Kate Middleton Was ‘Astonished’ by the Mother’s Day Photo Drama: Royal Biography
The drama surrounding Kate Middleton’s edited family photo for Mother’s Day is being rehashed. In their latest book, a royal author dished on how the Princess of Wales, 42, (and Prince William) felt about the photo drama in the weeks before her cancer diagnosis became public.
Kate saw the Mother’s Day photo as a ‘personal’ way of spreading ‘joy’
On March 10, 2024, Kensington Palace—the Prince and Princess of Wales’s office within the royal family—released a photo of Kate alongside her and William’s three kids, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis, to celebrate Mother’s Day in the U.K.
The photo, taken by William, marked the public’s first official glimpse of Kate as speculation about her health swirled online. (It wouldn’t be until 12 days later that she’d announce her cancer diagnosis in a video.)
The Mother’s Day photo quickly came under fire for poor editing, spurring conspiracy theories. Kate, for her part, as Robert Hardman wrote in a Daily Mail excerpt of Charles III: New King. New Court. The Inside Story, saw it as her way of marking the holiday and spreading “joy.”
In Kate’s view, an aide told Hardman, “This had just been a mother deciding to share a personal picture of her and her children on Mother’s Day to bring some joy to the nation. That’s all.”
She and William, the Kensington Palace staffer noted, were very much involved in making the Mother’s Day photo happen. “The Prince and Princess have agency in everything,” they said. “They are the final decision makers.”
Kate and William were ‘astonished’ photo agencies pulled the image
When the four main international photo agencies—Associated Press, Getty, AFP, and Reuters—retracted the Mother’s Day photo with respective ‘kill notice[s],’ it left William, Kate, and their staff “astonished.”
The decision, according to Jobson, “seemed an oddly exaggerated, almost performative, response.” According to the previously mentioned member of the Wales team, it was the culmination of “several factors.”
“Anything written or said about the Princess of Wales at that point was at fever pitch and front page news,” they said. “It also spoke to the nervousness of the photography industry around AI [artificial intelligence] and their future. Even so, the reaction seemed extremely disproportionate.”
The Wales team didn’t ‘dwell’ on the Mother’s Day photo drama
The following day there wasn’t “dwell[ing]” on the matter from William and Kate or their staff. “Within Kensington Palace and Adelaide Cottage, the Waleses’ home at Windsor, there was no great soul-searching the next day,” Jobson wrote. “If there was frustration that the media should be making quite such a meal of a well-intentioned, homespun gesture, there was no time to dwell on it.”
All that was left to do was to “try to ‘kill’ the story.” So, rather than a statement from Kensington Palace, Kate released a public apology on social media which she signed “C.”
“Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” Kate wrote. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.”
Since then, William and Kate have continued their tradition of sharing photos for birthdays, albeit in a slightly different way—without major photo agencies.
