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Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images; Merlin Entertainments
Right now, as I write this, it is clear that something is very, very wrong within the Royal Family.
Bottom line: Following a hasty announcement in January that she would undergo abdominal surgery, Princess of Wales Kate Middleton has not been seen in public, prompting widespread online speculation about her whereabouts. In response to conspiracy theories, the Royal Family released a photograph of the princess and her three children for British Mother’s Day, which was quickly discovered to be digitally altered, leading the media to retract the photo. photo and thus magnify the situation at least a hundred times. . Kate’s subsequent explanation – “Like many amateur photographers, I occasionally experiment with editing,” she wrote on her X accounts – did them no favors, as the likelihood of a member of the Royal Family having a Adobe Photoshop, let alone knowing what it is, is probably slim to none.
Kate’s absence from public life has sparked a flurry of criticism from royal watchers, many of whom have used the Palace’s Benny Hill-style clumsiness of the situation as a reference point to discuss the irrelevance, hypocrisy and the corruption of the monarchy. Faced with a public relations crisis without any real precedent, and unable to silence the usually malleable British press, the Palace has responded in basically the worst way possible, refusing to adopt any semblance of transparency or accountability to the public, even when the situation was so clear. demands it (and that arguably applies doubly if Kate is, in fact, in significant danger or in extremely poor health, as some have speculated). With the death of Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles battling prostate cancer, #Kategate has raised extremely valid questions about the long-term viability of the monarchy and why a small group of inbred Britons are subject to a set of higher standards than the rest of the world. world.
And yet, while public opinion toward the Royal Family has arguably never been lower, we can thank them for one thing: Kate Middleton’s disappearance has sparked serious conspiracy theorizing and wild speculation (even from extreme nutcases). right that have wandered through the days of speech). late to share her belief that she died from a “vaccine injury”), but it has also sparked an avalanche of some of the internet’s best memes.
Kategate memes can basically be classified into three ascending levels: There’s Level One, which places the princess in the context of other current news or cultural phenomena, such as the suggestion that she is playing the role of the Stranger or the Oompa-Loompa, plagued by boredom in the Glasgow Wonka experience; or that she is the mystery guest on new Lil Nas X album; or that she is in the agony of a paralyzing world of warcraft addiction; or that she is trapped in Barbieland helping a doll version of her through an existential version.
There’s Level Two, which focuses less on timely jokey explanations and more on the actual conspiracy theories circulating about her absence, such as the suggestion that she’s in a coma from complications from her abdominal surgery, or even deceased. “To everyone making fun of Kate Middleton’s Photoshop skills, I’d like to see how well YOU edit family photos when you’re dead,” says a viral cheep. Another concerns the belief that she is in the process of divorcing her husband, Prince William, who has long been rumored to be having an affair with the couple’s friend, Rose Hanbury, the Marchioness of Cholmondeley, who has a striking resemblance to Middleton. “I’d be a lost girl too if my bald husband cheated on me with someone who looked exactly like me but more horsey,” says one. cheep. (The royal has not commented publicly on the rumors, but a lawyer for Prince William did at one point. say The Daily Beast were “false and highly harmful”).
And then there’s Level Three, the most sophisticated level, where the joke is not so much on Kate or whatever sinister theory has been devised to explain her whereabouts, but on the Royal Family’s utter ineptitude at quelling the growing antipathy toward them. . In one tiktok viral, a woman speaking with an Eastern European accent stands in front of an illustration of an “England castle,” pretending to be Middleton officially speaking on behalf of the Palace, while looking off-camera at an unseen person writing her lines. “My three biological children have 10 fingers, 10 toes, and a skirt,” she says haltingly, referring to the Photoshop controversy. “Basically what I’m saying is that everything is fine!” Another tweet uses the clip of Succession by failson Roman Roy, blankly clicking on his notifications after seeing the explosion of a rocket launch project he had overseen, with the caption: “The royal family’s social media manager thinks they did a good job on the Kate Middleton photo editions”.
Leaving aside the central mystery of Kate’s disappearance, this has been the most fascinating thing about the entire debacle: watching the perfect artifice constructed by the Royal Family fall apart. After being read into the trash for trying and failing to mislead the media and the general public, there is no longer any reason for anyone to take anything the palace says seriously and, by extension, no reason to that we take royalty seriously as Good. Whatever Kate is going through, and whatever the true explanation for her absence, she deserves the respect and privacy afforded to any other human being going through difficult times. But that does not equate to representatives of the Royal Family openly lying to a population they consider stupid, and now that they have been denounced for it, there is no reason not to denounce them for their very existence.