Photo: Jimmy Rainford/Pool/Getty Images
The British royal family’s relationship with Prince Harry remains quite strained, so it was pretty shocking to see them acknowledge that he turned 40 on September 15 and wish him a happy birthday in a manner that (initially) appeared totally noncontroversial.
As People notes, “Public birthday wishes are usually reserved for working royals,” and both Prince Harry and Meghan Markle stepped back from their official duties in 2020 (then fled to America, released a tell-all book, and spilled family secrets to Oprah). Yet the official social-media account run by King Charles’s office at Buckingham Palace posted this message on Sunday:
Then Prince William and Kate Middleton’s official account shared @theroyalfamily’s post and added their own pleasant (if generic) birthday greeting. (The royals have separate PR machines: Buckingham Palace is Charles and Camilla’s press team, and Kensington Palace is William and Kate’s.) This was even more shocking, as the brothers do not appear to be speaking at the moment.
But we’re talking about the royals here, a crew so petty that a christening once sparked a public skirmish over a baby’s title on a website. Surely there has to be some passive-aggressive twist to this birthday greeting?
Well, maybe? Within hours, social-media users were accusing the royal family of intentionally needling Prince Harry yet again, and on Monday morning the New York Post ran a story titled, “Meghan Markle cropped out of Prince Harry’s birthday photo shared by royal family.”
This is the sole piece of evidence behind this theory: There’s another version of the photo of Harry laughing, which was taken during the Sussexes’ 2018 visit to the start-up Dogpatch in Dublin, Ireland. In the full image, a somewhat blurry Markle is shown sitting beside her husband.
Photo: Jimmy Rainford/Pool/Getty Images
But it appears the royals did not do the cropping themselves. Both the full image with Markle and a photo of Harry cut down to a square are available on the AP and Getty’s photo websites. A source told the Post, “in guidance, the photo was provided in this format by the Press Association.”
So there are two possible explanations:
- The Buckingham Palace team searched through the AP’s archives for a nice solo image of Prince Harry, and the already-cropped square version of the 2018 photo is the first one they saw that was not taken during a funeral, a court appearance, or a gossipy interview.
- The royal social-media team knew that people would search for a hidden dig at Harry, so they intentionally picked the cropped photo, knowing internet sleuths would discover Markle was excluded from the birthday post.
I’ll let you decide for yourself, but I personally find it hard to believe that the PR team that regularly failed to spot glaring Photoshop errors in official royal photos executed a burn this subtle.
