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--:-- Alana Casanova-Burgess: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Alana Casanova-Burgess, filling in as host today.
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--:-- Alana Casanova-Burgess: Something is going on with the Princess of Wales. Okay, I'm like so confused about this Kate Middleton thing. People are noticing that a highly famous woman in a notoriously dangerous public family is basically missing. I have a theory. Hear me out. I reckon Kate's got herself a BookTok account and she's just locked away reading. My personal favorite theory is that she's been recovering from a BBL. Someone else suggested that she's Banksy, the England-based street artist with an unconfirmed identity. How her absence went from Kensington Palace saying she was recovering from abdominal surgery to wild rumors and online conspiracy theories. Coming up on Today Explained. Can we stop speculating about where Kate Middleton is? None of our business. Let the woman rest. Good for her, I say. And honestly, you could be so right. We're probably all just a little bit delulu. But let's entertain it for a second.
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--:-- Alana Casanova-Burgess: It's Today Explained. I'm Alana Casanova-Burgess, filling in as host today. The search for Kate Middleton has taken over the internet. Constance Grady has been covering it for Vox. Kate Middleton has been sort of ambiguously seen twice in the past week. There was a paparazzi photo of her last week driving in a car with her mom. They are very grainy photos. We believe that the images were taken shortly after Kate and her mother finished the school run. And then over the weekend, it was British Mother's Day, and Kensington Palace put out a picture of Kate hugging her kids. And this picture blows up the internet. Lurie conspiracies and wild speculation about the Princess of Wales have dominated conversation about the royals for many weeks.
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--:-- Alana Casanova-Burgess: Well, this beaming family photo released to mark the British Mother's Day on Sunday was supposed to end all that. So you look at this picture and at first it seems totally normal. It's like Kate Middleton, her three kids are all around her. She's got her arms around them. They're all smiling really big. It's like a cute, normal Mother's Day picture. And then the more you look at it the more like weird little things start to jump out at you. First of all, there are trees behind them that are in full leaf. It is March. This picture was supposed to have been taken within the past week. Then you look at Princess Charlotte and there's so many weird things happening with her. This part of Princess Charlotte's sleeve fades away unevenly. Her skirt seems misaligned with her cardigan and Catherine's right hand looks blurry. And one of the things that people clock onto immediately is that she's not wearing a wedding ring. On her left hand, right, yep. Where the hell is her wedding ring? Why is Kate Middleton not wearing her wedding ring?
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--:-- Constance Grady: A lot of outlets have talked to Photoshop experts, and they say that it looks like there has been a lot of blurring done with Photoshop's blurring tools. Photo editors the world over have been dissecting every pixel of this photograph, finding more than a dozen inconsistencies. So it looks as though some things are being kind of deliberately alighted and made to look more coherent than they are on closer examination. They've made a bright flipping hash of it. So the photo goes out on Sunday and within a few hours of it going out, it is pulled by international news agencies. Several news agencies, including Reuters and the Associated Press, have withdrawn the new photo from publication, one saying it's been manipulated by the source. The agencies have strict rules about altering images.
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--:-- Alana Casanova-Burgess: Kate on Monday puts out a statement posted to her Twitter or X account saying, I'm an amateur photographer. I played around with editing tools. I apologize if this caused any confusion or alarm. Bless her heart. Do you think that she actually put that out? Oh man, it's so hard to say because the second you say no, you sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist. Someone puts an apology out under Princess Catherine's name. We have no way of knowing for sure that it was Kate. Kate admits that she tampered with the photo, but won't release the original photo. I don't know, guys. Nothing's mathing. Nothing at all.
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--:-- Alana Casanova-Burgess: Did you see someone overlaid the 2016 Vogue cover picture of Kate onto this Mother's Day shot from Sunday? And the overlay was almost exact. This is the picture overlaid with half of it erased. And look how exactly everything lines up. The possibility of these two photos lining up perfectly is near zero. So I did find this overlay compelling, but I think there's plenty of explanation for just like Kate has her go-to smile. She's very good at it. Like every time I see her, I'm like, oh, she looks so cheerful. Suggestive, but inconclusive. Okay. Exactly. So what is happening here? Why do people dissect and analyze this picture so much?
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--:-- Constance Grady: Take us back to the beginning. Kate Middleton has not been seen in public outside of these two pictures since Christmas Day of 2023. So, on that day, she is photographed with her family going to church in the little village where they all spend Christmas. Everything looks normal totally fine Then she kind of disappears On January 17th Kensington Palace announces that Kate has entered the hospital the day before for planned abdominal surgery They say that she will be in the hospital recovering for 10 to 14 days. So this is not like a little outpatient procedure. And that she will continue to go back to her duties on Easter, which this year is March 31st. They say that all of her forthcoming appointments and scheduled commitments have been postponed. And then on January 29th, they announced that she's back home. Okay, so that seems normal. So she's going to be recovering for a while. It's still not March 31st.
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--:-- Constance Grady: Yeah, all of this is pretty normal. We first start to see people being like, well, things seem a little fishy here for two reasons. Wait, can you say who are people? The conspiracy theories about Kate Middleton's whereabouts is arising from royal watchers on the internet. Specifically, it's arising from Meghan Markle fans. Megan stands start to notice, hey, Kate's on medical leave and the paparazzi seem to be leaving her alone. Weird. Like the British paparazzi, the paparazzi that hacked people's phones and voicemails and hides in bushes and harassed Princess Diana to death. They're like respecting Kate Middleton's privacy. What's going on?
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--:-- Constance Grady: One person tweeted and said, you're telling me that Kate Middleton, the same woman who posed outside the hospital like a freaking supermodel mere hours after giving birth, suddenly requires months of recovery before showing her face? And the British press now magically respects privacy? This feels sinister. Then people start fiddling around with other weird little inconsistencies in Kensington Palace statements, like if her surgery is scheduled, why is she having to postpone scheduled commitments? Things like that.
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--:-- Alana Casanova-Burgess: The point at which things start to reach the mainstream internet is February 27th. So on that day, Prince William is scheduled to an appearance at the funeral of a family connection. And he cancels it very late, citing a personal matter. You only do that for really intense family matters. But no one knows what those could be because the royal family is not saying. Right. And so into this vacuum of information come conspiracy theories. There is an insane rabbit hole of people who have so many conspiracies about Kate Middleton. So there are a lot of joke theories that she's had a Brazilian butt lift, that she's trying to grow out bad bangs, or that she became the villain from the Glasgow AI Willy Wonka experience. She's run away, she's on the lam, she's living out of a van.
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--:-- Constance Grady: It is possible, though, that it's all just part of the necessary secrecy of being a contestant on The Masked Singer. There is a non-zero chance she died 18 months ago. The more serious conspiracy theories kind of fall into two camps one camp says something's gone really wrong with Kate's health like she is in a coma she physically cannot be made to sit up and put on makeup and take a picture being like hello I'm still alive the second camp says Kate is dealing with some ambiguous health problem but the real reason that we're not seeing any pictures of her is she's no longer willing to take them because her marriage with Will is on the rocks. There's at this point a pretty complimentary profile comes out of Lady Rose of Chumlee, who has long been rumored to be having an affair with Prince William. I feel like this is strategic. And yeah, maybe they're soft launching his mistress and soft launching a divorce.
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--:-- Constance Grady: Some people think that Kate is dealing with a mental breakdown from the stresses of fame. She needs a gap from the pressure. And that's what's so unfair. She just needed a break. And people aren't willing to give her that break. There's just this giant hole where all of the information about what has happened to Kate has gone and people are speculating wildly in the midst of it. What is going on with Kate Middleton? Let's look at her astrology.
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--:-- Alana Casanova-Burgess: So how is the palace treating this, or should I say the firm treating this? Yes. So the firm is, broadly speaking, as we learned from Prince Harry, the firm is the apparatus that handles royal matters, the publicists, the press agents. Kensington Palace is the part of the firm that specifically works for the Prince and Princess of Wales. Buckingham Palace, of course, works for the King and Queen. They are separate. They don't work together as the same entity. Often they work at cross purposes to throw one another under the bus. Kensington Palace has reacted very, very bizarrely to these rumors. They have actually addressed them on the record, which the palace never does.
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--:-- Alana Casanova-Burgess: The general rule is that they don't want to dignify rumors with an explanation. They don't want to give oxygen to these rumors. But in January, a Spanish journalist reports that Kate is in a coma. She says the doctors had to take drastic actions at the moment because of complications that arose during the surgery. The decision was to put her in an induced coma. They had to intubate her. And instead of ignoring this report, Kensington Palace puts out a statement being like, this is false. She is completely wrong. She does not know what she's talking about. That is wild. That is not something they ever do.
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--:-- Alana Casanova-Burgess: The thing is, while they're making these statements, they are not saying anything really about what's happening with Kate. They're just saying she's doing well. She continues to do well. We told you she was going to come out in public again around March 31st. And that stands. They're not adding any information. They're just talking about it in kind of a weird way.
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--:-- Alana Casanova-Burgess: Is this out of the ordinary for Kate? Kate Middleton is one of the most dependable members of the royal family, right? She is a star who always shows up and always does her job. For Kate to just disappear is very bizarre and really adds to the confusion from a lot of people watching. Do you have a theory on what's going on with Kate Middleton? I am trying to avoid getting too wedded to one theory or another I think when she eventually emerges it is going to remain mysterious where she been for these past months and weeks The truth will probably come out eventually, but with this family, it could be like 20 years the way it was for so many things with Charles and Camilla. At this point, I am mostly just marveling at the fact of the cover-up and it's incompetence, but I think it'll be a long time before we know what's actually been covered up.
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--:-- Alana Casanova-Burgess: Constance Grady. Read her at Vox.com. Coming up, what the Kate Middleton drama tells us about the royal standing in British society. Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio? Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies. They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model.
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--:-- Alana Casanova-Burgess: Annabelle Dixon is a senior political correspondent at Politico, based in Westminster in London. And she says the public speculation around Kate Middleton does and doesn't surprise her. So, you know, there's always an interest in the royal family in the UK and around the world. There's always been conspiracy theories remember the era of princess diana i just think that the whole thing was a conspiracy it was never an accident like the whole lot was planned she was just too good for them and had to get rid of her because she was like the people's princess and actually you know there is real sympathy for kate i think until now there was a sense that people felt she should be left alone but this photoshopped image has created days of drama in in the uk and negative coverage.
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--:-- Annabelle Dixon: So it has really felt like a departure from the sort of usually carefully worded statements that you get from the royal family. And I think what's striking about it is, you know, this is a sign they're probably not really adapting to the kind of digital age and thinking about the pitfalls of the modern media world. And also kind of struggling with the kind you demand for transparency that's asked for in this day and age by the public. Right. They're probably used to a universe in which they release a photograph to the press. The press publishes it and then it's really not a dialogue. It's not a discussion. But here you have people really talking back to this picture.
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--:-- Annabelle Dixon: Yeah, exactly. And I think also in the past, it's very unusual for the royals to produce their own pictures. They would either use professional photographers or they would get in an agency or one of the pools, those are the sort of national newsroom photographers who take it in turns to go and cover the royals and then circulate the photos. They used to be a lot more reliant on that sort of system before. So using a kind of amateur photographer rather than a professional photographer is a trend over the last few years. And sort of before that, it wasn't really an issue. And probably more to the point, not just an amateur photographer, but an amateur photoshopper.
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--:-- Alana Casanova-Burgess: The press has suggested that Princess Kate's disappearance was especially damaging or is especially damaging because there's a lack of stability among the royals. Why is that and what is this instability? Probably the main thing is because we've had this double whammy. So we've had Princess Kate, who it was announced at the beginning of the year that she was going into hospital to have abdominal surgery and wouldn't be back till Easter. And then very quickly afterwards, we've received breaking news from Buckingham Palace, which has announced that the king has been diagnosed with cancer. And although he's been visible, we've actually seen quite a lot of him while he undergoes his treatment, even though he's not doing so many public engagements.
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--:-- Annabelle Dixon: The fact that we lost two of the four principals in such a short space of time has been really a big deal. You have to remember it's only two years since Queen Elizabeth died and it's a time actually when this next generation, this sort of modern royal family, are trying to kind of work out their place in the world and what they for The royal family still command public support in the UK Really There's a majority of the public who still thinks that we should have a monarchy. That's diminishing and that does change. But actually, you know, support for them is holding up.
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--:-- Annabelle Dixon: There's questions about exactly how big they should be. King Charles now, he's been very keen on a sort of slim back royal family. He's keen to be seen to be a bit more frugal, not the sort of excess and lavishness that some people associate with the royal family. He really wants them to be seen to be very hardworking, that people really feel give them good value for money. And in terms of trust, I think on the whole, it is seen as a trusted institution. And one of the reasons focus groups often talk about wanting the monarchy is the fact they're not political, the fact that they rise above politics, particularly amid the political turmoil of the last few years in the UK, they've been seen as this kind of stable force. And that's one of the things that appeals.
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--:-- Annabelle Dixon: And really, I think that goes to the heart of why this story has been so interesting. The majority beyond the sort of fringes have dismissed the conspiracy theories that they've been reading online. But, you know, the handling of this didn't help on trust. You mentioned political turmoil. Are you referring to the very high number of prime ministers that the UK has been burning through? Yeah, one of the things that I'm referring to, you know, we've had Brexit in 2016. And then since then, we've had a succession of prime ministers, including Liz Truss who didn't last very long at all.
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--:-- Annabelle Dixon: An Economist article compared that total days Truss had been in control to roughly the shelf life of a lettuce. It was a resounding victory for the Greens. And I remember speaking to someone in 10 Downing Street who was worried about that feeling of instability that the death of the Queen might have at the same time that politics was really in turmoil. So a slightly different political, perhaps lowercase p, political story is the press's relationship with the royal family. Sometimes it's as much of a story as the royal family itself. What's that relationship like right now? Do you know, it's been pretty good. And it's a symbiotic relationship. You know, the press sells papers, gets website hits from the royals, and the monarchy gets the publicity that they actually need to survive.
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--:-- Annabelle Dixon: And actually, King Charles has done a good job with the press since he became king. And it was widely thought that actually that his cancer diagnosis was handled really well. The palace were really upfront about it. The press were really supportive. But, you know, there has been a bit of a change of mood in recent days. One of the things that I think has sort of contributed to that was, again, talking about this control that Kate Middleton and Prince William like to have over their narrative. And the fact that it was them releasing the picture has highlighted a kind of wider frustration with the way that they operate. And I think that the press do feel that they need the access and it can't always be a kind of controlled message. And, you know, they're just kind of waiting for morsels, as it were.
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--:-- Annabelle Dixon: So it seems as though there's genuine concern for Kate Middleton's well-being on some level. There's also for people who want to trust the royal family. There's some upset over these stumbles. And then for people who hate the monarchy, who view them with suspicion, there's also this maybe sense of delight in watching this play out because it appears that this is an apparatus that's collapsing from the inside. And people get to watch that. I know you said that the British public continues to want the monarchy polling shows, but has the scandal exposed anything about what the future might look like for them, do you think? I think it's shown how fragile things can be and how these things can kind of take on a life of their own. William Caden have been hugely popular and I think they will continue to be. We could well see Kate back at work in a few weeks' time and then moving on from this.
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--:-- Annabelle Dixon: And the royals know that older voters are overwhelmingly in favour, but the next generation is a bit of an unknown entity, I would say. The polls suggest that the younger people aren't so committed to the royal family. And I think the kind of lack of a desire for an elected head of state works in their favour. But things like that can change quickly. The public mood can change quickly.
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--:-- Alana Casanova-Burgess: Annabelle Dixon is a senior political correspondent at Politico, where she covers government in the UK. Today's show was produced by Avishai Artsy and Jesse Alejandro Cottrell. It was edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by David Herman. I'm Alana Casanova-Burgess, and this is Today Explained.
