The Dutch King appears to have pulled the leg of the Princess of Wales by making a quip about her recent photo-editing hoo-ha.
King Willem-Alexander was caught on film making the joke to a group of kids during a royal engagement. While he was meeting the children, one little girl tells him she has a photo of the monarch with his whole family.
Willem-Alexander appears to reply: “Really? At least I didn’t Photoshop it!” His comment was greeted with laughter by the grown-ups in the crowd.
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The clip of the exchange quickly went viral on platforms such as X/Twitter.
One user wrote: “King Willem-Alexander serves us jokes”, while another said of the UK Royal Family: “They are really a laughing stock now.”
The quip comes amid the fallout of Princess Kate’s family-portrait fail, which saw her release a snap of her and her three children at the weekend.
It was designed to show Kate in good nick following her recent abdominal surgery, but it quickly emerged that the snap had been heavily edited.
Kate took responsibility for the digital changes, saying she does “occasionally experiment with editing”, and she apologised for the confusion.
But a bunch of picture agencies issued a “kill order” – a mechanism that recalls them from their clients and deletes them from their libraries.
It’s raised questions over whether official photos released by the Royal Family can be trusted as genuine source material, and it’s also done some damage to Kate’s reputation as being immune to some of the c*ck-ups suffered by other members of the family.
Willem-Alexander’s comment was reported by De Telegraaf, which called it a “striking moment during a work visit by King Willem-Alexander in Zutphen, where he appears to joke about Kate-gate”.
There has been sympathy as well as brickbats for Kate, though, with her defenders saying the edits she made to the family photo were just innocent attempts at touch-ups while she continues her recovery from surgery, and they don’t signify any wider conspiracy.
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