The Princess and the Pigeon Tunnel

In my 2022 novel False Light, I dealt with the issue of altered audio-visual imagery in the service of a bad guy’s destruction. A real-world variation of this theme surfaced this week when the Princess of Wales apologized for editing photos of herself posing with her kids.

This is an example of how a likely meaningless and routine task took on global significance due to the backdrop of an unfolding larger story. That larger story is about the health of the Princess and her invisibility since her January surgery, not to mention the ongoing specter of King Charles’ cancer diagnosis.

The British are old-fashioned about discretion. It is considered unseemly to discuss medical challenges in detail, especially if the details concern sexual reproduction organs. Regardless, I tend to be a proponent of the Occam’s Razor school for this brouhaha: Likely, the Princess had a hysterectomy and isn’t bouncing back as quickly as the public demands. After all, this is the same woman who appeared on the hospital steps mere hours after giving birth. At the same time, ever mindful of appearances, the Princess indulged in the obsessive-compulsive habit of many of her generation: playing around with photos to present her family in the best light. After all, don’t we all have a preferred angle of our faces or expression on our children’s? Along the way, harmless tinkering became a crisis. (No one has disputed the basic authenticity of the photo’s fundamentals.)

Salacious alternative narratives are big business. Where there are troughs, there will be pigs, and when there is a hibernating princess, there will be journalistic entrepreneurs. They’ll cook something up if  you don’t give the tabloids something to cover. One TikTok wag suggested that Kate’s face in the scandalous photo was lifted from a prior magazine cover. He found it curious that her face precisely resembled…her face. As opposed to whose, Charles Barkley’s?

In the wake of Princess Catherine’s surgery and King Charles’ surprise — and ambiguous — cancer diagnosis, news consumers were ripe for a conspiracy: Charles dies, William prematurely becomes King — but who will his queen be if…if…if..? Conspiracy theories are a blast, but there is a vanity in them: Whoever espouses one immediately becomes the smirking, in-the-know center of attention. Whoever rejects them is a dupe and a drip; nobody wants to be those things.

Indeed, that meaningless edits to the royal photos beg the question, “If they altered these photos, what were they hiding?” And, “If she’s fine and dandy, why not have her just wave to the cameras live?” Could it be that she just doesn’t feel like it right now? Must the Firm get everything it wants? “Who’s the princess, them or me?”

As I puzzle through the Occam’s Razor explanation of what happened here, I think of spy novelist John Le Carre’s memoir The Pigeon Tunnel in which he speculates about the great mystery that drives espionage: “You want the rolled-up parchment in the innermost room that tells you who runs your lives and why. But there is none.”