In the annals of royal family PR disasters, the bodged attempt by Catherine, Princess of Wales to release the perfect Mother’s Day portrait of herself and her three children by digitally altering an image, was hardly the worst.
But it has had the opposite of the desired effect. Rather than providing reassurance about the princess’s recovery from abdominal surgery, it has fuelled fresh speculation about her health, firing up conspiracy theories about the reasons for her absence from the public eye since January.
On Monday, the same day that the controversy erupted, King Charles delivered his first speech since Buckingham Palace confirmed he had been diagnosed with cancer last month, commemorating virtually the 75th anniversary of the Commonwealth.
Efforts by the convalescing princess to keep up appearances were successful only in so far as they stole the limelight.
“Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” the princess explained in an apology on social media platform X after news agencies withdrew the portrait from distribution, citing signs it had been manipulated. But the damage was done. Tongues were wagging.
Clive Irving, veteran journalist and author of The Last Queen, a biography that forecast trouble for the House of Windsor following Elizabeth II’s reign, said the family had made a classic mistake.
They had partially addressed concerns about their health in public, but without becoming decisively more transparent, he said.
It is a theme that applies to other aspects of the British monarchy today, Irving added, noting that in his 18 months on the throne, King Charles has so far “missed an opportunity to show resolve in slimming down the monarchy to a more appropriate scale” as promised.
By this he meant not so much the number of royals on the payroll, which is down, as the anachronistic conventions, and overall costs, associated with them.
Before her death, the nature of the Queen’s illness and circumstances of her final hours were kept tightly under wraps. By contrast in January King Charles was candid about being diagnosed with cancer. And the princess’s surgery was also announced, along with a request that she be left in peace to recover.
But the palace did not reveal the type of cancer the King is battling nor the underlying reason for the princess’s surgery, which will keep her away from public engagements until at least after Easter.
“It’s an example of stepping halfway into the light and then stepping back. It sets the fires ablaze again,” said Irving adding: “When you tantalise with half of a piece of information it never satisfies.”
The photo fiasco has raised awkward questions about how far the sanitised version of the family delivered by its members can be trusted, resurrecting demons that haunt the tense relationship of codependency between the royals and the press.
The incident has also contributed to a wider sense of monarchic drift and disharmony, which critics said has prevailed since Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, died in 2022 and was succeeded by her then 73-year-old son and heir Charles III.
Another royal historian, who did not want to comment publicly, was more generous about this week’s events. He said the princess was only guilty of doing what, thanks to technology, so many people now do: touching up the family snaps. But because this was for public consumption this had created “an inauthenticity problem”.
“In the old days a family snap by the royal family was the ultimate thing in authenticity. You knew what it was,” he noted.
Even before this week’s events there were wild rumours circulating on social media over the princess’s withdrawal from public engagements. On the one hand, there is some public sympathy with members of the royal family over the pervasive intrusion into their lives.
On the other, according to critics, the royal family has long depended on acquiescence from the press in disseminating a carefully choreographed version of itself, alongside the more scurrilous one captured with long lenses aimed at royal backyards.
“The palace has always been into manipulation, treating the media as a free PR exercise,” said Norman Baker, former Liberal Democrat minister and long-standing campaigner for the modernisation of the monarchy.
“This time it has backfired,” he said, adding that the relationship between the public and monarchy is becoming more brittle because it is failing to adapt fast enough with the times.
“The point is this. The British monarchy is adrift. It is stranded in an imperial age, with all the attendant privileges, when every other European monarchy has managed to become part of the democratic fabric of their nation,” he said.
One marker of public disaffection is in the scale of irreverence that has greeted the princess’s blunder. Whereas the Queen was more or less untouchable, even when members of her family were feuding or embroiled in scandal, the royals today are seen as fair game. The Princess of Wales’s doctored portrait has launched a thousand satirical memes.
“It’s gone back to how it was in the 18th century and the way cartoonists like James Gillray were lampooning the royal family on a daily basis,” said Irving.
