Having just completed their highly successful tour of Australia and New Zealand, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will have been dismayed to see risque pictures being published in the German and Australian press. Bild, perhaps Germany’s most notorious tabloid, and Rupert Murdoch’s The Sydney Daily Telegraph played dice with privacy laws to publish a photograph of William and Kate taken during a visit to Sydney’s Blue Mountains. A paparazzi pounced as Kate’s blue and white Diane Von Furstenberg dress momentarily blew up in the wind, revealing more than royal dignity would ever want. In the UK the national tabloids are much more circumspect about breaching royal privacy since the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics and practices, but the foreign media sees no reason to be bound by British law or etiquette. The Sydney Morning Herald’s headline for the story was “Why should the media stick to an antiquated code of etiquette when Kate doesn’t bother to protect her own modesty?” A brusque justification but, in practical terms, the only way Kate can prevent this kind of intrusion is to take more precautions when in public, in this instance wearing weights in her hems would have prevented the mishap. If the foreign media continues to publish photographs effectively censored in the UK, a frustrated domestic press may ineluctably follow suit in the not too distant future. Which all suggests that it would be prudent for Kate to take a little more care as legal action in this case would serve little purpose other than to draw further attention to the matter.
