The picture that will scotch vile rumours about the Princess of Wales

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?

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.