A decade ago, their first Mother’s Day portrait was greeted with nothing but warmth. Now, as this doctored photo provokes a welter of conspiracy theories, we pose 20 questions Palace should answer to end the frenzied gossip about THAT picture

What a huge amount of change can happen in ten years.

Back in 2014, Kate and William issued their first Mother’s Day photo.

Printed on the front page of The Mail on Sunday, our report described the image as ‘a tender, natural and intimate portrait… never before has a Royal portrait beckoned to an audience with quite the same promise of effortless informality’.

Taken by an award-winning photographer at a window of their home in Apartment 1A of Kensington Palace, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, as they were then, were practically still newlyweds.

Prince Harry had just launched his Invictus Games, while Meghan Markle was a relative unknown in Britain, working on the other side of the Atlantic filming the legal drama Suits and running her lifestyle blog, The Tig.

Printed on the front page of The Mail on Sunday, our report described the image as ‘a tender, natural and intimate portrait… never before has a Royal portrait beckoned to an audience with quite the same promise of effortless informality’

If a picture is worth a thousand words – although in both cases it was far more – in 2014, they were mostly platitudes and pleasantries. But amid the reams of press coverage following last week’s Mother’s Day image, it would be safe to assume a fair few were unprintable expletives.

There are still many unanswered questions (Kensington Palace declined to comment on this piece).

Kate’s admission that she had doctored the photograph and her apology for doing so have triggered a furious debate about transparency and trust – a key pillar of public support for the monarchy.

Some Palace insiders felt commenting further would merely give the story unwanted oxygen.

But the silence created a vacuum that led to unprecedented online mockery and conspiracy theories.

Such is the level of controversy that the Daily Mail’s respected royal expert Richard Kay wrote yesterday: ‘If the Royal Family is not quite at the 11th hour, it is perilously close.’

Sadly, what the public has officially been told is scant. It was reported that William took the picture of his family on Friday, March 8.

It was published to the Prince and Princess of Wales’s official Instagram at 9am last Sunday and then sent to news outlets.

Kensington Palace was soon fielding questions from journalists about why the Princess was not wearing a wedding ring, but aides declined to comment.

By 8pm on Sunday, the Associated Press news agency had issued a ‘kill notice’ saying the image had been manipulated.

It was swiftly followed by Getty, AFP and Reuters. At 10.30am on Monday, an unprecedented mea culpa was shared on Kensington Palace’s social media platforms, attributed to the Princess. It reverberated around the world.

The Italian newspaper La Repubblica dubbed the incident ‘Photoshop-gate’ while Japan Today reported on the ‘Katespiracy’ and El Universal, one of Mexico’s biggest papers, said the photo showed a ‘failure of the Royal Family’s communication strategy’.

Kensington Palace was soon fielding questions from journalists about why the Princess was not wearing a wedding ring, but aides declined to comment

It was reported that William took the picture of his family on Friday, March 8

Analysis of the metadata, information attached to images and left attached by the Palace when the photo was issued, revealed it had been saved on Photoshop, an editing tool, once on Friday evening and again the following morning.

It soon became clear that many Britons supported the Princess – who was said to be ‘shell-shocked’ – and viewed the controversy as a tempest in a teapot.

Yet as Kate continues to recover from a serious abdominal procedure and William gets back to work as normal this week with an engagement in Sheffield, after the chaos caused by his family’s Mother’s Day photo, there are fears that nothing will be ‘normal’ for the Royal Family any time soon.