Prince William's manipulated Mother's Day photo, featuring Princess Catherine and missing sleeves on Princess Charlotte, was deleted by Reuters and AP after experts exposed digital errors. Despite Catherine's Instagram apology claiming self-editing, guests Tessa Dunlot and Alex O'Connor argue the Palace's refusal to release the original fueled deepfake theories and body double claims. This transparency failure exacerbates public distrust during King Charles's cancer diagnosis and Prince Andrew's disgrace, suggesting the monarchy's crisis management backfired by inflaming gossip rather than quelling it. [Automatically generated summary]
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Trust Erosion and Royal Photos00:14:14
Lury conspiracies and wild speculation about the Princess of Wales have dominated conversation about the royals for many weeks.
Well this beaming family photo released to mark the British Mother's Day on Sunday was supposed to end all that and for most of yesterday afternoon it worked.
The picture of Smiling Kate kills the absurd conspiracy theories said the Daily Mail.
I'm smiles better, Kate's joyous Mother's Day photo made a front page splash of the Metro.
The front page of the Express says Kate thanks to Nation for its support with charming photo that proves she's on the mend.
But just as these newspapers were rolling off the presses last night, a bombshell development, myriad major global picture agencies announced they'd taken the unprecedented decision to kill the picture, deleting it entirely from their systems over concerns it had been manipulated at source.
And on closer inspection, well there couldn't be much doubt about that.
There's a glaring empty space where Princess Charlotte's sleeves should be.
Charlotte's hair seems to end abruptly on her left shoulder.
The corner of her skirt is oddly pointed.
In the background behind Prince Louis' legs, the white step is a clear break and a jaggy gap where there should be a straight line.
And the list goes on and on.
There are 16 basic rudimentary errors in total.
And that's not including question marks of whether the leaves on the trees show this part of the photo is actually months old.
The photo apparently taken by the Prince of Wales himself last week has very clearly been manipulated and manipulated pretty badly.
Now Catherine hasn't been seen at an official event since Christmas Day.
She was hospitalised in January for serious abdominal surgery requiring her to be in hospital two weeks and we were told she'd then be away from public duties until after Easter which is the middle of April.
But we still don't know what her condition actually is or what the surgery was for or how sick or otherwise she really is and the royals have provided very scant details about her recovery.
That's fine.
It's a private matter for them.
But conspiracies have inevitably filled the vacuum in this world of social media.
Royal watchers are speculating about everything from her health to the state of her marriage and all this photograph has successfully done rather than douse the flames of gossip is inflame them.
It's become the gasoline.
Well today the Princess of Wales took the rap writing on Instagram that she'd edited the photograph herself saying like many amateur photographs, I do photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing.
I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion that the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.
I hope everyone is celebrating and a very happy Mother's Day.
Okay, but it's really what she didn't say rather than what she did say.
Was she well enough to pose for that picture?
Was it a new picture, actually?
If it was a composite picture, how much of that is actually from last week when we were told in briefings from the palace that Prince William took that image?
And why didn't they realize that of the many, many unedited family pictures the public hasn't seen, any of those could have done the trick without being heavily edited and creating suspicion?
Will they now release the original photograph and tell us exactly when it was taken?
Well they're saying they won't.
And that's the kind of thing that you haven't got to be a conspiracy theorist for to think is a bit weird.
This has been a humbling and humiliating episode for the Royal Family at the worst possible time for a family that's been under so much stress and pressure recently.
And of course they've made much of the transparency over the king's cancer diagnosis, although again, we don't know what cancer it is.
It's a painful lesson for the monarchy perhaps about honesty control in this new age of social media.
And the only way out of the corner they've painted themselves is to tell the full story and release the original photograph.
I think they owe that now to the public.
Well for more, I'm joined by the royal historian and author Tessa Dunlot, the Republican YouTuber Alex O'Connor and the author and Daily Mail columnist Maureen Kagan from across the pond in the United States.
Turn to you Maureen first of all.
A Daily Mail, like every paper, early on, very ecstatically happy to see Kate looking so happy herself and so healthy.
That was certainly my reaction.
But I remember where I was last night watching the news when suddenly, bang, up popped this fact that all these major agencies from Reuters to AP to Getty were all killing the image completely because of issues with the veracity of the image at source.
In other words, the people who took the picture, well, we know William took it and Kate now edited it.
What do you make of this?
I mean, how big a deceit is it for the public and how damaging to the public trust in the royal family?
Well, it's quite unprecedented, Piers, as you noted, that global, multiple global news agencies would unanimously kill this image and say we cannot run it because it's clearly a fake.
And it's so strange.
It makes you really question who is advising William and Kate as to their public relations and going forward with Kate's recovery.
This is a completely self-inflicted wound.
They did not have to issue this photo.
They did not, as you said, have to issue any photo, but if they felt it was necessary, it could have been one taken at any time in the past year.
This image of Kate this morning that we saw in the United States of Kate with William in the back of a car, but her head turned away from cameras indicates a sort of defiance that she's now being trotted out to prove how well she's doing, but she does not want to play along.
It makes one wonder why Kate was the one who had to fall on her sword and say she manipulated the photo when Prince William was given the photo credit.
Kate Middleton has a ton of goodwill on both sides of the pond.
I don't think anybody feels she owes the public any explanation as to her health.
But when the palace starts playing fast and loose with the facts, when they start playing around with imagery meant to prove her health in an era of deep existential fear about deep fakes and AI, you're going to lose some trust.
And it really just throws into relief how much Queen Elizabeth masterfully engendered that trust and took care of that trust.
And this new slimline monarchy that we're seeing with two of its most important charismatic figures down seems to be cracking under the strain.
Yeah, it does.
Tessa, I mean, the late, great queen, her great mantra was always, never complain, never explain, rarely be heard speaking in public.
Just do your duty and the public will respect you.
And she was the most popular public figure on the planet when she died.
I've got a horrible feeling this picture was not taken last week.
Now, I might be wrong, and I hope I am wrong, because the implications, if I'm right, are that they have really spun a deliberate lie on the public to protect the public or to hide from the public, not protect, to protect themselves, but hide from the public the reality of how she looks and how she may be.
Now, I don't know that.
I just have a gut feeling.
If you compare the paparazzi picture taken last week that TMZ ran in America with the picture that was released yesterday, it is light and shade in terms of one person looking pretty unwell and the other person looking a bastion of good bursting vitality and health.
What do you make of this?
I think there were several SEs.
One is the immediate media feeding frenzy and the clumsy.
Inevitably.
Inevitably, and the clumsy way in which...
But even you can't blame the media.
I don't blame the media and the clumsy way the palace has handled this current crisis.
And the second is a larger existential crisis for the royal family.
So let's go to the first one.
What's happened?
And the very dubious response from Kensington Palace this morning, with Kate, their vulnerable, unwell player, being the one...
put forward to take the flack.
A photograph she clearly didn't take because she was in it and yet she was the one editing it.
The story didn't even stack up at that point.
On that point let me just jump in there.
She has in recent years taken almost all the pictures right of her with the kids and William with the kids whatever, and you know she's done that to remove the media.
Who did do that?
That's about control right, it's about control.
So there is a long track record in recent years of her taking the pictures and presumably editing them.
And we remember the christmas card picture at christmas I mean Louis, you know his hands all over the place and so on clearly not the first time she had editing issues.
So I think on that point, it's quite possible that he took it and she edited.
I found it quite unlikely, I mean, just as someone who's got children, and the first thing that struck me I didn't hone in right closely on knees and elbows, but I did think wow, future king and budding photographer, I mean, have you ever managed to take such a brilliant amateur photography with all four, absolutely as they should be.
It was an extraordinarily accomplished effort by William, if indeed he took it.
That's what immediately piqued my interest.
But okay, even if Kate was the one to edit it clearly, the gaffe arguably wasn't hers.
It had to go through filters at the palace.
It was in William's name.
Why was she the one put up to take the flack?
Do you know why?
Because the palace knows full well we are much less likely to come down hard on Kate than we are on William possibly, or indeed the Seats Possible.
Yeah, she's a softer target and that's what they're hoping for.
For us to back off of it.
Yeah, it may be.
I mean Alex look, you're not a massive fan of the monarchy by any means.
You're an anti-monarchist.
From a PR perspective though, what do you make of this?
Disastrous and amusing, I must say.
It's good to see you again, Piers.
Congratulations on becoming a YouTuber, thank you, it's a lifelong aspiration.
It is nice to speak to you as a I like it on YouTube.
Just take more time.
We can have a debate here and just chew the flat until we run out of steam.
Piers, you're so old.
It couldn't have been a lifetime aspiration because there was no YouTube man.
I like the new format.
Perhaps, unlike Prince Andrew's former pal, I might actually manage to get to the end of my sentence this time.
We'll see, I don't know.
It's nice, by the way, to hear you also calling for accountability from the royal family.
That's something that I suppose I'm not used to when sat in this room.
Well, hang on, I do think they should always be held accountable.
The taxpayer in this country pays for the royal family.
I just think there's a deal there where the royals put in the duty.
I think they're entitled to the palaces and the trimmings and everything else if they put the duty in, and I do believe that the net some zero effect of the royals.
They wash their face by bringing you more money than they cost.
So that's my position on them.
Right, you and I have debated that, but I don't think they should never be unaccountable and I certainly don't believe in that.
They're not elected officials, but absolutely they're accountable to the British public, and my issue with this story is it goes to the heart of trust how are they accountable to the British public if not by people like the media, actually by us?
And that's where I think Alex has a point.
You have dropped the ball a little bit recently because you've been focused on how some decito well, actually means that that means that the royal family is about as accountable as any other form of celebrity.
I mean, every celebrity is accountable to, except that they are publicly funded.
Yeah, I suppose for that reason they should probably have a level of higher accountability.
That is, I can't argue the royal family don't get accountability.
We see they're the most scrutinized family in the world.
Actually, we seem to agree on the point of accountability.
I suppose we disagree on the mechanism and the extent.
The reason I say this is amusing is because, For one thing, this seems to me something of a non-story.
I mean, every single photo that ever goes out, and I'm not exaggerating here, unless it's your friend on Facebook or something, every photo that ever goes out is manipulated in some way.
Usually that might be a good idea.
You're missing the point of the story, which is that they gave, they released this to me.
The context of this.
Well, no, it's very straightforward.
They released this to all the major news agencies who all have the exact same cardinal rule.
They will only put out, they're all neutral, they're not politically partisan at all.
They will only put out images if they are genuine images.
And they were clearly led to believe by the palace these are genuine images.
Hence, the embarrassment for everybody when they discover pretty quickly from probably from the internet, from social media, people pointing out, well, hang on, look at Miss Han, look at Miss Cardigan, look at Miss whatever.
They all realized this picture had been edited.
They just weren't sure how much.
Now, like I say, the really damaging thing for this may still be to come.
If it turns out that picture was not taken last week and they said that to the media to spin a lie about this is how Kate now looks, that's a question of trust.
That's, of course, an important thing to point out, but I would say that if they're, so whatever edits have been done here, and it is blatantly obvious, it's almost comical how bad some of these cuts are.
We don't know what it is, but I would say that if there's anybody harboring conspiratorial notions that this is some grand concept to try to deceive the press and the British people into thinking something is the case, that it's not, you don't think they might have taken a little bit more care than to allow such egregious mistakes to fall through the pressure.
I don't think they thought about it that carefully.
That's the problem.
If this was seriously an attempt by Kensington Palace to paint a knowingly false image of the royal family.
I reckon, you know what I reckon?
You don't think that they think that they would have allowed, first sorry, you think they would have allowed Kate and William themselves to be able to do that.
I actually think they've been secondly, you don't think somebody would look over this before.
Well, I have a big issue.
However, if, however, well, now you say hold on, but like you say, we have the opportunity here to expand the conversations and hopefully get to the end of a sentence.
Maybe I'll make it at the end of a full stop.
It would be nice.
It would be novel.
Again, something that I haven't experienced yet in this interview.
If you spent more time spending...
I got so close.
I just want to ask you this.
If you spend more time making your point than telling me you can't make your point of view.
You've equated this to every other person fiddling about on Facebook.
Palace Misleading the Media00:03:46
If that's the case, why don't they just throw into the public domain the original photograph?
Oh, look, here Charlotte is with the real sleeve, and here I am with my half zip.
I fear the reason for that.
I'm not trying to interrupt you.
I'm going to make a point.
It's funny.
You don't let me start.
I suppose.
I fear the reason.
Get granddad finish.
Listen, you can talk.
You just have to, at some stage, make a point and finish and let me respond.
Oh, is it time now?
That's fine.
Look, you may be, it may be true.
It may be true.
All I'm saying is that whatever these edits are, if this has been edited, as I suspect, for a relatively minor reason, as some people have suggested, family photos are difficult because children fidget.
And so if they wanted to release the original photo, what would you be releasing?
You'd be releasing an image of a royal child looking not very professional.
And that would get rid of all the scandal and all the conspiracy theories and we could all move on to something else.
This is my problem.
Bringing back Maureen, I mean, this is my big issue with this.
The whole point of releasing this image was to counter the negativity that came from the TMZ Paparazzi picture, where she looked, you know, as I would have expected her to look, very drawn, very tired, like somebody who'd been through major surgery and was recovering pretty slowly.
That picture of her in the car with her mother.
We weren't allowed to show people in this country that picture, which is another weird anachronism where the rest of the world, including all over America, they were able to see our future queen, but we weren't here in this country because of the agreement between the media and the palace.
That is why that trust is so important, because if the media has not published that picture last week, which they didn't in this country, because of a level of trust with them and the palace, if they have now been deliberately misled by the same palace into thinking this picture was taken last week and shows the Princess of Wales in the full flush of revitalized good health, which it looked like it was,
if that turns out to be untrue, that's a major hemorrhaging, not just of the contract of trust between the media and the palace, which, as I say, last week, the media held off in this country publishing it, but a massive breach of the contract of trust with the British people who pay for the royal family here and are entitled to know that these kind of pictures are genuine.
And if they're apparently taken last week, they're taken last week.
I couldn't agree with you more, Piers.
It's so strange, this attempt, this flat-footed amateur hour attempt to kill all of these conspiracy theories that are swirling around the internet.
They've just fanned the flames that much harder.
The image that we saw in America that ran on TMZ was a very grainy photo.
And Kate looked, as you said, she looked wan.
She looked drawn.
She did not look well.
But an image like that was so grainy and strange, you could have any number of conspiracists say, well, that doesn't even really look like Kate.
That's a body double, whatever.
But to not be able, for the palace to be unable to come forward and say, you know what, we did a little bit of trickery, a little bit of sleight of hand.
Here's the original image makes everybody that much more suspicious.
I was just talking to somebody else who compared the photo of Kate, her facial expression, the face itself, as looking almost exactly like her British Vogue colour.
Yeah, I saw that.
That it seems to have been a lot of fun.
If we're talking about that level of Frankenstinian manipulation, the palace is going to have so much to answer for, and rightly so.
I agree.
And look, these are some of the conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy Theories Explode00:05:32
They're all obviously nonsense.
But this is what's been happening in the last six weeks, that she's growing disastrous curtain bangs.
She got lost at the Willy Wonka Chocolate experience.
She's had a Brazilian butt lift.
She's transitioning.
One post read, not a single Banksy since Kate Middleson disappeared.
Coincidence?
She's run away, Paul de Gong girl.
She's living a nomadic van life.
They've replaced her with a wax figure.
Her sister Pippa replaced her in that car picture.
And so on and so on and so on.
It's the new pool is dead.
It's the new pool is dead.
And the editor is so bad that, I mean, they say that when the Beatles discovered this conspiracy about Paul being dead, they actually started to intentionally do things that would trigger such conspiracies because they found it funny.
And with the editing this bad, you might think they'd done the same thing.
But the problem here is it's not funny, Tessa, because the stakes for the royal family right now and the monarchy have never really been higher.
I mean, you look at the Slim Diemonika, you've got King Charles, who's got cancer in his mid-70s, always serious.
We don't know how serious his condition is, but they're obviously very worried about him.
You've got William now, whose wife, his future queen, is also struck down by a mystery condition, which has led to all this fever speculation, which they've now tossed gasoline on.
You've got Andrew disgraced and thrown out.
You've got the Montecito duo, who I won't labor the point, but they're over in California trashing the family and so on.
You put it all together.
This is a family where the fabric, the foundation, having lost Prince Philip, lost the queen.
They lost the Queen Mother recently in recent years, last 10 years.
You put it all together.
These are big blows.
Now, it was predictable there would be something of a crisis post the late queen.
She was so extraordinary.
Heroma on for so long and all the kind of tinsel and the hoo-ha around the funeral of the coronation are to distract from the difficulty of any royal transition.
But I don't think any of the royal experts that I know expected the chickens to come home to roost as quickly as they have.
We have Charles with an unnamed cancer, the main player, the king.
The other main player, the tinsel and fairy dust individual who captivates us with her glamour and her smiles and her seeming effortless grace, is also ill.
Again, unnamed.
We don't know what the condition is.
Now, one of the aspects, the extraordinary aspects of Philip and Elizabeth was their health.
It is an essential ingredient for monarchy, and the other one, a willingness to do the job.
And at the moment, our royal family reflect the country.
They are unhappy, they are unhealthy, and they are angry.
And actually, the two that aren't, William and Camilla, are the two most reluctant.
You never really feel.
And actually, fair play to Camilla, is that to step up and do a lot of stuff she wouldn't normally do in her mid-70s.
And don't forget.
If we had a few days' break, everyone went nuts at her.
I was like, dude, give the woman a break.
But arguably, and this is where I do turn it on you, Piers, even though I feel a bit warmer to you today.
Is that the need to be seen?
The late Queen always said to be believed, I have to be seen.
But actually, we don't know how or where to draw the line.
And the mechanism is...
You know, the thing that really worried me about it all was when William didn't go to the memorial service for the former king of Greece, who was his godfather.
And it was next door.
And a close friend, and he was literally next door.
And he pulled out at the last minute from reading the lesson at his godfather's memorial.
And there's been no explanation.
No.
He popped up at some event the next day or the day after as if like nothing had happened.
What happened then to make him miss doing that for his godfather?
So there's a lot going on here.
There's a lot going on.
So you need good health.
And we know that they don't have that right now.
You need to want to do the job.
And I flag that up once again.
We know the Queen believed in the divine power.
She also believed in the show must go on.
Alex, you would clearly, you don't want the show to go on.
Do you actually think this, what we're going through now, is going to hasten the end of the monarchy?
It seems like everything that the monarchy does is hastening the end of the monarchy.
It's a good day for me.
You might not remember the last time we were on camera together, we shook hands on a bet for £10 that the monarchy would be abolished.
We didn't put a time scale on it.
What time scale would you put on it?
Perhaps now we don't have to.
Would you put a time scale?
Well, it's difficult to predict, but I would certainly say that within our lifetimes, I would be surprised if it wasn't.
Well, you're younger than me.
So whose lifetime are you talking about?
I can speak to your estate.
I sit in the middle.
Why don't you go through me?
By the way, you need to put inflation on that.
I don't think it'll happen in my lifetime or your lifetime.
But I certainly think at the moment that it's looking quite perilous.
If you ask people now in the street what they think of the monarchy generally, you get a majority of people, certainly older people, saying that they're in favour of it.
I would imagine this is a bit like asking people in 2012 what they think about the European Union.
You go in the street, you ask them, and they sort of go, yeah, sure, sounds great, whatever.
It's only when it becomes a serious national question and the points start being raised on mainstream television and mainstream debate platforms that people begin to realize, hold on a second, there isn't much water here.
By the way, the reason that I think that this original photo probably isn't being released is because whatever editing has been done here, they're obviously concealing something.
Now, I'm not conspiratorial about this, but even if it is just because, you know, Prince George sneezed, the reason they're not going to want to release that is because you have a picture in that case, which will do what I think all the instance of the editing itself has done, which has proved to people that despite, I mean, the airbrushed photo is something of a representation of monarchy in general, an attempt to airbrush a family to make them look more perfect than they are.
But in a modern world, they're unable to cover up the inevitable photography of the people.
If only it was one of the kids sneezing that was the problem for why they don't want to release the original.
Deep Concerns for Kate00:04:55
Come back to Maureen.
It could be.
It could be.
Yeah, but Maureen, I think the far more likely thing is that they've airbrushed Kate in some way or used an old picture, whatever it may be.
Like I say, I really hope that's not the case because that would mean the palace has deliberately lied about when this picture was taken and made people think she's absolutely back to full health.
When even from that picture today in the car with William hiding her face, what's she hiding?
You know, so there's a lot of unanswered questions.
William disappears just before his godfather's memorial.
You now have this.
It all adds up to me to a pretty disconcerting picture.
How are Americans viewing this?
I've had an amazing number of people text me or email me from America, all saying, what's going on with Kate?
Is she okay?
You know, what's happening with William?
People are genuinely worried in America.
Oh, it's a huge story in America.
And it has been since the news broke here that she had been hospitalized, that she had an operation, and that she was going to stay in hospital for at least two weeks, which, I mean, in America, that is unheard of.
You know, that means you are like in the ICU.
They want you out of the hospital as quickly as possible.
You have major surgery here, and within hours, you're back home.
So, I mean, I think underneath all of this is a really deep concern about Kate, about how she's really doing.
Again, you know, that image this morning of her turning away from the cameras, you can read that one of two ways, or two ways.
You can read it as someone who doesn't feel she looks her best and is only ever seen as like the picture of health and wellness, or someone who is defiant, who already had to fall on her sword, claim blame for that horrible public relations misfire, say it was her mistake, and, you know, sort of refuse to play along with this dog and pony show.
I just, it really is such a mistake on their part.
And this is only fueling speculation that something is truly, really, really wrong with Kate.
I don't know how they get out of it.
With each misstep, it feels like incredibly hitchcockian to me.
I feel like I'm watching, you know, a psychological thriller from the 40s in which a woman is deeply in peril and can't get out.
And the problem is that we're all beginning to think something's up really bad because of the cackhanded way the palace has been handling this.
Tessa, we're nearing the end of our pleasant time together compared to some of our previous walls on the airways.
I bet you're longing for Harry and Megan to fart just to take the focus away.
I bet William is.
Yeah, I bet he is.
Where's my idiot brother when I need him?
What's going to happen here?
Well, I've got a big concern regarding Kate.
Anyone who's been sick for a period of time, you get off the roundabout and then you look back at that roundabout spinning around and not spinning in the way you particularly like the look of three unette curtains or the silk ones they have and you think, I don't fancy that.
What was I doing?
Going round and round on that roundabout, glad handing, smiling at the camera.
Especially if you're the future of the monarchy.
And without that pressure.
She is the lightning rod for that family.
Without Kate, they are pretty much nothing.
A few also rants who look like they're bit part players out of a Hamlet production.
They need Kate.
And my worry is that she doesn't feel she needs us.
That perhaps she doesn't fancy the gig in the way that she used to.
And I would read in that back of the car seat, what do I know?
I'm not a pop psychologist.
Tension in the marriage.
Whose marriage wouldn't be feeling the heat at the moment?
And let us not forget what the role of monarchy is.
It's to rise us up above our grubby politicians.
And at the moment, it all feels as murky as our political story.
The worst thing is they're playing down to Alex O'Connor's worst expectations.
That's quite right.
I mean, nothing about this is surprising to me.
Make me a monarchist really passionately.
There's something triggering about.
Well, at least there are some of you left.
I mean, maybe you're right.
Maybe Kate sort of doesn't like this monarchy stuff anymore, which wives of the principle of conspiracy.
I know sometimes this is what happens when you raise a family for a start, essentially unconsensually, to be monitored and, as you say, accountable to the public, at least to the press, for their entire lives.
The moment that they say, you know what, something personal is happening, I want to take a step away from public life, which is what I've been recommending that they do in its totality for a while now, suddenly the mood shifts, and I have to wonder why that is.
And I think it's clear to me that this is, if not going to cause anything like the end of the monarchy, is rather indicative of its worrying time for people who love the royal family.
I am genuinely concerned about it.
I've got one as well because it feels a little uneasy to me.
Unconsensual Public Monitoring00:00:50
Yeah, it does.
I'm good for my money, but I'm worried about what this all means and what's really going on.
Because I do know one thing about a little bit about the media and PR over my 40 years in the game, which is if you've got a big problem with conspiracy theories, what you don't do is pour fuel on the fire, which is exactly what they've done.
Tessa, good to see you.
Words I don't often use.
Alex, nice to see you.
I'd say so too.
Can we settle at that?
This has been a Maureen.
If you don't read Maureen's brilliant columns on dailymail.com, you are missing out.
They are some of the sharpest, waspish-ish, and most readable columns in the whole of global media.