As I’ve noted in several posts already, Prince William and Kate came out of their summer holiday with a somewhat stable message: Kate is “cancer free” but not committed to going back to work, and the Wales marriage is fine, possibly even better than fine! After Kensington Palace dropped the Will Warr-directed video, KP minions then dutifully went on briefing sprees to reinforce the message with their most sycophantic rota reporters and commentators. Tom Sykes at the Daily Beast seemingly got the most ridiculous briefing of all, which makes sense. Sykes often gets the most hateful and deranged briefings. Some highlights from this Royalist piece:

The tonal shift of the video: So it’s fair to say there has never been a more massive and abrupt shift in the tone of royal messaging than the one signaled by Kate’s astonishingly intimate Instagram cancer recovery video, directed by Will Warr. If the medium really is the message, then the message here was unequivocal; forget everything you think you know about the monarchy, this is what the royal family is going to look like from now on.

The reset: The reign of King William and Queen Kate, we were put on notice Monday, will be shiny, professional and digital first, with a heavy focus on artfully configured cornfields, butterflies, positivity, flattering light, sunsets, picnics in the forest, card games and snogging Prince William on the beach. One friend of William and Kate told The Daily Beast: “It’s the reset to end all resets. This is Kate and William as they mean to go on. It’s family first and f**k the haters, f**k the press, f**k Harry and Meghan. It helps that they actually are like this. If you go to a kid’s birthday party at their house, they will be the ones organizing games for all the kids whereas the rest of us would happily get an entertainer in and be drinking wine in the kitchen.”

A declaration of war: This video was a declaration of war on the stiff upper lip, a forceful rebuttal to those who accuse her of being some kind of automaton, a blank screen or “a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung” in the stinging words of the late Hilary Mantel. The rejection of the strictures of royalty also meant there was no room in the video for an embrace with King Charles or Queen Camilla, despite the relentless messaging from the king’s office over the past nine months about how close he and Kate have become in their shared cancer journeys.

Kensington Palace thinks Meghan was seething over the video? Among the billions of people watching what could in another world be a two-minute ad for a dating site, there can be little doubt that among them was one particular resident of Montecito, California. And Meghan Markle might be forgiven for wondering what the world (and specifically the British media) would have said if it was she and Harry who had released a video vignette of such tooth-aching saccharinity. And she might also have been wondering how the hell this uptight Limey, who couldn’t even lend her a dab of lip gloss without rolling her eyes a few years ago, had managed to so comprehensively steal her clothes.

[From The Daily Beast]

“Who couldn’t even lend her a dab of lip gloss without rolling her eyes a few years ago, had managed to so comprehensively steal her clothes.” So we’re just admitting that Kate copies Meghan and steals her looks now? And it’s being spun as a positive for Kate? And this: “It’s family first and f**k the haters, f**k the press, f**k Harry and Meghan.” THAT was the message? Really? Because I did not get the message of “f–k the haters” from that video. I got the message of “look at us, we’re affectionate like Harry & Meghan, our marriage is fine!” Running around, insisting that they have nothing to prove shows that Will and Kate have been on the back foot for years, actually.

This is so strange: “despite the relentless messaging from the king’s office over the past nine months about how close he and Kate have become in their shared cancer journeys.” Yeah, Charles swooped in and saved William and Kate after months of incompetent clownery. Buckingham Palace stepped in to the rescue to save the monarchy, because Will and Kate’s frankenphoto antics and wall-to-wall lies were doing permanent damage. And this is the thanks Charles gets? Fascinating.

Photos courtesy of Will Warr/KP and Cover Images.