The moon landing was faked, the Roswell landings were real and Elvis is currently running a moderately priced pizza joint in Poughkeepsie.
Also Kate the Princess of Wales is missing.
There have been strange turns of events in the royal world of late but the growing clamour if not some good old fashioned hysteria over the exact location and state that the princess might be in takes the Battenberg cake.
On Thursday, the Princess of Wales was trending across every social media platform between here and LinkedIn (slight exaggeration, maybe). The internet is currently having a collective conniption with an added side of meltdown, with stories about and posts about Kate supposedly going missing spreading like noxious weeds.
Jeepers, this is not good.
And not because Kate is currently being held captive in the basement of the Castle of Mey against her will or because there is some grand plot to keep the public in the dark about her whereabouts and exact aliveness. Take a deep breath. Hold it. Slow exhale. (The princess is alive and probably currently buying out Sezane’s stock of cream frilly shirts.)
No, this is bad for fellow unwell person King Charles.
Last month Buckingham Palace created shockwaves, and substantially boosted the British card industry, after revealing that His Majesty has cancer and is currently undergoing unspecified treatment. This meant that he would be pulling out of all public duties, on the advice of doctors, but would still keep up with his mounds of State paperwork, Zoom meetings and once a week holding Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s hand as his lip wobbles over his forthcoming ouster.
Unfortunately this came as Kate was off sick too, with Kensington Palace having announced in January that she had undergone abdominal surgery and would be out of sight and out of royal action until after Easter. This also meant that Prince William was busy mass deleting his diary to be by her side, mop her brow and to ensure their kids didn’t bunk off school to find out, Railway Children-style, if they actually own Wales.
Then two things happened.
Firstly, in early February, journalist Concha Calleja turned up on Spanish TV to say that she had “spoken to an aide from the Royal Household in a completely off-the-record manner” and that the princess had been “in great danger” after her operation.
Calleja reportedly said: “The doctors had to take drastic decisions at that moment because of the complications that arose. The decision was to put her in an induced coma. They had to intubate her. There were serious complications that they didn’t expect because the operation went well, but the post-operative period didn’t go so well.
“The concern in the royal household was palpable. It was about saving her life.”
To care for Kate at home, “practically an entire hospital” had been allegedly set up.
The palace immediately poured frigid North Sea water on this tall tale.
A palace source told the Times: “It’s total nonsense … It’s fundamentally, totally made-up, and I’ll use polite English here: it’s absolutely not the case.”
Righto then! Except then, things took a turn for the X Files on Tuesday this week when William, only 46 minutes before kick-off, pulled out of attending his godfather King Constantine of the Hellenes’ St George’s Chapel memorial service due to a “personal matter”.
‘KATE!’ the entire internet flapped. Tin foil helmets immediately came out. That “nonsense” idea suddenly developed a virulent life of its own. And those conspiracy theories around the exact nature of her surgery and recovery leapt from fringe to mainstream.
(There are also other dingbat hypotheses doing the rounds that the princess had had a tummy tuck along with some the tongue-in-cheek suggestion she’s had a Brazilian butt lift or is growing out a fringe.)
Suddenly, in the space of hours, the Internet is treating the Princess of Wales like she’s the Shelly Miscavige of the Sandringham Set. (Shelly Miscavige being the wife of Scientology leader David Miscavige who hasn’t been seen in public since 2007.)
This Great Kate Panic has morphed from entertaining to the unhinged and it would be easy to dismiss it as just sound and fury if not for the much more serious and real implications.
The timing of the GKP (trademark pending) could not be worse for His Majesty as he works remotely from Sandringham and fondly remembers feeling the calloused hands of the toiling masses while out and about.
Right now, the standing of the royal family is dicey. Three of the four highest ranking members of the working cadre have gone AWOL (Charles, William and Kate) leaving us in the previously ludicrous-to-even-imagine position that Queen Camilla is holding down the fort and is now THE public face of the monarchy. (Rottweiler to Regina will be the name of my upcoming, still unwritten musical about Her Majesty.)
Meanwhile, any hope that vast waves of public pity might sweep the palace after the King’s was announced were dashed recently when YouGov canvassing found that royal support had remained largely static. There is “no evidence of ‘rally round the flag’ sentiment,” the pollster reported.
What this current situation with Charles’ cancer requires is for Crown Inc. to be projecting a stately image of calm, of dignified continuity, of nice starched stability and dutiful perseverance with everyone mucking in.
KateGate has, today, become a massive, problematic sideshow and a serious distraction which, should courtiers look up long enough from their Telegraphs and leather bound agendas, be a cause for real concern.
It’s A) a big fat disruption from the wider royal mission and B) is creating doubt around an institution that has been trying to cast off the image of being a shadowy, imperious bastion of pathological caginess.
Added to which, what His Majesty needs today, about as much as a vole infestation or his German second cousins deciding to arrive for a nice long visit, is for there suddenly to be all this suspicion cast on the royal family and for them to look furtive or squirrelly.
Fundamentally what this Kate hysteria comes down to is trust and what has become clear in the last 24 hours is just how little store and faith much of the Wi-Fi-connected world puts on what the palace says officially.
More Coverage
Despite everything, despite it being nearly 27 years since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, many people are still willing to think the worst of the royal family.
Before we part ways, let me just say this really clearly here. The truth might be out there but Kate is tucked up at home in Windsor, getting better. Though I do hear Elvis has been in touch …
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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2024-02-28 23:37:30Z
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