The 24-hour rush to certainty leaves plenty of room for conspiracy theories

I know that Wills married Kate last weekend because I saw it with my own eyes. I didn’t have much choice in the matter because my wife was camped out in front of the TV for 12 hours being catty about Victoria Beckham’s Croydon facelift and stupid hat and generously summoning me in whenever Lady Amelia Spencer, the pouting blonde baddun accused of lamping some bloke in a Cape Town McDonald’s drive-thru restaurant (that’s how I like my quasi-royals to be), hove into view. So, anyway, I had no objections when the BBC and ITV News that night reported their marriage as an unchallenged fact, nor when the newspapers said the same thing the next morning. I did not require the newsreader to insert the words ‘according to palace officials’ when reporting the wedding, nor for the headlines the next day to make use of quotation marks to qualify a statement of fact.