The British royal family is no stranger to scandal. From cheating rumors to actual affairs, divorces and abdications, unruly royals, phone recordings, rehab, and one prince’s dubious friendship with Jeffrey Epstein — the list of infamous incidents is long and, at times, salacious.

For the first time in recent memory, however, something odd has happened: The coverups and fumbles have become bigger than the stories themselves.

Case in point: the hack editing job on Kate Middleton’s Mother’s Day photo. The family portrait was presumably designed to get people to stop talking about the Princess of Wales’s absence from the public eye. But instead of quashing skepticism, the janky image has made Kensington Palace less trustworthy and only increased speculation about Kate’s disappearance. The response has also created spinoff scandals, like the Late Show-endorsed rumor that Prince William is allegedly cheating on his ailing wife with her friend Lady Rose Hanbury, Marchioness of Cholmondeley.

The entire kerfuffle is now being called “Kategate.” The longer Kategate goes, the less in control the royal family seems.

For a family and institution that’s been known to operate like an impossibly efficient machine, Kategate becoming an international news story can’t help but feel like a failure on multiple fronts. So what happened to that machine? Why does this scandal feel so big? And why do we care so much?

This is what happened without Queen Elizabeth to guide the family

One of the lasting legacies of Queen Elizabeth was that she was extremely good at her job. The saying “never complain, never explain” is such a simple and perfect distillation of the PR strategy Elizabeth employed. For the queen, it was easier to perform her duties if she kept her cards close. Getting into a back and forth, “explaining” her actions, or “complaining” about someone or something would quickly turn into a no-win situation — especially for a ruler who’s literally above the law.

This could have its drawbacks (see: the lack of response from the palace immediately following Princess Diana’s death), but for the most part it kept the queen above the fray when, say, there was infidelity — or worse — in her sons’ marriages, or her husband said something racist.

The queen precisely understood that she and her family were a symbol and that favorability is crucial to the monarchy. Prior to her death, the queen’s approval ratings were extremely high. For comparison, right before King Charles’s coronation in the spring of 2023, polling found that Britons’ support for the monarchy fell, with 36 percent of UK adults responding that they had a more negative opinion of the royal family than they did 10 years prior.

Being that well-liked amid long-term........

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