Inside story: how Kate’s post passed the gatekeepers
The Wales household is in flux, but it only partly explains how Kensington Palace missed so many red flags around the Princess of Wales’ Mother’s Day photo fail.
When the picture came through on Saturday it was the result Kensington Palace aides had been hoping for: a new family photograph for public release.
In it, the Princess of Wales could be seen looking healthy and happy as she posed in a wicker chair surrounded by her three children: Prince George, 10, Princess Charlotte, 8, and Prince Louis, 5.
It would be a heartwarming posting to the public the following day, with Mother’s Day providing the ideal opportunity for the princess, 42, to thank the public for their support and good wishes and provide some reassurance about her health as she continued her recovery from abdominal surgery.
With the benefit of hindsight, there may have been a question over whether, perhaps, the picture was a little too good to be true. The first red flag might have been that the seemingly perfect image was shot in a 40-minute window on Friday in Windsor. Family schedules and time constraints meant that the picture had to happen when the Waleses were back together after their various activities.
The following day Kate circulated the image to her team. It was not immediately obvious that it was the subject of an unfortunate edit in Photoshop.
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 the Waleses would have had to have been extremely lucky to have captured such an engaging picture.
If there was any surprise when the picture was circulated internally at Kensington Palace on Saturday, it was mostly due to its mere existence.
For weeks aides had been discussing how and when they might release a new image of the princess.
Online rumours had been circulating for weeks about Kate’s “disappearance”, while a photograph had been sold to US websites that showed Kate wearing sunglasses being driven in a car by her mother, Carole.
While much of the chatter was absurd it had, a Kensington Palace aide said, been “distressing” for Kate. The photograph, then, would act as a reassuring sign that the princess was recovering well.
A PR plan was put into place for the image, and its corresponding message, to be circulated at 9am on Sunday.
However, within hours of its publication, theories were circulating online that the photo had been doctored. Armchair detectives pointed to Princess Charlotte’s blurred cuff and myriad other discrepancies.
The mood changed at the palace when the major news agencies started to drop the image, sending “kill” messages to picture desks around the world after advising them that the image had been “manipulated”.
A shocked palace assessed the situation and went back to William and Kate, who confirmed that she was the culprit behind the image manipulation.
The princess thought that honesty was “the best policy” and wanted to “own up” and acknowledge the mistake.
A palace insider said that Kate felt “awful” about the altered image and that she had just tried to make the image the “best it could be”.
They added that she was also thinking of her own children when editing the picture, hoping that they looked good for their own sakes.
After agreeing on the words, Kate released a statement on Twitter/X in which she apologised for “any confusion” over the picture. “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” she said.
Kensington Palace refused to explain what software was used to edit the picture or the ways in which the original had been changed. However, Sky News said that one of its technicians had analysed the photo’s metadata, which revealed that it was saved in Adobe Photoshop twice on an Apple Mac and that the picture was taken on a Canon 5D Mark IV, with a Canon 50mm lens. The broadcaster said that the image was first saved at 9.54pm on Friday and the second at 9.39am on Saturday. It is not clear if both saves were made 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 Wales household being in flux.
William and Kate’s palace team is in transition after restructuring. It has advertised for a chief executive but has yet to announce the successful candidate. The widely respected Jean-Christophe Gray, a civil servant and former spokesman for David Cameron while he was prime minister, was private secretary to William until he transferred back to government recently.
Instead, William and Kate both have new private secretaries who are well respected but new to their roles. Ian Patrick joined the household for William last month as Gray’s successor. A former private secretary to Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, Patrick has an exemplary track record and sits on the board of trustees for the charity Crohn’s & Colitis UK.
Kate, meanwhile, has hired Lieutenant Colonel Tom White to fill a role that had been vacant for at least a year after the departure of Hannah Cockburn-Logie.
The Times
