The British royal family abhors being referred to as celebrities or influencers. This is ridiculous – they are celebrities, they are the OG influencers, and over the last three months, they have courted more controversy than any Hollywood celebrity and any TikTok influencer. Every f-cking day it’s something new, a fresh embarrassment, another fumble. But the last three weeks have been an unprecedented level of chaos. So let’s just do a quick recap, because something critical happened exactly three weeks ago today that took this sh-t to DEFCON 1.
Three weeks ago today, on February 27, 2024, is when Prince William bailed on the memorial service of his godfather, King Constantine II of Greece, where he was supposed to give a reading. It was a highly unusual move at a highly unusual time, considering King Charles is not in royal rotation while he’s receiving treatment for cancer and William’s wife Kate, at the time, had not been seen since last Christmas while recovering from abdominal surgery. William’s absence was explained due to “personal reasons”.
Speculation about Kate had been limited up to that point to certain corners of social media and for the most part, mainstream media wasn’t engaging with any of the rumours, mostly respecting Kensington Palace’s explanation that Kate would be on the injured list until Easter and that no further updates would be provided unless absolutely necessary.
When William pulled out of the memorial service though, this is when the situation took a wild turn. “Personal reasons” is much too unspecific at a time when there are already so many questions and, as we saw, the conspiracy theories exploded and expanded territory, going well beyond Twitter and TikTok reaching all the way to the mainstream so that the media could not ignore it.
Exactly one week after that, TMZ published the first photo of Kate, sat passenger side in a car driven by her mother, Carole Middleton. It was low resolution, people debated whether or not it was actually her, and the situation was made worse.
A few days after that it was the Mother’s Day photo and the “kill notification” that went out when news agencies deemed the image a fraud. A day after that it was Kate’s apology, taking responsibility for editing the photo.
The following weekend, and I wrote about this yesterday, the UK Sun publishes a report that Kate was seen at a local farm shop picking up some produce and according to witnesses, she looked well. But the article was sparing in detail. No names of onlookers, no photos, no video. Which did nothing to quiet the noise.
Then, a few hours later, both the Sun and TMZ released their exclusive footage of Kate on Saturday from the farmer’s market. Kate is smiling as she and William are seen in casual clothes walking briskly.
Cue another round of everyone bashing their heads against the wall because… whyyyyy were they sitting on this?! Why did they not just release the visuals at the same time as the written report? Staggering the release of the video has only led to more doubt and suspicion. So, not surprisingly, the internet is treating the video like the moon landing, running it through all kinds of digital and AI forensics trying to either prove or disprove whether or not this is or isn’t Kate.
TMZ in their post about the video name the person who filmed it, Nelson Silva, so it’s possible that Nelson did not come forward with his footage until after the Sun decided to run their story about the Kate sighting. Still, given that there’s already such a thick foundation of skepticism, a reasonable explanation like that is not tracking with people who already have a problem trusting images that are coming from or involving Kate. Which is why TMZ had to qualify the photo in their post, clarifying that they checked the metadata on the asset to verify that it was indeed filmed on Saturday where Kate and William were reported to be.
And that, in itself, is extraordinary! The Prince and Princess of Wales are the future King and Queen of England! They are dignitaries – more than just dignitaries, William will one day be the Head of State! And we have come to the point where a video of him with his wife has to be authenticated like they’re hackers?!
This is F-CKING CRAZY, and don’t let anyone tell you it’s not. Don’t let the sycophantic British tabloids downplay how out of goddamn control it’s become and don’t let them assign all the blame to the internet and the trolls because Kensington Palace has to eat a lot of this, most of this, too. William and Kate and their teams have failed on every level of modern communication through a combination of unpreparedness, lack of imagination, and sheer arrogance. Arrogance is, to go back to my original point, William dropping out of the memorial service and offering such a vague and opaque explanation for his absence…
It was a truculent “none of your business” answer which, yes, is appropriate at certain times on certain occasions when it is, indeed, none of our business. But at this time, on this occasion, as the most senior active member of an institution that is supposed to symbolise stability, that is meant to ALWAYS BE THERE, steady and constant, when the King’s health is compromised, when his wife’s health was a mystery, “none of your business” was not strategically the right call. You can’t tersely tell people it’s none of their business at a time when people are worried about the wellbeing of the monarch and the future queen. “None of your business” in this case is William’s inability to read the room. “None of your business” in this case resulted in everybody getting up in his business.
Which brings us to Rose Hanbury and the rumours of an affair between her and William. These have been floating around for years, and up to now we haven’t heard from Rose. But now, due to all this f-cking incompetence, Rose’s ass has been dragged into the mess, and she’s just denied, through her lawyers, that she has anything to do with it. In a story in Business Insider, Rose’s legal representatives have issued a statement that “the rumours are completely false”. And it’s not just the rumours about an alleged affair, it’s also that the internet is deep-diving on Rose and her husband, David Rocksavage, and ostensibly false accusations about infidelity might not be their biggest problem.
People are coming for their stolen furniture now, LOLOLLLOOL.
Cheating rumours are inconsequential for aristocrats, that sh-t happens all the time, it’s a shrug. What rich white people worry about the most is their property, and you know it’s bad when they start getting anxious about the sh-t they’ve been desperately clinging onto.
Back to Kate and how she’s been found…
The KateAnons out there will never be convinced. They’ve already started a new hashtag #FakeKate and, like I said yesterday, until the Princess of Wales starts streaming on OnlyFans, they will not change their minds. So this video hasn’t changed much where those people are concerned.
For others, who are more rational, the great news is that Kate is OK. The bad news is that this is one of the few times that great news isn’t widely accepted to be great news. This is how low the British royal family has fallen – that the sight of a healthy princess is met with such polarising reactions. And the worst part of that might be that the royals will refuse to accept that this is a problem; they will try to breeze through it, like there isn’t something to be learned here – a takeaway about how they should modify, evolve, their approach to the public in these devastatingly unpredictable times, and maybe not to be such a f-cking suck, William, when it comes to public appearance and pulling out of them at the last minute when the King is sick and your wife is missing. It always comes back to this: their refusal to listen, adjust, and change….
When it doesn’t have to be that hard!
Example: look at how Kate changed her hair! To me this is part of why people don’t think it’s her (for the record, I DO think it’s her) because we are so used to seeing her in those corny clumpy curls, and rarely without a bend or a wave. But here her ends are straight… and it looks GOOD. Can we please see more of this when she’s, um, finally ready to go back to work?
We're Squawking about this today. (app link here)
Also attached - Prince William visiting Sheffield today.
