Kate officially hits rock bottom ​

COMMENT

I’m calling it. Datchet High Street. 1.50pm. March 11. We have officially reached what has to be the absolute nadir of Kategate when a brick wall in an otherwise unremarkable British village has become the subject of furious online scrutiny and downright obsession.

The wall in question is in Datchet in Berkshire and the reason that social media has flipped its lid and fallen off into the deep end debating the colour of bricks in said wall is because on Monday afternoon, UK time, Kate the Princess of Wales was photographed passing it as she travelled with husband Prince William to London. (He was off to the Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey, she had a private appointment.)
 

According to the now veritable army of Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marples who have taken complete control of the social byways, a force armed with nothing more than incipient diagnosable paranoia and the ability to make a TikTok, are adamant that this Kate has been faked thanks to the colour of the wall.

Don’t you know? It’s an old photo of Kate from Christmas, you see. No wait, it’s the Waleses’ Norfolk chum the Marchioness of Cholmondeley who is actually in the car. The Prince and Princess’s marriage is in deep trouble. He’s left her, there was a pregnancy, a breakdown. No, it’s a coma!

Whatever higher power exists, have mercy.

But while the world is losing it, there is still Kate, a woman who has suffered a head-spinning, stunning nosedive from shining royal star to chaos-bringer; from dignified future Queen to global figure of humiliation and mockery.

 

The Princess the world has known for years – perfect, polished, forever beaming and bearer of adorably chocolate boxy children – has been replaced by a woman who has just been brutally embarrassed, forced to issue the very first public apology of her royal career, and now finds herself in a place where the royal say so will now be doubted for years to come.

For Kate, having spent more than a decade painstakingly building an adored public profile, one hospital wing opening and one plucky Scout outing at a time, all of that has, mind bogglingly, been dashed and lost in less time that it probably takes Prince William to iron his beloved Aston Villa stripe.

It’s not just a question of speed but magnitude too.

In fact, even go back to where it all started for the Prince and Princess of Wales, St Andrews University in 2001, and there has never, ever been a situation such as this where the Princess’s actions have called down such a violent tempest on the royal family or debased the wholesale level of trust in them as an institution.

This is all horrible and all new, for us and for the Waleses. Somehow the couple has managed to violently disturb the royal equilibrium and order of things.

What. The. Hell. Has. Happened?

 

For years now royal scripts have been flipped with unnerving regularity but the perpetrators have tended to be spare one and spare two – Prince Andrew the Duke of York and Prince Harry the Duke of Sussex. But this time, it’s the princess who has found herself stuck on the Buckingham Palace scolding stool.

The question that no one can or will answer is, how have William and Kate gotten this all so dashed wrong? And so very badly wrong?

We’ve had, in drumbeat succession, King Constatinegate (what was really behind William’s withdrawal from his godfather’s memorial service 46 minutes before it began?); Papgate (when a lone snapper managed to get a photo of Kate in a car with her mother, a shot the UK press decided not to publish); Picturegate (the Waleses’ releasing a new image of Kate and their three children only for the world’s major picture agencies to issue kill notices); Apologygate (after Kate took the complete blame for “experimenting” with the editing, a mea culpa that answered no real questions and only inflamed the situation); and now, Wallgate.

How many “gates” can William and Kate clock up and still find time to make a 9am school gate drop off?

Their attempts to try and corral this situation and wrest things back under control are going about as well as Prince Andrew placing a personal ad.

 

Take the wall photo, which the royal savants of Twitter (sorry, X) and TikTok are adamant was faked.

It was, in fact, taken by two well-known freelance photographers, according to the Telegraph, who had set themselves up in that spot to get a shot of William.

“It was about 1.50pm when we saw the convoy coming towards us and we just managed to get a quick picture,” one of the snappers told the paper. “We had no idea that Kate was even in the car with him until we looked at it. It was pure luck.”

Given that the shots were taken in a time and a place where it could be expected they would be photographed, it’s reasonable to assume these wall photos were taken with the Waleses’ tacit agreement. They clearly wanted to try and do some sort of crisis management.

Bad luck Your Royal Highnesses.

I’m not sure how or why they might have thought that one blurry shot of the princess travelling in the back of a Range Rover in this combustible climate would be enough to begin to fire fight this situation.

The couple and their staff seem at sea here, with no real notion how to deal with this sh*t storm back or get things back under control.

 

For so long now, William and Kate have run a tight ship that has, generally, done a blue-ribbon-winning job. (The key, ‘orrible exception was their disastrous 2022 Caribbean tour.) Still, the Waleses have nice big, juicy marquee projects and initiatives, very healthy social media followings and polling numbers that would make the Tory and Labour leadership weep salty, jealous tears into their pillows of a night.

The Prince and Princess of Wales have been, for so long now, the universally-acknowledged, Great Hope of Crown Inc, the shining city on the hill, the beacons of hope for committed monarchists fretting over whether King Charles and Queen Camilla have it in them to keep the whole shebang afloat.

How much damage has the couple and their handling of the last few weeks done to that? They are now clouded by vast masses of public suspicion and scepticism and have, with the picture editing snafu, just accidentally revealed the degree to which their seemingly easy, breeze-y, bouncy show is actually carefully constructed and moulded for public consumption.

The great Wales dog-and-pony show has come unglued.

We have never been here before, nor has Kate or William.

Meanwhile, I hear on X that Datchet wall has managed to get itself an agent. Its 15 minutes are well and truly here.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.