Kate's photo fail exposes royals' rocky future
Just 18 months after the death of Queen Elizabeth, are the wheels coming off the royal carriage? Suffice to say, 2024 is off to a most displeasing start for this new Carolean era, led by King Charles the Third.
To recap: the “slimmed-down” House of Windsor, with only 11 working royals (half of them well past both British and Canadian traditional retirement age) was rocked by the twin announcements mid-january that the King himself, and Catherine, Princess of Wales (Kate Middleton to most of us), would be temporarily out of commission for health reasons. Charles, for an enlarged prostate. Catherine, for unspecified abdominal surgery. Oh, and in supporting his wife, another senior-most royal, Prince William, would also be off the job.
The communications approaches of each royal could not have differed more: Charles, far more transparent about what was ailing him, including a subsequent announcement that his prostate treatment had also revealed a form of cancer (although Buckingham Palace could not quite bring itself to tell us what kind, or what stage.) Since then, he's been seen several times, reading get-well cards, meeting with cabinet ministers and basically, well, kinging.
By contrast, the Waleses decided that it's none of our royal business what's going on with the woman who will be Queen. The speculation that has followed this vacuum of information has lurched from the sublime to the ridiculous to the salacious and ultimately humiliating. The
This royal mess pulls at so many threads of the tapestry of an ancient institution.
princess was leaving her husband. The princess's surgery was actually elective (Google that one). The princess had quit the country.
Having first refused any updates beyond bland palace missives that she was “doing well,” the princess released a snap of herself and the kids on British Mother's Day. The problem: it was photoshopped. So much so that major news photo desks withdrew or issued a “kill notice” for the offending picture. The head of Agence France-presse (AFP) says Kensington Palace is no longer a “trusted source” of information, something AFP also says about state-released photos from Iran and North Korea.
This royal mess pulls at so many threads of the tapestry of an ancient institution. How many other royal photos have been heavily edited before release? To what extent do high-profile working royals — whose taxpayer-funded existences rest upon their very visibility — have a right to total and absolute privacy? And beyond the gossip factor, why does any of this matter in Canada? Let's take the last question first. Whether we like it or not — and public opinion indicates we don't, much — Charles is king of Canada. Catherine will be queen of Canada. Knowing the former is unpopular (in Canada, the monarch's favourability numbers are lower than the prime minister's), palace courtiers have sought to maximize the popularity of the latter. The problem is that when people view members of the Royal Family as celebrities, they will be not only exalted as such, but also speculated about, and criticized in similar fashion.
Of course the princess has a right to privacy, an issue particularly sensitive given the way her predecessor Diana, Princess of Wales, was literally hounded to death by the paparazzi. But a total absence of information has made things far worse for Catherine, and the system she represents. At a time when only one in five Canadians views the Royal Family as relevant, and more than half view their values as outdated, this is hardly the fresh start the new King had hoped for. People in this country are suffering from the greatest crisis in access to health care in modern times. How many exhausted working mothers coming through health challenges of their own wish they could disappear to “focus on their families and their health” for months at a time?
This May will bring the first anniversary of the coronation of Charles, a time for celebration and reckoning. No amount of image editing, literal or metaphorical, can prevent Canadians, and indeed the royals themselves, from reflecting on whether the institution — and its representatives — still work in a modern world.