Prince Harry Was Right All Along
The British royal PR team is unsuited for this era, and the way they've handled the Kate Middleton saga demonstrates it is time to clean house.
About 2 pm Eastern time today, a video was released to media agencies in which Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales, announced that she’d been diagnosed with cancer.
This, of course, was not the end that anyone wanted to this social media saga, because cancer is awful. It is a thoroughly nasty disease that takes far too many lives before the victims can live a full life, and it had already been announced as the same affliction King Charles III was suffering from. Kate and I are both 42, and she has three young children. I cannot express anything but my sincerest wishes that she recovers and lives a long, happy life with her children.
With that said, I think it’s urgently important, for the sake of their family, that Prince William and Kate fire their entire public relations team. This team helped drive a wedge between two very close brothers, drove Meghan Markle right out of the royal family through a constant harassment campaign that they stoked to protect Will and Kate, and spent the last two months putting a woman that we now know to be fighting cancer in front of the public’s scorn for actions they surely took.
When Prince William pulled out of his godfather’s memorial service for “a personal matter,” they said nothing. When the rumors began about Kate’s long absence, the infamous Photoshopped photo was released:
The sheer amount of poor editing in the photo, released through official channels in high enough resolution that everyone would be able to zoom in and see these flawed edits, is shocking. It’s even worse that they made Kate took the blame for the photo. Even if she was responsible, she’s just gotten a cancer diagnosis. It is appalling that these fools got away with blaming Kate Middleton for this poor editing, when they either A: did it themselves, or B: should have caught and stopped it.
They followed this up with a paparazzi photo where “Kate” was driving with William, but her face is never seen. More questions abounded online, so what happened next was a staged walkabout with “Will and Kate,” except that the anomalies glaringly stood out. Why was the video so blurry? Why was nobody around them reacting to a very famous woman who hasn’t been seen in months? Why was this an exclusive with the Sun, the most deferential of the tabloids to Will and Kate?
The ridicule continued, and finally, today, Kate had to go public with a cancer diagnosis she probably had no desire to talk about. Even now, she was by herself, as if the issue was that her husband had been in the prior staged attempts to change the subject instead of the lack of even a semi-competent team working for them.
There’s a lot of people who probably had not felt sympathy for William and Kate that now do because of this moment. It has demonstrated how everything about royal PR teams is involved in satisfying the tabloids, as if it’s still the Nineties and the tabloids drive conversation. The public is smarter about these things. Social media drives conversation now, and people on social media can spot the fraud from miles away. They see the morally barren philosophy of pitting family against each other, treating the royals as pieces on a chessboard, and they reject it. Yes, shame on Will and Kate for not firing their team the moment they began attacking Meghan and Harry. However, if they don’t fire them after botching this situation and throwing Kate Middleton under the bus, then it’ll just prove how right Harry was—the royals are complicit in their own manipulation by these apparatchiks and refuse to smash a system that has failed them time and again.