Palace has lost control of the Princess of Wales narrative – here’s the picture that shows how

For weeks, the cry has gone up from the internet trolls: “Show us proof of life! Where is Kate Middleton?”

Now they have it. A video, taken by a member of the public, showing the Prince and Princess of Wales leaving the Windsor Farm Shop has been published online, capturing her looking happy, busy and on the mend from surgery.

Ordinary people who felt a twinge of curiosity about her absence from public life will watch, smile and move on, looking forward to the Princess’s return to work at some point after Easter.

But on the internet, the social media conspiracy theorists have doubled down. It must be a body double, they screamed; she looks too well. Even the rustic-themed decorations outside the shop were cause for suspicion, they claimed; it “must have been” taken not on Saturday but at Christmas.

The publication of metadata showing the video was taken exactly when and where it is said to have been taken was not enough to satisfy them.

Even those who believe it is the Princess have used it to pile on the criticism about why she has not yet got back to work, seemingly unaware that walking a short distance from car to shop is not quite the same as returning to work in formal wear, with microphones ready to broadcast any passing comment around the world.

At this point, the Princess and the palace simply cannot win. The rules that govern the press, some written in the form of privacy laws and some unwritten based on decency and common sense, have, for now, fallen.

The media’s relationship with the palace was drastically redrawn in the wake of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, shedding the excesses of the paparazzi and pouring a shock of cold water over the public’s insatiable appetite for royal gossip.

More than a quarter of a century on, as a new generation hounds the new Princess of Wales digitally, those lessons do not seem to have been passed on.

The paparazzi have been swapped for mobile phone cameras, the columnists supplanted by endless online royal “experts” with clickbait at their fingertips, but the sentiment – that the Princess is up for discussion without boundary – remains the same.