Since You Asked For It: Let’s Talk About the Kate Middleton News
Months of theories, conspiracies, and outright weirdness built to this...
On Friday night, as the 6 o’clock news kicked off in the UK, Kensington Palace released a video of Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, revealing her recent cancer diagnosis. She talked about receiving scheduled abdominal surgery and how nothing cancerous was found at the time, but later tests offered a new verdict. She said that she has taken time to deal with preventative chemotherapy as well as provide comfort and support to her family, particularly her three young kids.
The video is pretty tough to watch, to be honest. Kate’s voice wobbles and her sadness is clear. It’s the culmination of months of conspiracies, media obsession, memes, and straight-up oddness that has become a worldwide fascination. I don’t think you need me to tell you how strange it’s been, or how outlandish some of this got. Between a photo so poorly edited that the Associated Press killed it to TMZ releasing footage of Kate at a farmer’s market and then pretending they thought it might be fake, things entered ancient aliens levels of stupidity very quickly. What the hell was going on? Why was Kensington Palace making such a mess of this issue? How did we get to this stage where even the BBC had to talk about something that would have been more at home in the comments of 4Chan or Mumsnet? How did we end up from BBL jokes to literal cancer?
Let’s try and break it down, starting from the beginning. I highly recommend Ellie Hall’s full timeline of events on NeimanLab, and her own analysis on how this story spiralled out of control. She’s been one of the few consistently sharp and not-weird journalists covering this story.
In January, Kensington Palace announced that Kate was admitted to hospital for "planned abdominal surgery." It had been almost a month since she'd last been seen in public, and the palace said that she was "unlikely to return to public duties until Easter." This new came around the same time that King Charles went public with his cancer diagnosis, and overall, most people seemed pretty chill about this news.
But it didn't take long for the internet to get weird, with one Spanish journalist with a questionable past claiming that Kate was in a medically induced coma. As the news vacuum grew larger, the British press got antsy, as did social media figures looking for something to entertain them while we waited for the Oscars. The memes started, but so did the conspiracies. Kensington Palace tried to quash this but it didn't land. One side member of the royal family died by what seems to be suicide and that made conspiracy theorists go wild. TMZ published a paparazzi image of Kate and her mother, Carole Middleton, in a car near Windsor Castle on March 4, which many people claimed wasn't her because her face looked different, apparently (it didn't.)
Then, on the night of the Oscars, Kensington Palace released a picture of Kate with her kids as a Mother’s Day celebration, but also as a means to push back against growing curiosity around her supposed disappearance. That backfired when the Associated Press issued a kill notice on the picture for its obvious and messy Photoshop. Soon thereafter, the Palace’s Twitter account had “Kate” issue an apology for playing around with photo editing software, and of course it only got darker from there.
By this point in time, Kate’s lack of presence in the public eye had become worldwide news. The social media panic had expanded well beyond the hellish barriers of Elon’s cesspool. Even the usually dutiful British press, which has never been one to rock the boat when it comes to their relationship with the Windsors, had to delve into the mess. Other long-simmering theories about the royals started to bubble over, most notably the rumour that William is or was having an affair with an aristocrat called Rose Hanbury, the Marchioness of Cholmondeley. The story blew up mostly via clickbait and SEO-driven headlines with no actual reporting, but that also made its way to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. It created this false image that the press were finally spilling the tea about the Waleses, when really it was amplified whispers via the terror of the clickbait machine.
THEN TMZ, never one to pass up the opportunity to be the absolute worst, posted exclusive phone camera footage of William and Kate at a local farmers market, but that added further fuel to the conspiracy fires because people tried to claim it didn’t look like her. It got so exhausting that TMZ tried to play both sides of the coin and be like, “well, it might not be real, let’s get all of those clicks.”
And also Kate’s wife-beating uncle was on Celebrity Big Brother. It was like an SNL Stefon sketch, but sh*t.
And now it’s come to this.
On its most basic and bureaucratic level, this is a massive failing of palace public relations. It’s tough to get over how avoidable a lot of this mess was. The photoshopped picture of Kate and her kids is the biggest error here, and for them to then throw the cancer patient under the bus when it failed? Jesus. The palace seemed utterly incapable of dealing not only with the magnitude of Kate’s illness but the issue of fake news and finding the right balance between transparency and privacy in the always-online age. Their desire to keep all of this out of the public eye is certainly understandable, but then why be so sloppy with stuff like that photo? And then why let Kate take the fall?
You cannot stop people from being curious. There was always going to be a level of speculation around Kate, especially since her entire job (such as it is an occupation) is to be visible and available to us plebs. With the King out of commission and the Sussexes excluded from the narrative, the sudden decrease in frontline royals has never been more evident. Plus we’ve long been told that the royal PR game is unimpeachable. There are entire documentaries dedicated to this mythos. Charles managed to reinvent himself as a dutiful king and husband after years of cruelty towards Diana. Queen Elizabeth’s decades’ long strategy of being seen but never heard (she didn’t give interviews, famously) made her beloved and enduring. But it’s long been clear, certainly since Harry and Meghan left, that the firm’s courtiers and publicists are not equipped for this era. Or at least they weren’t equipped to help Kate.
Would things have been cleaner had the Wales camp said, “Kate is recovering from major surgery and recently received a diagnosis of cancer, for which she is receiving preventative chemotherapy”? It’s hard to say, and it’s hard to see where the hard limit is. Charles gave a brief statement about his cancer diagnosis and people left it at that because cancer doesn’t need to be extrapolated on. But Kate also has young kids, and explaining all of this to them would have taken time and sensitivity, plus space from the rest of the world before it became front page news. Imagine the whole planet being aware of your mother’s illness and asking you about it at school. There was clearly a desire to toe that line, but then they went in the other direction and it got messy.
Medical privacy faced up against the very nature of the monarchy: when your entire (shaky, outdated) existence is dependent on taxpayers and media attention, denying access for whatever reason is like adding blood to the shark tank. It’s an impossible deal to maintain, as Harry has spoken about for several years now, and it’s one where the very notion of privacy is debatable. And that’s weird, right? Fame in general forces people to sign this demonic deal, one where everything, including your medical privacy, is justified as “in the public interest.” And Kate didn’t owe people the grotesque details of her health. Watching the usual suspects, the ones who are so eager to scorn others for their interest in this topic, turn a cancer diagnosis into clickbait speculation has been disturbing and utterly predictable.
I’ve never been shy about my anti-monarchist views. I seldom write about the royal family without mentioning that I believe the institution is rotten and should be abolished. My perspective is an increasingly popular one in the UK but there are still many royalists, particularly in the press (although I’d argue the default mode for locals is ambivalence.) But navigating the past few months of this very strange story and the catastrophic failing of Kensington Palace’s public relations has been treacherous. Not because I feel the need to put aside my politics, but because I’ve seen a hell of a lot of publications and supposedly sensible people act as though being a small-r republican is an excuse to be as ghoulish, misogynistic, and conspiratorial as one pleases. Frankly, it's been disheartening to watch a hell of a lot of so-called journalists go full QAnon with their theories. I’m not talking about the criticism of the PR chaos here, but how someone’s medical privacy became the platform on which others could accuse Kate of everything from a BBL to a hysterectomy to an eating disorder to being literally dead.
Many things can be true at once. Kensington Palace screwed this story up big time. A lot of people need to reconsider how willing they were to adopt wild conspiracies because the internet told them to. You can have empathy for someone while still finding the institution they signed up to an anti-democratic disgrace. It’s weird that the palace knew all of this and still made Kate take the blame for some bad Photoshop. TMZ is a gross hellhole that tried to play both sides of the coin and showed their whole arse. There is no sympathy quota. It’s exhausting and gross that Meghan will inevitably be dragged into and blamed for this, as one especially snivelling royal “journalist” tried to do with Charles’ own cancer diagnosis. It doesn’t help Meghan one iota to be a weird sexist creep about Kate’s medical situation. The monarchy shouldn’t exist in 2024, and cancer is pure evil that should be annihilated.
To be honest, this whole issue has made me tired and sad. And the messiness has only continued. The British press hasn’t stopped covering the story for a second, despite information remaining scant and recent terrorist attacks in Moscow. The conspiracy theorists on social media are beyond saving but so are the tabloids, if we're being brutally honest. The content cycle continues. The "blame Meghan" headlines are inevitable. The scolding is more hypocritical than ever. To quote Lainey and Sarah's write-up of the announcement on Lainey Gossip, "You can’t respect her privacy when you’re creating storylines using her health condition in order to villainise others, unless the villain is cancer itself."
Where do we go from here? I’ve truly no idea. At the very least, I hope this news gives people a moment to consider their own health and take care of themselves. Make that doctor’s visit you were putting off. Get those check-ups. Put yourself first for once.