PETER HITCHENS: The doctored royal photo may be trivial, but it epitomises an era open to monstrous deceit Stalin could never dream of

Doctoring photographs can be very wicked, as we shall see. But it can also be trivial.

Many of us must wish that various pictures of us did not exist. That awful school photo from 1962. The disastrous holiday snap from 1968. Is it wicked for us to do what we can to keep other people from seeing them? For example, countless couples who were married during the fashion desert of the 1970s do not display their wedding pictures. And who can blame them?

I still have no idea what the Princess of Wales was up to in her recent family snapshot, but I cannot work up much in the way of outrage. The public demands a lot of photographs of the Royal Family, and why not? Half its power comes from the fact that is a family, rather than a gang or a cabinet or a board of directors. But families, even Royal ones, are not always as cheerful, contented and well-behaved as we wish they were.

I think they’d have been cleverer not to do whatever it was that they did. But it is quite low in the catalogue of sins.

Far worse, in my view, and much more fishy, was the curious case of the Bullingdon Club pictures of David Cameron, Al ‘Boris’ Johnson and George Osborne from their Oxford days. Lord Cameron obviously hated these records of debauchery, not wanting the public to be reminded of his time in this hard-drinking society of well-heeled yahoos. Was it a coincidence that soon afterwards they were mysteriously withdrawn by the company which owned them, so newspapers had to stop using them? I am a great believer in Coincidence Theory (the belief that things happen by accident far more often than by design). But even I thought that was hard to swallow.

I still have no idea what the Princess of Wales was up to in her recent family snapshot, but I cannot work up much in the way of outrage

Weirder still was the obviously doctored 1992 Bullingdon picture, featuring among others George Osborne and his (now former) friend Nat Rothschild. At first glance, it appear normal. But look carefully and it is full of suspicious oddities. To the left of the middle, there’s a mysterious gap where somebody ought to be standing but isn’t. Odder still, there’s a patch of shirt-front and waistcoat there, with no person attached.

Odder yet, Mr Rothschild’s right trouser leg has a white lapel on it, not usual even under the bizarre dress code of the Bullingdon.

On close examination, the three seated figures at the front appear to have been stuck in place after being moved from somewhere else. One of those present once promised to tell me (face to face only) what had happened. But on the morning of our planned meeting, he called me to cancel, and so I shall never know.

But again, these are tiny things compared with the monstrous crimes which the truly powerful commit with photographs, when they can. In pre-internet days, they simply hacked up the old pictures and replaced them with new items. Only the tiny few with access to original archives could ever be sure that what they were seeing was true.

Thousands of images of the Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky, sometimes standing near the Soviet demi-god, Vladmir Lenin, were wiped from Soviet books, magazines, newspapers and encyclopaedias after Trotsky fell from favour. In 1997, David King, in his book ‘The Commissar Vanishes’, chronicled this photographic murder of the past. And it was murder. Those whose pictures were removed usually became dead soon afterwards.

The most poignant story of this kind is told by Milan Kundera in his ‘Book of Laughter and Forgetting’. It concerns the Czech Communist Vladimir Clementis. Clementis was standing beside the Czech Communist leader, Klement Gottwald, at a huge public meeting in Prague to mark their takeover of the country. It was snowing heavily, so Clementis lent his fur hat to the bare-headed Gottwald. Pictures recorded the comradely scene. But four years later Clementis was purged for having the wrong view of Marx, or something. He was hanged, cremated and his ashes used to grit an icy road outside Prague. And he was wiped from the pictures of 1948, leaving only his hat behind.

Who knows what a future totalitarian regime might do, with the limitless powers provided by modern technology? This cannot only erase the past but can, through deepfake methods, create a wholly different past so convincing that only those who were actually there would be sure it was not a lie. And even eyewitnesses of the truth, if my experience of human gullibility is anything to go by, might eventually fall in with the new altered version.

This was prefigured, as are so many evils of today, in George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’. The central character, Winston Smith, has the highly-responsible job of cleaning up the paper archives of ‘The Times’, to make sure that they do not clash with official lies. His discovery of a photograph, of three leaders of the ruling party - Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford - fills him with terror. He sends it swirling into the ‘memory hole’ which leads to the great furnace where all inconvenient facts are burned to ashes.

Thousands of images of the Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky, sometimes standing near the Soviet demi-god, Vladmir Lenin, were wiped from Soviet books, magazines, newspapers and encyclopaedias after Trotsky fell from favour

Can you spot the difference? Trotsky is mysteriously absent

But he is still not safe. What if someone else saw him as he looked at it? What if the surveillance cameras picked it up (as we learn later, they did)? The mere fact that he has seen this picture, whose obvious location and stated date show that official history is false, puts him in danger. He knows what nobody should know. He can never forget it. He cannot unsee it. His actual existence is a peril to his totalitarian chiefs.

Orwell writes: ‘It was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory. Was the Party’s hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer had once existed?’

As it turns out, in the torture cellars of the Ministry of Love, Winston, amongst other humiliations of the mind, is compelled to affirm that the photograph never existed. And in the end, with tears in his eyes, he joins the great deceived multitudes who believe what the authorities tell them and who have no idea what the past was really like, even if – especially if – they lived through it. It is that sort of thing, not a mildly doctored family snapshot, that we need to be worrying about – useful as it is to know that the technology exists to turn anyone with the right equipment into a potential liar, and to make us all open to monstrous deceit, of a kind that even Stalin never dreamed of.