Let Princess Kate recuperate, says Judy Finnigan

Poor, poor Kate. Weeks of mounting pressure to show us a photo of herself – any photo, doing anything – to disprove mad conspiracy theories about her mushrooming on social media... and she finally gives in. Photo duly posted, lovely snap of her with her kids laughing and smiling at William (reportedly the man behind the camera) and then what happens?

The roof falls in.

The photo’s a fake! Why? Well, er, because a sleeve to the right, some fingers to the left, a zip in the middle, a few more tiny tweaks here and there, make it so.

Oh, please! Who cares?

So Kate touched up the picture a bit using Photoshop, apparently, not the dreaded “AI” (artificial intelligence). She just employed a basic tool that, as she later pointed out to us all, millions of amateur photographers like her routinely use to enhance their published work.

It’s so NOT a big deal. But that didn’t stop any of the increasingly deranged conspiracy theorists piling in.

If the fingers/zip/sleeve had been altered, then maybe the whole photo was a fake. Maybe Kate’s smiling face had been “lifted” from a Vogue photoshoot taken months ago. Or maybe – just maybe – this devoted mother of three, recovering from what no one is pretending wasn’t a serious operation (she needed fully two weeks in hospital after major abdominal surgery, for God’s sake) simply wanted to put her family’s best foot forward in a photo she knew would be minutely inspected by all and sundry.

So she tidied it up a bit – in exactly in the same way a mother smooths her children’s hair and straightens their clothes before an important appearance in public.

She isn’t a super-sophisticated, Machiavellian, arch-manipulator, Kate’s a dead ordinary,middle-class girl who married into royalty for love and has done a damn fine job of managing life in the relentless glare of global scrutiny ever since.

In fact, she has not put a foot wrong, as far as I can see.

So can we please leave her alone to get better? The Palace said from the outset that she’d need until at least Easter to recover from surgery, and we’re still weeks away from that somewhat arbitrary deadline.

Come on. Give Kate a break.