[Bones McCoy]

All the usual client journalists have taken to social media to tell people that there is nothing to see here and urging people to move on. I some how can't see that happening any time soon.

Nothing to see here. More on pages 4, 5, 6 and 13-21.

[satnav]

Whilst I don't buy into the more bizarre conspiracy theories I do think that the Princess of Wales is probably suffering from either an eating disorder or mental health issues. If she did undergo abdominal surgery in early January I think she would probably be up for posing for proper photographs with her children by now.

[The Weeping Angel]

Helen Lewis has a good article here on how this has turned a lot of people who you wouldn't mormally think of into conspiracy therorists

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... cy/677729/

There was a time, not that long ago, when mainstream-news consumers pitied people who had succumbed to the sprawling conspiracies of QAnon. Imagine spending your days parsing “Q Drops,” poring over cryptic utterances for coded messages. Imagine taking every scrap of new information and weaving it into an existing narrative. Those poor, deluded, terminally online saps. What a terrible modern affliction.

And then some of my friends became Kate Middleton truthers.

In January, the British Royal Family announced that Catherine, Princess of Wales, had needed surgery for unspecified, noncancerous abdominal issues, and that her recovery would take longer than originally expected. She would therefore not resume public duties until after Easter. For several weeks, that explanation sufficed. But by late February, half the internet seemed to be speculating over her whereabouts, using the favored format of conspiracists everywhere: just asking questions. An absence is filled with puzzlement—what aren’t we being told?—and then larded with a garnish of suspicion. Why are they hiding the truth from us?

In the past few weeks, my WhatsApp groups have been taken over by friends wondering what is wrong with the Princess of Wales. American acquaintances, perhaps assuming that my Britishness gives me some mystical connection to the Windsors, have started texting me for updates. Everyone has a theory. Everyone wants to know.

But it’s more than that: Everyone also seems mystified by the simple fact of not knowing. We have become so used to smartphone surveillance, oversharing on social media, and the commercial harvesting of life events for content that the prospect of remaining uninformed about the state of a stranger’s intestines now seems like a personal affront. On March 4, a grainy photograph of Kate traveling in the passenger seat of a car with her mother, Carole, began to circulate, but it did not stop the speculation. Did her face look weird if you zoomed in to 20 times magnification? (Yes, but then so would anyone’s.) Where was Prince William? (Maybe with their kids?) Was the photo staged, as in Weekend at Bernie’s? (Come on.) Just to add fuel to the fire, that picture was not widely circulated in Britain. Again: What aren’t we being told? Why are they hiding the truth from us?

Over the weekend, the frenzy intensified when Kensington Palace released a photograph, supposedly taken by Prince William last week, of Catherine with her three children. Within hours, TikTok was full of momfluencers earnestly discussing the clumsy signs of editing on Prince Louis’s patterned sweater. Someone on X (formerly Twitter) put the photo in an online tool that deemed it AI-generated. Someone else claimed, in a post that went viral, that the photo had been taken in November, based on the family involved wearing the same clothes that they did on a trip to a food bank—edited to be different colors, for some reason. Another person jumped in to say that the shrub behind them was suspiciously green for early spring in England. And—oh, look—she didn’t appear to be wearing her wedding ring.

These assertions sounded plausible, and the sheer volume of them was self-reinforcing. But when I stopped to think, my brain somehow rewired itself. Why did I instantly believe in such a thing as an online tool that can precisely calculate the probability of a photograph being AI-generated? Why would Kensington Palace cunningly edit a white sweater to be navy—and then leave telltale signs of fakery, such as Princess Charlotte’s impossible sleeve? When I read a suggestion that Kate’s face had been lifted from her Vogue cover portrait, the spell broke. Maybe the faces looked the same … because they belonged to the same person?

[The Weeping Angel]

[Youngian]

This conspiracy stems from her hubby being in a lavender marriage but in reality living with a ‘flamboyant bachelor’ and high class swindler in Paris. The Mail was on the case back in 2010.

No one will be more concerned about the extraordinary arrest in Paris yesterday of flamboyant bachelor Francois-Marie Banier, who is accused of ­fleecing the L’Oreal heiress Liliane ­Bettencourt of £850 million, than film-maker David Rocksavage, a.k.a. the Marquess of Cholmondeley. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... quess.html

[Bones McCoy]

This conspiracy stems from her hubby being in a lavender marriage but in reality living with a ‘flamboyant bachelor’ and high class swindler in Paris. The Mail was on the case back in 2010.

No one will be more concerned about the extraordinary arrest in Paris yesterday of flamboyant bachelor Francois-Marie Banier, who is accused of ­fleecing the L’Oreal heiress Liliane ­Bettencourt of £850 million, than film-maker David Rocksavage, a.k.a. the Marquess of Cholmondeley. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... quess.html

David Rocksavage, is that "peggy's" trade name?

[Youngian]

His wrestling name?

[Youngian]

Not a normal country

[Bones McCoy]

How very P.G.Woodehouse.

Can anybody here pinpoint precisely when our agents released L.S.D. into the Telegraph's water supply?

[Andy McDandy]

It's up there with a piece I saw in the Times when lockdowns began - how to ensure your kids get the best home tuition from the servants. Even with the parents and kids all locked up together, the idea of doing something as common as looking directly after them was...ugh.

[Bones McCoy]

It's up there with a piece I saw in the Times when lockdowns began - how to ensure your kids get the best home tuition from the servants. Even with the parents and kids all locked up together, the idea of doing something as common as looking directly after them was...ugh.

I don't pay £46,000 in school and adventure camp fees and expect to have to meet my offspring!

[satnav]

I'm sure I read somewhere that William and Kate employ 60 staff to run their household so William making a big thing about employing a valet seems a tad petty.

[Youngian]

Toothpaste doesn’t get on a brush on its own.
The British royals are masters of reinvention, if the Windsors become really hated they’ll move to the Dutch option; remain quietly minted, tell the kids to get proper jobs and ride bicycles.

[Youngian]

The chippy owner is miking the publicity for all its worth with his gammon herding. Fair play times are hard for retail.

[Andy McDandy]

Turns out she's having chemotherapy. That's a lot of people looking like cunts, and lots of journalists banging out pieces like nobody's ever had cancer before, and which fucking headscarf suits her best.

There's a lot of overlap there.

[satnav]

There seems to be a lot of sanctimonious nonsense on social media criticising all the conspiracy theories that have been floating around for the last couple of weeks but then of these theories only gained traction because Kensington Palace published an heavily edited photograph to try and give the impression that everything was OK when clearly it wasn't.

[davidjay]

I hope that's the last we hear of them for a few months. Thy've had their lives turned upside down in the past year or so; they need a bit of time to themselves.

[The Weeping Angel]

I hope all those people who spread conspiracy theories about this feel fucking ashamed about this.

[kreuzberger]

The element of her message which caused me to sit up was that she twice refers to her abdominal surgery as "major". That sounds both ominous and like cat nip to the armchair oncologists, and that's the last thing that the poor kid needs right now.

[Rosvanian]

Unsurprisingly, the Mail and others are now in full moralising mode, furiously pointing their fingers at those who they accuse of promoting conspiracy theories (Owen Jones getting it in the neck. WTF?!) Obviously Mail Online completely ignores its own role in this sorry episode but what baffles me is that most online commentators appear to be utterly oblivious to the Mail's hideous dishonesty, double standards and cynicism. Quite incredible.