What ‘sleevegate’ reveals about Catherine, conspiracy theories and camera tricks

Good morning. Yesterday’s Daily Mirror, like many of the newspapers, featured a wholesome picture of the Princess of Wales with her children. “It is hoped the photo will stop the wild conspiracies about Kate’s health as she recovers,” the caption read. Well, not exactly.

It’s been a heady couple of days on WhatsApp. On Sunday afternoon, the resident royal mystery connoisseur on one of my group chats sent round a series of screenshots of parts of the photo in a “just asking questions” sort of way. Later that evening, something discombobulating happened: the conspiracists turned out to be right.

I mean, sort of. The major international picture agencies withdrew the image from distribution, warning that it appeared to have been manipulated. Yesterday morning, Kensington Palace finally sent out a statement from Catherine, in which she apologised and said that “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing.” It was like Neil Armstrong popping up and saying he’d never been to the moon.

Still, that ought to be the end of that. You suspect that it won’t be – and it’s hard to imagine a more chaotic unforced error than the monarchy having to admit to an element of fakery in a picture intended to reassure everyone that a senior royal is absolutely fine. Today’s newsletter, with the Guardian’s head of photography, Fiona Shields, is about editorial standards in picture editing, marginal royal conspiracy theories, and whether it’s possible to cross your fingers the way Prince Louis did. Give it a go, and here are the headlines.

In depth: Five big stories

In depth: ‘If you really want to pull the wool over people’s eyes, it’s absolutely possible … [but] you wouldn’t do it like this’

To a casual observer, it looked like a standard royal PR picture: a family photo of the Princess of Wales with her children, charmingly taken by Prince William, to celebrate Mother’s Day and, conveniently, to allay swirling rumours about Catherine’s health.

“It wasn’t obvious at a glance,” Fiona Shields said. But people on the internet do not stop at a glance – especially when they’re obsessing over a fairly wild set of rumours that have sought to explain a princess’s absence from the public eye since Christmas. Nor do picture editors.

As the speculation blew up online, an editor working a Sunday shift at one of the agencies took a closer look at the picture and spotted something very curious about Princess Charlotte’s sleeve, with her wrist seeming to materialise from thin air. The manipulation was so obvious that they quickly notified the other members of the pool that gets sent pictures by Kensington Palace, and four of the biggest agencies – Getty, AP, AFP and Reuters – issued a “kill notice” telling their media clients not to use the photo.

“They all did it pretty quickly,” Fiona said. “That was partly because there was no explanation coming from Kensington Palace, and that raised questions about its authenticity.”

If you still don’t quite grasp why everyone’s freaking out so much about a child’s glitchy sleeve, here’s what else you need to know.

The Kate conspiracy mill

Stories about the princess’s health have been hovering at the edge of the mainstream for a while now. In January, it was widely reported, on the basis of a Kensington Palace statement, that she had been admitted to hospital for an unspecified abdominal surgery and that she would likely be absent from her public role until Easter. Later the same month, it was announced that she had returned home.

While she’s still on track for that Easter return date, the palace has not issued regular updates on her condition since. That is on the basis of the reasonable view that the minutiae of her health are nobody else’s business – but the internet loves a vacuum, and also a mystery over a missing royal.

Prince William’s cancellation of a personal appearance late in February over a “personal matter” only heightened the (tasteless, baseless and unhinged) fever. Was Kate in danger of dying, or in an induced coma? Had she been replaced with a body double? Were she and William divorcing? Had she had a … Brazilian butt lift? Was she waiting out a terrible haircut? Was she part of the Wonka Experience?

As you’ll notice, quite a lot of the theories occupy the exciting liminal space between conspiracy and people finding ways to amuse themselves online. Nonetheless, they meant that any news stories about Catherine’s wellbeing were a likely click magnet, and so the coverage proliferated. The thing to do, someone at Kensington Palace must have concluded, was to put out a photograph that would shut everyone up. Another day at the royal press office passes off without a hitch! Now to put my feet up with a cup of tea and check Twitter.

What was wrong with the picture?

The picture has definitely been manipulated. Sadly for the amateur online detective community, that doesn’t mean that every question raised about it is a valid one. “It is pretty glaring,” Fiona said. “It’s impossible to tell exactly what the correction was – it might be brightening up a shadow or getting rid of a grubby mark – but you can see very clearly that Princess Charlotte’s sleeve has been manipulated.”

The “cloning” tool on software like Photoshop would be the standard way to make such picture edits, she added. “It means you can pick up a little detail from a picture and replicate it elsewhere – you might use it to remove a lamp-post that looks as if it’s growing out of someone’s head by replacing it with sky. But it was very clumsily used here.” The BBC reported that metadata on the image showed that it had been saved in Photoshop.

Here’s a list of 20 plausible anomalies in the image. Wilder speculations have meanwhile abounded: unseasonably green leaves on the trees, dark theories about why Prince Louis has crossed his fingers and whether he has done so in a way that’s physically possible, and quite a lot of people who think the picture was taken in November.

“I was cycling into work looking around at the trees, and there was plenty of foliage on some of them,” Fiona helpfully points out. She, I and several enthusiastic WhatsApp correspondents have tried the finger thing and can confirm it’s doable for most people.

Who was the culprit?

The sheer hamfistedness of the editing doesn’t actually speak of a high-level conspiracy, if we’re brutally honest with ourselves – and although William is said to have taken the photo, a statement was issued in Catherine’s name yesterday taking the blame.

“If you really want to pull the wool over people’s eyes, it’s absolutely possible, and the only way to tell would be to compare the image to the original digital file,” Fiona said. “You wouldn’t do it like this. So I suspect it’s quite innocent and done by an amateur.”

The real mystery, then, is not a conspiratorial one – but why Kensington Palace took so long to issue a comment, refusing to answer queries from picture agencies on Sunday and finally coming out with a statement only after the speculation had become fully delirious.

As Caroline Davies notes in her analysis, that silence gave far more space for coverage and theorising than a straight answer would have done. It may have been founded in the general royal preference to stay above the fray, especially about matters even tangentially related to the health of family members – even if doing so risks fanning the flames.

Why pictures like this are a problem

For all that this level of attention to an unexceptional family photo is ridiculous, the reasons for the picture agencies’ caution are not. “It has become really important to news agencies and publishers of reputation that there is no image manipulation – that the pixels have not been moved around in any way,” Fiona said. “Standard darkroom toning techniques, where you might brighten an image or increase contrast to bring out some detail, is acceptable. But nothing that changes the facts of the events being photographed.”

While rules like this have been in place for at least a couple of decades, editors are highly attuned to them now: Dan Milmo puts the furore in the context of “a deluge of AI-generated deepfakes in recent years”. “We think about it all the time,” Fiona said. “The only way we can be certain is by knowing that we can trust the photographers and agencies we work with, and the agencies need to have trust in the images they are sent. That’s more important now than it’s ever been.”

So, you can trust the Guardian, promise. But if you happen to see a picture of Prince William giving his brother a wedgie on your online travels in the near future, don’t say you weren’t warned.

What else we’ve been reading

• Those heady nights out during my university years were legendary, so I read this piece by John Harris on why British nightlife (above) is shutting down – taking with it all its magic and messy glory – with a tinge of sadness. Nazia Parveen, acting deputy editor, newsletters

• I loved Larry Ryan’s excavation of the origins of The Simpsons, and the nerds, comedians and punk zine contributors who were Matt Groening’s early collaborators. Archie

• Photographer Polly Braden has spent two years documenting the lives of Ukrainian women and children as they migrated across Europe to escape the war. Some found happiness. Some were overwhelmed. Some had to return. Nazia

• Stuart Heritage went to the “normal people Oscars” – sitting among the competition-winners and crew members in the upper levels of the Dolby theatre. His celebrity encounters are underwhelming, but his enthusiasm for his neighbours is not. Archie

• Being a “bookfluencer” is the hot new trend, but do the A-list celebs who have started their own book clubs do it for their love of the written word or, more cynically, because it adds “another layer to their personae”? Nazia

Sport

Football | Chelsea secured a much-needed 3-2 win over Newcastle, with goals from Nicolas Jackson, Cole Palmer and Mykhailo Murdryk sealing victory. The result leaves Newcastle just a point ahead of Chelsea in 10th.

Tennis | Emma Raducanu crashed out of Indian Wells in a 6-3, 7-5 defeat to Aryna Sabalenka. Raducanu gave a strong account of herself against the No 2 seed but slipped to a 0-6 record against top-10 opponents.

Football | Premier League clubs have walked away from a deal to provide more money to the English Football League, risking a row with the government and putting the position of the Premier League chief executive, Richard Masters, under threat. Over two years since top-flight clubs were first told by ministers to provide extra funding, clubs chose not to proceed to a vote on a proposed new deal.

The front pages

“Biggest Tory donor: looking at Diane Abbott makes you ‘want to hate all black women’” – the lead story in the Guardian this Tuesday morning. “Tories delay ‘British ISA’ £5k tax-free savings until after election” says the i while the Financial Times has “Telegram hits 900mn users as owner gears up for bumper market listing”. “Kate’s photo bomb!” – that’s the Metro while the others carrying the doctored picture scandal include the Daily Mail – “How DID Kate photo become a PR disaster?” – and the Daily Mirror – “Picture of chaos”. But the Sun reckons everyone should “Lay off Kate … stop bullying over edited pic”. The princess’s apology features on other fronts like the Times’, though its lead story is “Johnson to join election campaign in red wall”. The Daily Telegraph goes with “Sunak’s new gas plants ease risk of blackouts” and the Daily Express has “Exposed: lies of asylum seekers who become ‘Christian’ to stay in UK”.

Today in Focus

Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings

The Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

In the Studio Ghibli film Princess Mononoke, the forest-dwelling spirits known as kodama were depicted as tiny humanoids with rotating bobble heads. A new genus of squid the size of one’s pinky fingernail has been named in honour of the kodama (above). A second pygmy squid species discovered was named after mischievous creatures from Okinawan mythology, the kijimunā. These pygmy squid are, says Jeff Jolly from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, a sign of a healthy ecosystem.

Jolly and his colleagues have studied their behaviour up close, especially because they are easier to keep alive than their cephalopod cousins such as octopus, which are known to attack each other. Their species-specific name is jujutsu, because these tiny squid hunt shrimp much larger than them. “The principle of jujutsu is that a small person can attack a larger person,” Jolly says. “You corral and wrestle them and control their back, which is what the squid do.”

Though the total number of pygmy squid species is just eight, taxonomist Amanda Reid, who helped identify the new species, believes more will be identified. “It’s not the end of the story, as far as these little critters are concerned.”

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