From botched plastic surgery to serial killers: Middleton conspiracies part of a glorious history

It was the hands. It’s always the hands. Kate Middleton — whose absence from public life since surgery at the turn of the year has raised all manner of speculation about her true state (was she really recovering from plastic surgery? In a coma? Dead?) — put out a picture with her children over the weekend, marking Mother’s Day and thanking her well-wishers. Within hours, newswire service Associated Press sent out a “kill notification” stating that the picture had been tampered with.

Presumably, there is no picture issued by the palace that hasn’t in one way or another been touched up, but there is something comically inept about releasing an altered picture of the subject of various conspiracy theories, and then doing so poor a job (apart from the blurry hands and lack of a wedding ring, the background was suspiciously green for UK winter) that it creates its own conspiracy theories.

Of course, when the entirety of your prestige and legitimacy comes from conspiracy and intrigue — the British royal family descends from Germany, after all — you can scarcely complain when people start to form some conspiracy theories about what you’re up to.

George VI’s fatal disease kept from even him

If there is any skullduggery going on regarding Middleton’s health, it would not be the first time. King George VI became king in 1936 when his brother Edward VIII abdicated his short-lived stay on the throne to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson — before the pair did a spot of sight-seeing in Germany. George, who was monarch throughout the Second World War, was a heavy smoker all his life, and when a giant ominous mass was found during a chest X-ray, doctors kept his lung cancer not only from the public but from the king himself. He never fully recovered from the operation that removed his lung and he died at the age of 56 in 1952.

Did MI6 off Princess Diana?

Probably no royal event has raised such a flurry of conspiracy theories as the death of Princess Diana following the 1997 car crash that killed Diana and Dodi Fayed. With Dodi’s father Mohamed al-Fayed leading the charge, it was widely believed that the pair had actually been murdered in a plot masterminded by Prince Philip. Why did the ambulance take so long to get to the hospital? Why were so many of the surveillance cameras along the route the car took facing the wrong way? Did her psychic know it was going to happen? Did Diana herself know? What we’d really like to know is who conspired with al-Fayed to produce “Innocent Victims”, the tacky as-all-get-out bronze memorial to the late pair displayed in Harrods between 2005 and 2018.

Prince Albert Victor a serial killer?

Poor Albert (known as Eddy) had no end of speculation about him in his short life; noting that he was not well respected by the upper or lower classes, that he was thought of as a “slow” child who became a “dull” adult, the writer James Pope-Hennessy said:

Even his nearest and dearest, who were naturally bent on making the best of poor Prince Eddy, could not bring themselves to use more positive terms. Prince Eddy was certainly dear and good, kind and considerate. He was also backward and utterly listless. He was self-indulgent and not punctual … He was as heedless and as aimless as a gleaming gold-fish in a crystal bowl.”

But this speculation — as well as the rumours that he had syphilis and narrowly avoided being caught frequenting a gay brothel — pales in comparison to the theory put forward by various historians from the 1960s onwards that he was Jack the Ripper, the notorious London serial killer who killed an unknown number of women in the Whitechapel area in the late 1880s. This one has been pretty thoroughly debunked though, with contemporaneous documents showing the prince wasn’t in London on most of the occasions the Ripper is thought to have struck.