As I write this at 330am in Los Angeles, Duana and I are screaming in our hotel room over what just crossed the wires, in old people speak, lol. I’ve just woken up from a 45 minute nap because I am exhausted from three days straight of Oscar television prep, Duana is still rocking and rolling, but before, my intention before the nap was that the next post on my checklist was the controversy that has erupted around Princess Kate and her Mother’s Day photo… 

 

And then I wake up and there’s yet another f-cking crazy ass development which, thank god for my nap because otherwise I would have had to throw out everything I had previously written since these people CANNOT put a foot right these days – what is this chaos?! 

Let’s back up and briefly run through the situation. 

Yesterday was Mother’s Day in the UK. Kensington Palace usually releases a photo of Kate with the children but of course the Mother’s Day message this year was especially loaded because Kate is the new Waldo. So here it is – the photo that made it all worse. Kensington Palace released it to the media explaining that it was Prince William who had taken the photo… recently: 

This is what happens when you underestimate the public, the internet; when you are lazy and stupid; when you think you can fix a modern problem with a primitive toolbox. They did not anticipate the forensics. Online CSI quickly clocked that the image didn’t look right, that it had been f-cked with, side-eyeing everything from the greenery in the background and questioning the timeline to the eye shape and the pupils of every person in the shot, and in particular zeroed in on Kate’s weird hands. 

 

Hilariously British media went ahead and published the photo without incident but ended up looking idiotic when four international outlets flagged the picture, with the AP issuing a “kill notification”, advising outlets to not run the photo because it was suspected of having been “manipulated”:

That’s where we were before I took my short nap. And it’s bad enough. Because now we’ve gone beyond a social media conspiracy theory – legitimate news agencies are questioning the authenticity of a photo that came directly from the British royal family, directly from Kensington Palace which is a MAJOR assault on the British monarchy’s reputation! These news agencies are basically putting it on paper that they think the Firm is lying, an unprecedented repudiation of what the institution is supposed to symbolise: righteous, reliable, unimpeachable. And that puts Kensington Palace into crisis mode, because while they can ignore the chaos that’s happening on Twitter, they cannot ignore it when actual news organisations reject their contributions to the news. 

 

So that’s where we were before I went down for a break…only to wake up to find, YET AGAIN, that they showed their asses. 

What… Is….Happening?! 

I saw this before Duana. She was furiously typing away at her assignment list when I started hollering and scared the sh-t out of her. IS THIS FOR REAL?!? Seriously had to fact check it because…again… UNPRECEDENTED!

 

Never explain, never complain, remember? 

And here we are, the British royals, the Princess of Wales, having to APOLOGISE because she photoshopped a photo that was supposedly taken by William – three weeks after half the planet, it seems, has issued a missing person alert for her. As our friend Lolo just texted to us on the group chat, these people are “stepping on every rake in the garden”. 

This is the best they could come up with after several hours of crisis management?! The goal was to defuse the situation and there is one very obvious solution to achieve that. And since they already found out the hard way that putting out a doctored photo from an undetermined time (the Mother’s Day photo could easily have been from last fall) didn’t do the job, whyyyyyyyyyyyyy would they think that a statement that could have been written by anyone would get it done? 

 

The fact that they keep going out of their way to avoid doing the thing that would shut down any and all speculation and conspiracy is what keeps fueling the speculation and conspiracy. I don’t want to be the person out here demanding that Kate be seen. And, like, a month ago – before William bailed on his godfather’s memorial service, and before that blurry ass photo of Kate with Carole Middleton was taken by the paps  – I wasn’t part of the circus on social media doing WebMD on her medical condition.

But the royals and the people who manage their affairs, they’ve changed the conversation now. It’s been unforced error after unforced error. They didn’t have to post the Mother’s Day photo. IT WAS OSCAR SUNDAY! So much attention was already being consumed by the red carpet – they could have let Mother’s Day quietly come and go, status quo with whatever her health situation is, and let the Oscar headlines dominate the cycle today. 

 

But these geniuses, they couldn’t help themselves. Almost like they’re addicted to scoring on their own goal. So on top of whatever it is that they’re dealing with in secret behind palace gates, they have materially eroded public trust in the institution and they’ve made themselves even more of a joke than they were 24 hours ago. 

And… with Kate assuming responsibility for this latest cockup, to some it might also seem like they’ve thrown her under the bus. If that really ends up being the case, she’d be the latest in a growing line of women married into this family who’ve been forced to eat sh-t and then thrown to the wolves in order to protect the throne. For over a decade now, Kate Middleton has been held up as the British monarchy’s crown jewel, their Most Valuable Player, an angel queen for the future. But if they’re leaving her out to dry, too, this truly is an implosion.