#WhereIsKate is trending online as the UK’s Royal Family digs in their heels and allows rumours and speculations to run rife.

Anyone with a shred of PR knowhow will tell you that it didn’t need to be this way. First the initial Mother’s Day photo of Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales, was removed by several press agencies as it had been clearly manipulated.

Then, in a shockingly weird move, Kensington Palace made Kate the fall guy for the photo. A publicly posted apology from the Princess of Wales claiming that she’d edited the image herself fell on deaf ears.

We previously went into the details as to why it’s monumentally absurd for the Royal Family’s uptight press team to expect the public to believe the complex Stalinesque photoshop revisionism was the product of a princess tapping away on her Mac.

Now, the latest detail to add into the mix is a video published by The Sun – that most reputable of papers – that attempts to put the wild speculations to bed by capturing the Prince and Princess of Wales going out to a casual farm shop in Windsor.

Immediately, the Internet was once again ablaze with suggestions that the woman walking beside Prince William was not, in fact, Kate Middleton. Some suggested it was an AI deepfake, others believed it’s a stand-in actor.

The entire furore over the whereabouts of the UK’s Queen-in-waiting is only getting bigger. #WhereIsKate and other versions of the tag are trending on X (formerly Twitter), while increasingly bizarre conspiracy theory TikToks spread like wildfire.

And all this because the Royal Family’s PR team has refused to properly elaborate on the Princess’s health. Kate was last seen in public at Christmas in 2023 before she underwent abdominal surgery on 17 January.

The Palace said it was unlikely that the Princess would resume public duties until at least Easter, which falls at the end of March this year. Then, unprompted, they released the Mother’s Day photo.

This entire conspiracy theory scandal is a completely unforced error on the part of the Palace. Whatever state Kate is in – whether she’s perfectly fine and content to stay away from the limelight or taking a lot of time to recover from a difficult surgery – no one asked for the Mother’s Day photo.

The completely unbelievable excuse around the photo was also not a requirement. They could have easily come clean and explained how the image was created instead of further entrenching the speculation.

And finally, this farm shop video. Originally posted by TMZ, it’s worth digging into the way the British press ran with the image. While The Sun isn’t renowned in many corners of Britain for its quality journalism, they generally do follow the demands of the Palace when they make demands over maintaining the privacy of the Royal Family.

That The Sun and then every other outlet pushed this unofficial video shows that the British press is confident that the Palace wouldn’t respond with bared teeth and have them remove it. The implication is, either this “photoshoot” was set up by the Palace or they’re happy with this being their method of refuting the conspiracy theories.

Either way, a grainy video that feels like a 20th century Bigfoot sighting is a pretty weird tactic to try and get this whole crazy thing to go away.

Which brings us to the crux of the matter. All of this could go away quickly if the Royal Family weren’t so obsessed with their privacy. If they simply came out and explained clearly what had happened, why they’d made the peculiar decisions they’d made, there would be a small chance of this ending.

The current scenario is that they’ve put nearly all of their future public communications under suspicion, which is hardly desirable for the nation’s figureheads.

And should the Royal Family have any claim to privacy anyway? By definition, they are not a private family. They are part of the state, no less private than the Civil Service or the NHS. While three members of staff at the London Clinic are investigated for breaching Kate’s medical records, shouldn’t details of the Royal Family’s health be freely known by the public? They are our heads of state.

The very act of existing within the Royal Family is one that forgoes your right to complete privacy. You can exist in an ordinary family, get a job, a mortgage and one day retire all away from the limelight. Or you can exist within a hereditary monarchy whose power over the nation is still imbued by divine right. In modern day terms, I think that means your medical records should be available to anyone willing to send in a freedom of information (FOI) request.

Harry and Meghan have done all they can to remove themselves from the requirements of a public institution to grasp at their privacy because they recognise that to be in the Royal Family is to be a public possession of the British public. Forget FOI requests, they should set up Big Brother house style CCTV and stream every move of the Royal Family. It would certainly have cleared up a few details on Prince Andrew’s life.

While Royalists will make some reasonable claims about how press intrusion into the family’s privacy is somewhat responsible for the death of Princess Diana, I have a simple solution to them. If you don’t like it, abdicate.