The Royal Treatment

Nicola Biggerstaff

The royal family have once again caused a furore this week after the Princess of Wales posted a doctored family photograph commemorating Mother’s Day to the Cambridge’s official Instagram page last Sunday. Within hours, press agencies withdrew the image, a previously unprecedented measure, due to ‘inconsistencies’, before she admitted to altering the image herself.

This is the culmination of hysteria and rumour surrounding her recovery after undergoing abdominal surgery in late January, and the photo was supposed to be an attempt to calm the waters and assuage the accusations surrounding her long-term absence from public life. Instead, by doctoring the image, she only added fuel to the fire.

Conspiracy theories surrounding her absence, and now the image, have been abound, varying from the plausible, such as those concerning the true condition of her health or a potential rift in her marriage to Prince William, to the truly absurd, such as allegedly travelling to Glasgow during her absence to take up the role of The Unknown at the now infamous Wonka experience.

We forget that Kate has always been a keen, amateur photographer, and she even reiterated this in her official apology. It is well reported on, with plenty other pictures on their official social media being her own work, including many of her three children’s annual birthday portraits.

Public hysteria has always been a pet hate of mine. It only serves to distract from the even more absurd goings on in our society that really warrant our attention including this week some, in my opinion, unsurprising revelations about the Conservative party’s largest donor, as well as the ongoing atrocities being carried out in Gaza.

This really should be just a drop in the ocean, and yet here we are again, ogling the royals like their lives are a bad soap opera.

She’s not even the first mother I’ve seen experiment with edits or filters on pictures of her own kids, in fact this is practically a staple of the true Facebook experience, even if I personally find the practice almost grotesque. Everyone wants everyone else to know their families are perfect, that their kids look perfect, that everything in their lives is fine and nothing goes wrong, ever.

But in this case, it’s the flagrant hypocrisy which is once again igniting the royal debate. If Harry and Meghan were offered this same level of privacy when they asked for it, the family’s reputation would likely be in a much better position than it is now, even despite the scandals they’re nowhere near. If they ever so much as put a light filter on a family picture, the right-wing media would likely set the metaphorical dogs on them.

But there is a flipside to this: the royal family also employ official photographers, who are under strict instruction regarding what they can and cannot do with the raw images taken. Everything is scrutinised and sanitised by staffers, so why wouldn’t the Cambridge’s take advantage of this during such a vulnerable time, unless they truly had something to hide?

This is where a lot of the speculation originates, in that an intimate family portrait manipulated so egregiously may have deliberately slipped through the cracks with the intention of spreading the opposite message, that these supposedly perfect people do in fact make mistakes.

Pundits were initially hopeful that she was the sign of a modernising royal family, as exampled by the early press coverageof her time at university, behaving like any other typical student would. But she has since conformed to the traditional royal model, her voice on issues she purported to have cared about in those earlier years growing quieter as officials began to talk for her.

Of course anyone experiencing health problems, and anyone who faces a difficult or ongoing recovery, should be entitled to an expectation of privacy, and it is our responsibility as a kind, caring society to respect that. If she now feels compelled to make a hasty return to public life, whether due to pressure from the public or from royal officials, we should be ashamed. Deciding to return to work following health issues, severe or not, royal or not, should be an entirely personal decision. This is no different to an employer pressuring an employee to give them a timeline for their return when they phone in sick.

While part of me wants to revel in the hilarity of the whole situation, which only confirms to me that satire is well and truly dead on its feet, I still can’t help but feel a modicum of sympathy. A gilded cage is still a cage, and another family still feeling the need to conform to standards of etiquette is another family deprived of that quality, unfiltered (pardon the pun), family experience.

I certainly don’t say any of this to mean the royals should be free from scrutiny. While they still live on, and actively benefit from, taxpayer’s money, far from it. But the institution actively dominating the headlines for superficial reasons that have been entirely blown out of proportion is getting more than a bit grating. We can, and should, be holding ourselves to a higher standard, and learn to stop and reflect when these items emerge. We need to all learn to say, “I just don’t care”.