The Princess of Wales has been photographed for the first time since she was hospitalised earlier this year. But while the picture, which shows Catherine in a car driven by her mother Carole Middleton, is splashed across the American celebrity website TMZ, it won’t be appearing in British newspapers. So why is the British press so scrupulous, so abstemious and so responsible – things they could never have been accused of in the Wild West days of the old Fleet Street – when their American cousins still shoot from the hip when it comes to publishing paparazzi pictures of the Royals?

The Earl’s words hit home

It all goes back to 6 September, 1997, when Earl Spencer, the brother of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, climbed the stairs into the pulpit at Westminster Abbey and, with the Princess’s coffin in front of him, denounced the paparazzi who had pursued his sister to her death in Paris in the early hours of the previous Sunday morning.

Diana, the huntress of classical mythology, he said, had become ‘Diana the Hunted’. I was sitting ten yards from him when he delivered his coruscating damnation of the news media. In the congregation that day were most of the editors of Britain’s national daily and Sunday newspapers. The Earl’s words hit home.

Without a formal agreement or the need for secret meetings, the editors collectively decided never again to publish paparazzi pictures of the Royals. Photographs that had been shot in the tunnel, showing in graphic detail the Princess’s agony as she struggled to stay alive, were sent to London papers as they were going to press. They were never published and have remained locked away ever since.

This unwritten, self-denying ordinance is still very much in force. Photographers working for British papers no longer behave in ways that had become all too commonplace as the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales disintegrated and the Princess sought to establish a new life for herself, only to be constantly hounded by shouted questions, long lenses and the blitz lights of a thousand intrusive cameras.

That has now resulted in those British people who cannot, or do not wish to, look online being unable to see the first image of the Princess since she underwent what was clearly major abdominal surgery at the London Clinic on 17 January.

Most laws and rules have unintended consequences; perhaps the ‘No pap shots’ diktat is a case in point. First, it is not clear who took the photograph. It may have been a determined Italian gossip- monger lurking in the bushes of Windsor Great Park. Or it may have been a passer-by who saw the car and took a lucky picture – and then realised it could be sold for money.

What the photograph has done inadvertently – and it is quite an achievement – is to scotch the vile, mad and frankly ridiculous rumours that have been circulating on social media about the Princess of Wales, some speculating on the state of her health and present location, others suggesting that she is in hiding after coming close to death during surgery.

All this frenzy has infuriated the public relations staff of the Prince and Princess of Wales at Kensington Palace. They have been required to denounce some of the most egregious rumours as ‘ludicrous’ and ‘total nonsense’.

Now, one photograph, taken at distance but clearly showing the Princess, has stopped all that nonsense. That will not only please hard-pressed Royal staffers but leave the Princess more able to concentrate on her own recovery and recuperation without constant, ignorant speculation by trolls.

Nature abhors a vacuum. A news vacuum becomes filled with rubbish. The stunning innovation of the internet and the useful channels of social media are too easily perverted and rapidly become a cross between a septic tank and a piranha pool.

On several occasions on television, I have repeated my call that the Princess’s privacy must be absolutely respected, as she herself has requested. But I have also said that the only way to counter the rumours would be for Kensington Palace to give careful guidance to accredited journalists about what is going on.

Rumour is a lying jade and falsehood is half way around the world before truth has got its boots on. It might not stop the trolls but it would stop them being believed. This picture of the Princess might have helped the Royals win an important battle in this disinformation war.