How the Princess of Wales became the most important royal of them all

Over the last few weeks, it felt as if the world had collectively lost its mind. You couldn’t open social media without being bombarded by yet another ludicrous conspiracy theory about the Princess of Wales’s whereabouts: that she and William were on the brink of divorce, that the Mother’s Day photograph she’d released was a fake, that the woman spotted in the viral video taken outside a Windsor farm shop was in fact a Kate lookalike.

Then some of the world’s most famous faces decided to pile in. Kim Kardashian shared a series of pictures captioned, “On my way to go find Kate”, to her 364 million followers on Instagram, while Blake Lively made a “Photoshop” jibe alluding to the Princess’s absence from public life when she launched a new drinks range earlier in the month.