Revealed: Where amateur photo editor Kate Middleton has been hiding all these months

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

EXCLUSIVE: Declassified can reveal exactly where Kate Middleton has been … she’s running in the EU election, which is why we heard nothing from her for months!

Obviously it’s been a trying week for Catherine, Princess of Wales (extra points for those who remember when Donald Trump revealed he had spoken with the “Prince of Whales” while on a trip to Europe).

She was forced to publicly apologize for the clumsy editing of a family photograph she released to mark Mother’s Day in the U.K. (thank goodness for Brexit, which saves good old British mothers from having to share their big day with pesky European ones).

Middleton’s apology statement (and it was definitely sent by her and not some Palace lackey or perhaps Prince Andrew, who has quite a lot of time on his hands these days) said only that “like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing.” I feel her pain as I also occasionally experiment with editing.

It was the first we had heard from the princess for months, leading to wild speculation that she and Prince William had split up or that she was dead or that she was really struggling with one of those massive jigsaw puzzles.

The editing job on the royal photo was not very sophisticated (not so much a deepfake as a shallowfake). Speaking of not very sophisticated, that brings us to member of parliament Lee Anderson, who was not long ago deputy chairman of the Conservative Party and has now quit the Tories altogether to join Reform U.K., which is Nigel Farage’s rabble.

To mark Anderson’s defection, Sky News’ Sophie Ridge accurately took the pulse of the nation when she said: “Tonight, one of the most prominent Tory MPs from the 2019 intake, Lee Anderson, defects to Reform U.K., as one of the last pricks in the so-called ‘Tory red wall’ just crumbled away.” She may have meant to say bricks. Although maybe not.

Speaking of choice language, former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš is in trouble after sending what he thought was an email request to an aide called Jan Rovenský asking him to dig up dirt on Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský. Alas, Babiš sent the message to ecological activist Jan Rovenský instead.

“Give me some topics, some background on this motherfucker [Lipavský],” Babiš wrote.

“The email reached me vicariously and its contents disgusted me. It is a great challenge for Czech society to reject, once and for all, the StB [Communist-era Czechoslovak secret police] methods in politics,” Lipavský told local media.

Babiš has always denied cooperating with the StB even though he was listed in Communist-era ŠtB files as an “agent” codenamed Bureš, which is Czech for “doesn’t know how to use email.”

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Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s deputy EU editor.