It’s been 24 hours since Princess Kate’s unprecedented public apology and admission that she doctored the photo that she released on Mother’s Day in the UK, a backfired effort to shut down rampant speculation about her … existence. Seriously not kidding about the word “existence”. There are some people out there who actually think she’s been disappeared because, well, she hasn’t really appeared in months. 

 

Not even the Oscars, all those celebrities, all that fashion, and all those Kens, could mute the story of the British royal family’s latest fumble. Just as many people, if not more, were gossiping yesterday about just what the f-ck is going on with the Windsors and this whole mess. And then Will and Kate were seen in a car together leaving Windsor – or, rather, William was seen leaving in a car seated next to a woman who could be Kate and could be… me. I mean I have dark hair and cheekbones, lol, and that’s all we can say about the person in the car who isn’t Kate’s husband, you cannot definitely identify that it’s her. So, guess what? That only added to the suspicion about the situation because apparently these people can’t go one f-cking day without stepping in more sh-t. 

 

To go back to that Mother’s Day photo …which, by the way, is still up on Will and Kate’s social media, only now it’s been flagged… 

Princess Kate's portrait on social media

… like, honestly, how humiliating – to have a red texted notice on an IG post alerting people to the fact that the image has been “altered”! Like this is where we are now! An institution once known for their attention to detail and military precision, for their STANDARD, in more ways than one: the word denotes a level of quality; it can also mean a system of doing things – and the British royals are famous for their goddamn protocol; and then there’s the physical form, an actual symbol, a visual image, an object, like a flag.

 

With this photoshop f-ckery though, the STANDARD has been compromised and once a standard is compromised …well… is it any longer a standard? Does the standard have to come down? Not yet, but it’s on its way – the Firm is destroying itself from the inside. And every attempt at recovery and pivot has resulted in even more self-clowing. Once upon a time, all it took was for the Queen to wave from a balcony and all would be forgiven. Now? Now we’re doing forensics on f-cking meta data while investigating a fraudulent photo! 

The meta data in this case refers to the information stamp that accompanies every photo. Kensington Palace released that janky picture of Kate and the kids to the media and the digital fingerprint of the image reveals that it was indeed taken last Friday and was manipulated twice: 

 

The infinitesimal shred of good news here is that there is no AI involved. Photoshop, yes. Artificial intelligence no. So that is Kate. But that’s not the original photo. And we don’t know what someone did to the original and what they were trying to hide. 

Kensington Palace is refusing to release the original. Instead what we’re getting is another round of explaining. According to sources who’ve spoken to The Times, it was William who spent 40 minutes taking the photo and then Kate worked on it in photoshop. Also, apparently they had been planning this for a couple of weeks to shut down all the rumours about her condition. Which only makes everything even more laughable.

You were strategising about this for that long and this is the best you could come up with?! Clowns. 

So the plan didn’t work, blew up in their faces in fact, and now they’re trying to smooth it over. What’s the move this time? The Mom Card. 

Royal insiders are saying that Kate feels “awful” about the controversy and she did what she did because she was “thinking of her own children when editing the picture, hoping that they looked good for their own sakes”. 

Kate’s just a girl, standing in front of two boys and a girl, and wanting the best for them because she’s their mother. This was treachery and obfuscation, people! It was simply the act of a loving mother! 

 

And now that she’s been busted, she immediately offered the apology because “honesty is the best policy”. 

The problem? Not a lot of people believe that this is honest. And I’m not sure that the way to fix something that could be described as dishonest (the doctoring of the photograph) with a source quote about “honesty is the best policy” is the best way to atone for the original dishonesty?! 

You know what’s the most insulting though? I noted it yesterday when I posted about Kate’s “apology”, the fact that she had to be the one to eat this sh-t, how it looked like they were throwing her under the bus. And it just doesn’t track. 

Kate Middleton has been known to the public for almost 20 years now, and for almost 15 years as an official member of the British royal family, the future queen. And what we know of Kate is that she is not sloppy. She is vigilant about her public image – all the right angles and clean lines. Look at her outfits: there’s never a wrinkle or a fold out of place, the woman is clenched, as tightly clenched as we’ve ever seen a woman in our modern times. Buttons all the way up in a tight line, leaving no room for air or the slightest of wobbles. 

Are we supposed to believe that she would have signed her name to such shoddy photoshop? If she was the one doing the photoshop, it should not have been that chaotic. There is no f-cking way Kate Middleton would have let that get out the door. So in my opinion, that was not her work. 

 

Now William on the other hand… 

Much more careless, much less rigid, and arrogant enough to think that whatever he did in photoshop would have been good enough to release. Assuming, of course, that he even knows what to do with photoshop to begin with. And I’m not sure I buy that either. 

So that leaves a staff member who doesn’t have the skills of a TikToker trying to f-ck around with the photo to eliminate whatever details that the institution didn’t want us to see. And then passing it up the chain for someone to sign off on it. 

But who? 

Who would have signed off so haphazardly without paying close attention to the details? This is more likely William who wouldn’t have had the eye for it. But if it was indeed William, then why was it William and not Kate?

You’d think that Kate would want to approve it before it went out. And you’d think, given my aforementioned description of her infamous attention to detail, that she would have noticed how subpar the editing was. Unless of course she wasn’t shown the photo at all and just had to swallow the error. 

See? None of it lines up. No matter how you rearrange the possibilities and the various attempts to explain what happened, it doesn’t pass the test. And this is why we’re all so skeptical. 

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