Gammon Verify 🐖✅: "Is that you, Kate?" How to tell the difference between the Princess of Wales and another woman with brown hair
By Charlotte Gill, Gammon Verify disinformation and social media correspondent
Hello and welcome to another Royal Emergency Special of Gammon Verify 🐖✅ .
Today we’ll be delving into a new theory spread by gammons and commoners online about the Princess of Wales.
Shockingly, this is the second time in two weeks that the Gammon Verify team has been forced to investigate rumours about our Royal Overlords.
So harmful does this new strand of disinformation risk being - think the fake news equivalent of Covid’s Omicron variant - that the team and I have had to cut short our trip to the US, where we had been investigating Donald Trump supporters for our new series Deplorable Democracy.
But just as Charles II has the divine right of kings granted by God, Gammon Verify takes very seriously its divine right to lie-slaying.
What happened on Tuesday 19th March?
Yesterday The Sun reported that her Royal Highness was spotted at a farm shop in Windsor:
Although the Princess of Wales is not known to buy her own eggs and sausages, she was dressed from head to foot in what our Fabric Scientist said were clothes from Mountain Warehouse and Lululemon; just what you might expect for a princess known for her love of hockey and wheelchair rugby. Laughing in the wind, you could have been sure it was her.
But was it?
You might think that commoners would rejoice at the sight of their Princess, but a poll undertaken by Gammon Verify showed that 40% were incredulous and 60% sceptical as to the veracity of the footage. You could say that 67 million and counting (the UK population) were pulling the face from The Scream by Edward Munch.
Even though Catherine was photographed with her husband, the Prince of Wales - who is second in line to the throne and has a brother who lives in LA named Harry - muggles still had doubts.
Contagious statements abound, such as:
“Is that Zoe from Eastenders?”
“Kelly Brook?” (who is known to like farm shops).
Eventually there was a frenzy, not unlike one under Robespierre in revolutionary France circa 1793 - just this one was on social media.
Footage of the Princess of Wales racked up millions of impressions on X (formerly known as Twitter), where I, Charlotte Gill, have 30,000 followers, and the Gammon Verify team 10,000.
Lie bullets
At Gammon Verify, we frequently consult with the best psychotherapists in the country (and some say the Western hemisphere), so we know the serious harm that rumour and disinformation can cause to national health.
This knowledge is why I’ve started my Parliamentary campaign for parity of esteem between real bullets and lie bullets (fired from mouths), to convey the danger of porkies. I will also soon be setting up an APPG on Mind Pollution, which will lobby to reduce toxic emissions in muggle brains.
Princess of the Tower?
To put it simply: if the story of the Princes in the Tower upsets you, then you should be equally worried about the Royal Family’s risk from disinformation.
But was Catherine’s appearance in Windsor “fake news”?
In this Royal Emergency Special, we get to the bottom of how to work out if someone is the Princess of Wales - or another woman with brown hair.
A personal interlude…
I tend not to talk about myself very much at Gammon Verify, but when I saw the story about the Princess of Wales, for the first time I felt very personally affected - as I have brown hair - and I felt it would be wrong not to share my story.
“Is that you… Julia Roberts?” were the words of one man five years ago - when I went into a service station.
“No,” I replied.
Another time it was Rachel Weisz.
But I was just Charlotte Gill, and I had the driving license to prove it.
Now that I am disinformation reporter and social media correspondent - often rumoured to be nearing national treasure status - I no longer have problems of mistaken identity.
But previous events mean I have heightened empathy with the Princess of Wales… Or Catherine, if I may, m’lady.
Back to Special K
As an expert on brown hair, I already had a hunch about whether it had been Catherine in Windsor looking for a jar of chilli jam that day.
But at Gammon Verify, a hunch is never enough. It’s data you need, and we’ve got lots of it.
Facial recognition techniques were soon deployed in our renowned Truth Lab, often called upon by the EU to share information, in order to explore whether the Princess of Wales really had been seen.
Gammon Verify’s team includes one of the top experts at facial identification - who holds the current world record for completing Where’s Wally? books.
After several tests, the facial recognition expert zoomed onto several photographs of the Princess of Wales, moving from a 20% computer view to 100%. Cutting-edge images were printed at Snappy Snaps, and then brought back to the Truth Lab for close monitoring overnight.
The expert confirmed that Catherine had, indeed, bought her clothes from Mountain Warehouse, but reality became less clear when it came to the Princess of Wales’ face.
Ear me out
An uncertified disinformationist might not have noticed, but the Princess of Wales’ ear became the biggest sign that all was not well in Windsor.
Take a look at the ear of “Farm Shop Kate”, and behold, the ear below, from the Princess of Wales’ previous ventures to meet commoners:
Running advanced tests through 23andMe, our expert fed the DNA of Kate’s ear into the algorithms and was able to find several matches - not in Windsor, but in the human–Vulcan community; third-cousin, Spock.
Sometimes it’s easy to think that commoners are wrong on Royal matters. But on this occasion, Gammon Verify can confirm that their suspicions were correct.
This is not usually the case and we urge muggles to be vigilant and stick to the facts on Gammon Verify.
“Even though Catherine was photographed with her husband, the Prince of Wales - who is second (sic) in line to the throne…”
But who verifies Gammon Verify?