cope with the fact human hands generally have four fingers and a thumb.

If you’ve ever tried to photograph a group of kids, you know one is always blinking and ­another will be pulling a face or wriggling out of frame.

That’s why busy princess mums like AI editing tools.

They take multiple different shots of the same scene and merge them together in a single image, choosing the best facial expression for each individual in the shot.

The global picture agencies that issued “kill orders” on the photos are deeply humourless about picture manipulation, as is the entire news photography community.

They don’t like it if an image is flipped from left to right. They can’t stand filters. Even cropping a picture is controversial.

Fair enough. The agencies pulled the image – and that sent this slow-growing corporate affairs crisis into hyperspace.

Kensington Palace’s press ­office hadn’t been able to cope when it was just a silly Twitter ­rumour hobbyhorse.

The advisers would have been completely incapable of handling a fully fledged national crisis of confidence in the monarchy.

And then … Catherine apologised.

“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,” she said. “I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day. C.”

Has there ever been a statement more icily polite, more carefully calibrated to induce a blush?

She hopes we had a happy Mother’s Day, because she certainly didn’t.

Now back off and let her ­recover.

Before too long, Catherine will be crowned queen consort – and she will keep calm and carry on with what, until now, has been a flawless public performance.

She won’t make this mistake again.