What else don’t the royals want us to see?
The IndependentOn first reading, the row about the Princess of Wales’s Mothering Sunday photograph appears to be the epitome of royal trivia. In the words of Kate herself: “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing.” Unfortunately for her, as well as for Prince William and their advisers, it In the case of this unfortunate snap – already referred to in tabloid circles as “Kategate” – it has had some calamitous consequences for their public image, and for the trust the public invest in the institution of the monarchy. When they do, previous episodes show that the result can be grievous indeed for them – the deceptions around the so-called “war of the Waleses” in the 1990s being a particularly powerful warning from history. The Princess of Wales certainly looked well and fully recovered in the image, so far as it was indeed a contemporaneous representation of her, and the quickest way to resolve all of these issues would be for Kensington Palace to arrange for the broadcasters to capture a few sequences, say, of Kate with her family, walking around the garden. There remains great public goodwill towards the institution, and little appetite for the United Kingdom to become a republic, but as Elizabeth II pointedly and shrewdly observed in 1997, a hereditary monarchy can only exist with the “support and consent of the people”.