Palace ire over claim of Kate ‘coma’

Palace officials are understood to be furious a Spanish news program’s false claims about the Princess of Wales’ health spread around the world.

The Princess of Wales has left hospital after abdominal surgery. Picture: AFP

Palace officials are understood to be furious that a popular Spanish news program’s false claims about the Princess of Wales’ health spread around the world.

An unfounded assertion that the princess was in a coma was made on Fiesta, which has about 900,000 viewers and is hosted by journalist Concha Calleja.

The seemingly authoritative claim, which came the day ­before Kate was released from hospital after abdominal surgery, quickly went viral.

Calleja, 59, claimed that the princess’s life “was in great danger” after the operation, and that doctors had to pull out all the stops to save her life. The journalist said she had received the information having “spoken to an aide from the royal household in a completely off-the-record manner” – a claim the palace has categorically denied.

“The doctors had to take drastic decisions at that moment because of the complications that arose,” Calleja told viewers. “The decision was to put her in an induced coma. They had to intubate her. There were serious complications that they didn’t expect because the operation went well, but the post-operative period didn’t go so well.”

The journalist and writer, who has appeared on Spanish television as a royal expert, went so far as to say that “the concern in the royal household was palpable, it was about saving her life”. She speculated that the princess’s recovery was “possibly going to require a lot of assistance, and I’m not just referring to her family”.

She claimed that healthcare staff were required in the royal residence and that “practically an entire hospital is being set up” in the couple’s home.

Calleja said the princess had first been taken to hospital for several days on December 28 after she “began to feel unwell, not for the first time”, and that the surgery was planned after that incident. Kensington Palace has vigorously denied the claims.

“It’s total nonsense,” a palace source said. “No attempt was made by that journalist to fact-check anything that she said with anyone in the household. It’s fundamentally totally made-up, and I’ll use polite English here: it’s absolutely not the case.”

The claims were picked up by a series of Spanish media outlets, including some of the country’s more serious newspapers, such as El Confidencial, La Vanguardia and La Razon.

It is not the first time foreign media organisations have infuriated the palace. When Prince Harry served in a frontline role in Afghanistan in 2008, editors agreed to a media blackout, keeping his deployment a secret, on security grounds, until his return. However, the prince, then 23, was forced to cut his tour of duty short after the Australian women’s magazine New Idea broke the embargo. In 2017, a French court ruled that paparazzi photographs published of Kate sunbathing topless on holiday with Prince William were a breach of the royal couple’s privacy.

The Times