When Photogate, or Kategate, or whatever we end up calling it, first became news, I remember taking one look at social media and thinking: you people have lost your damn minds. An anodyne photograph of the Princess of Wales and her children was issued to the press agencies by Kensington Palace to mark Mother’s Day. First, the amateur sleuths of Twitter spotted some visual inconsistencies in the image. Then the conspiracy theorists came out to play. And before long the major press photo-agencies had withdrawn the photo, with a great show of fastidiousness, from circulation.

It is a bellwether of the way we consume news in the digital age: not so much healthily sceptical as feverishly paranoid

Earnest articles were produced describing it as a watershed moment in the history of the Palace’s relationship with the public; as a catastrophic PR own goal that would take years to recover from. To which the answer is, er… maybe? Given, it isn’t a good look for the Palace to put out a digitally altered photograph without admitting it – though it’s questionable how many photographs reach us unedited anyway, these days, what with the ubiquity of filters and cunning crops and digital blemish removers.

But the frenzy went much beyond that unexceptionable but dull point. Every pixel of that photograph was parsed for a hidden meaning, either in and of itself (that missing wedding band) or in the meaning of the photo having been altered at all. Was the Princess trying to send the world a message about the state of her marriage? Or was the picture itself fake news – a composite designed to throw the public off the scent that the Princess of Wales was desperately ill, or already dead, or had gone home to the Sunken City of R’lyeh?

Occam’s razor suggests that the story is much as the Princess has since claimed. She messed around with photo editor, made a hash of it and didn’t tell her press people that’s what she’d done before the shot was released. It’s hard to construct, if we give our heads a bit of a wobble, a non-insane scenario in which anything else is the case. What secret message would someone be trying to send to the world by digitally altering a zip on a jumper, or giving a child one shoe with a stacked heel and another with a flat?

If the Princess is more unwell than the public has so far been informed, how exactly are the interests of anyone served by pretending she isn’t with a fake photograph – when everything comes out sooner or later and ‘none of your damn business’ is a perfectly respectable position to take? This isn’t the dying days of the Brezhnev era, where the grip of the Party was felt to depend on the health of the leader. The joy of the royal family is that they just aren’t very important; not in that way.

This real explanation is both very boring, then, and very trivial. But the storm around it – the non-explanations; the ‘explanations’ that made it the centre of a news hurricane – are more telling. We don’t like things to be boring or trivial. We thirst, collectively, for these things to be significant – which is where the solemn pronouncers on Palace spindoctoring, and the news editors who put the story at the very top of the days’ agenda, can find common cause with the bonk-eyed conspiracy nuts. Nothing can just be an unimportant mistake. It is a bellwether of the way we consume news in the digital age: not so much healthily sceptical as feverishly paranoid.

That’s an old impulse in new form. There’s the same vibe, in the wilder speculation here, of those Beatles fans who imagined that a band would announce the death of their guitarist by having him photographed barefoot on an album cover. But it goes back further than that. Think of the extraordinary grip that the idea of clues baroquely encoded in pictures and texts have always had on our historical imagination: Kabbalah, numerological readings of the Book of Revelations, the Bible Code, the riddling prophecies of Nostradamus… An idea that secret histories are found in codes and riddles hidden in plain sight in canvases by Poussin or Leonardo gives us Umberto Eco at the highbrow end, and Dan Brown or Baigent and Leigh at the lowbrow.

In our own age, it’s this exact impulse that in supercharged, digitally viral form gives us QAnon – the conspiracy theory which ate all the other conspiracy theories. James Ball’s recent book about the subject makes a compelling case that QAnon isn’t just a marginal collection of cranks, easily to be ignored – but that it is a decisive, and strengthening, force in the affairs of the world. These modes of thinking, these habits of looking at the world, may be bollocks – but they are enduringly attractive, and they have become mainstream.

In part, it’s because they allow you to conceive of our flat and disenchanted secular world as, once again, radiantly infused with meaning. It is comforting to imagine there’s a secret order behind things, even if it’s a malign one – inasmuch as it prevents you taking on board the alternative, which is that nobody is running things at all, that the world is too vast and too complicated for anything other than footling clashes of ordinary human venality and shortsightedness, cock-ups and dumb luck.

It’s flattering, too, to think that the evidence for everything is there if you only know how to read it: that for no reason that makes much sense, the conspirators who go to such trouble to hide things from the general public are simultaneously bursting to show you what they’re up to by admitting it in a series of cryptic crossword clues. You might be on the outside: but you’re not fooled, not like those other sheeple. You know how to read the signs.

In that sense, your adversaries pay you a degree of respect: those clues are for the special ones, the hermeneutic elect. It’s nicer to imagine that than to admit the alternative, which is that the powerful take no interest in your existence or state of knowledge at all. They have better things to do than lay breadcrumb trails to tease you. If a conspiracy really is going on, the folks at home won’t have the first idea that it is.

But, in this case, I feel confident in saying that it’s not. The Princess of Wales is a real person, who’s probably having a toughish time, and isn’t all that handy with photoshop. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.