A picture worth a thousand conspiracy theories, but now we know the truth
Princess Kate has shared with the world that she is battling cancer. We should take a moment to reflect on why we’ve been so ready to believe the wild and bizarre over sensible, real-life explanations.
We now know the truth. Princess Catherine is battling cancer. An awful way to put an end to the tornado of conspiracy theories that have surrounded the royal couple for the last several months. More on that in a moment.
Last month I took an Uber into the city to see a concert at the Sydney Opera House. The driver was a congenial chap. Plump, cheerful and chatty. These sorts of trips follow a formula, don’t they? How’s your day been? Gosh, the humidity is awful right now. The standard, polite, rideshare banter.
Well, not this night it didn’t. Just a few short blocks into our journey, I found my driver (who I should point out was basically harmless) took me on a detour down conspiracy street. We veered sharply from a harmless observation about the hype around Taylor Swift coming to town, to his firm belief that Swift was, in fact, a member of the Church of Satan. The granddaughter of the founder, no less. This turned out to be the entree before a buffet of various views, all delivered with a knowing glance and a furtive side-eye. Chem trails, he said, emphatically. The government is behind it all. They are poisoning us. I mumbled something vague about not believing everything you read.
Now, when you find yourself in an Uber and this sort of thing happens, there really is nowhere to run. Choking every instinct to tell this chap to spend more time outdoors, I nodded and smiled, offering an occasional “Really? I hadn’t heard that”, all the while practising my deep breathing.
Cheerfully undeterred, he kept going, I suspect in part at least because he knew I was a captive audience. The mainstream media is part of “it” (unsure what “it” was supposed to be). We’re being lied to on the daily (he might have had a point there). I was doing quite well until, just as we were crossing the bridge, old mate went to the bad place.
The Sandy Hook massacre – in which 20 primary school children, four teachers, a principal and a school psychologist were slaughtered when 20-year-old Adam Lanza went on a shooting rampage at their Connecticut school – was the work of the CIA.
Everyone has their limits, and that was mine. Mate, please, I said. That’s offensive and it’s untrue.
“No,” he said, meeting my gaze via the rear-view mirror with a knowing, conspiratorial look. “I’ve researched it,” He dropped his voice, sotto voce. “I’ve been on the internet.” Yes, my portly dude, yes you have.
You could easily dismiss this chap as a harmless outlier with too much time on his hands and say conspiracy theories belong to the fringe. I’d probably have agreed with you until a couple of weeks ago and that Mother’s Day photo – you know, the one that broke the internet and sent the world into a tailspin and gave birth to dozens of wild and unhinged conspiracy theories about what had happened to Princess Kate.
We now know the terrible truth, that she was trying to manage the shock of a cancer diagnosis, trying to shepherd her three children through the trauma of that news and all in the context of being one of the most newsworthy women on the planet.
For those who’ve been cut off from the modern world, a quick recap. Kensington Palace released a photo of Catherine, Princess of Wales, and the kids for Mother’s Day in Britain. Hours later, several leading media outlets issued a kill notice on the image, suspecting it had been doctored.
Yes, it had, Kate admitted the next day. “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” her message on X said.
Admit it. If the kill notice had never been issued, nobody would have noticed. You have to look pretty hard to find the so-called defects pointed out by genuine and newly minted photographic experts. Oh, but she wasn’t wearing her engagement ring, I heard you say. So? Maybe she’d just finished doing the dishes. Maybe she’d been trying to bleach a stain out of George’s school sports uniform.
In case you’re wondering, the offending photo is still up on the official Instagram account of the Prince and Princess of Wales. I love that. It’s a sort of passive-aggressive, defiant “one can go and get stuffed” to the world’s media.
But even that wasn’t enough to curb the off-piste theories about where Kate really was.
Depending on what you read, and where, Kate was in a coma, prepping for an appearance on Celebrity Masked Singer or recovering from the after-effects of a bad haircut. Don’t scoff, that kind of trauma is real.
One theory a group of us thrashed out at lunch last weekend was based on the belief that Kate had, in fact, died and sister Pippa Middleton had been secretly installed as her doppelganger/proxy. What a time to be alive! We’ve behaved like a bunch of tweenagers high on sugar and MSG, and we just couldn’t get enough of this story.
We didn’t want it to be as simple as the palace reiterated, that Kate had been out of action for exactly the period of time it said she would be when her surgery was announced months ago; she would be off the royal tools until after Easter. Nothing had changed, the palace said. For the love of god calm down is what it should have said, too.
That was apparently way too sensible and normal for us to accept. I mean, who wants to take that on face value when instead we could entertain the notion that, really, Wills was back bonking an old flame and Kate was simply too distraught to show her face in public.
Maybe I’m naive, but to me the palace’s explanation, which was perfectly reasonable and calm and credible, should have been the end of it. And sure, you could have dismissed it all as a meaningless distraction, but this story dominated news cycles for more than a week.
Yes, it’s the future king and queen of England, but does that mean every move they make should cause us to dive off the deep end? These are serious times. These are dangerous times.
Maybe, just maybe, that’s one reason we couldn’t get enough of Kategate. Or Photogate. It’s a moment of mental escapism when so much weight is being carried by so many of us, every day of every week.
Why do we seemingly always believe the wildly ridiculous and spurn the dull and sensible truth? Maybe the notion that in many ways Kate (minus the castles and fabulous wardrobe) may not be that different from the rest of us is too much to take. I mean, the fuss when she was photographed going to the shops and buying her own bread. She’s a mum of three who has some medical issues and is trying to protect her privacy for the sake of her kids. She shared a picture on her Instagram that she had a crack at editing herself and copped a barrage for it. But despite her best efforts to keep things looking normal, gossip won the day.
Frankly, I know at least a half-dozen women that scenario could easily apply to.
We now know where she is, and I’d like to think that even the most cynical and suspicious of us wish her nothing but the very best and a speedy recovery.
