The papers this morning were full of the revelation in a BBC documentary that the Queen had had a hissy fit and stormed out of a photo-shoot with the photographer Annie Leibowitz. As the Times reported:

The Queen offered a rare, public display of displeasure when she sat for Leibovitz, who is famed for her Vanity Fair photographs of stars such as a pregnant Demi Moore in the nude. A camera crew was invited to film the encounter for a fly-on-the-wall BBC One series, A Year with the Queen, made by the production company behind Wife Swap. The portrait was to commemorate the Queen’s spring visit to the United States.

Leibovitz selected the white drawing room at Buckingham Palace. The Queen arrived in white fur stole, gold-embroidered evening dress, Order of the Garter robes and diamond tiara, as requested. But Leibovitz, a perfectionist who once persuaded Whoopi Goldberg to pose in a bath of milk, had a change of heart. ‘I think it will look better without the crown,’ the film shows her informing the Queen. ‘Less dressy. The garter robe is so…extraordinary.’ ‘Less dressy?’ the Queen says in response to this display of lese-majeste. ‘What do you think this is?’ The Queen is then shown walking angrily from the drawing room. ‘I’m not changing anything,’ she fumes at a flunky. ‘I’ve had enough of dressing like this, thank you very much.’

In the context of royal etiquette and the character of the Queen herself, this was quite sensational. The Queen has never been known to storm out of any engagement. Ever. But now we learn that that this did not happen. She did not storm out of the photoshoot at all. The footage was actually filmed as the Queen made her way into the sitting - and she made her irritated comments to her lady-in-waiting before the shoot had even started. The BBC had falsified the sequence of events* — at least in the video trailer it made available to the press— to make a better story.

It has now issued a grovelling apology, saying that

the actual sequence of events was misrepresented.

The BBC’s trustees have asked the Director General Mark Thompson to explain what the hell went on here. Small wonder.The significance of this can scarcely be exaggerated. The BBC has a world-wide reputation for integrity and truth-telling. Suddenly it is revealed to be manipulating its images to dupe the public. At a stroke, the trust it engenders has been shattered. And over the Queen, of all people!

If it transposes a picture sequence like this to sex up a story about the Queen by transmitting an outright falsehood, just think what it is doing in the Middle East.

*Update: The BBC has blamed the production company that made the trailer for editing it in this misleading way. However, the Queen is said to be blaming the BBC, as well she might. The BBC was the publisher of this trailer and was responsible for it. Judging from reports of his press conference, the programme controller, Peter Fincham, was obviously thrilled that the BBC was showing the Queen in a bad light. The Times reports today that although Buckingham Palace told him shortly after that press conference that these events did not happen in this way, it was well into the following day before the BBC admitted the error. That’s why the BBC’s Director-General, Mark Thompson, has rightly told his his staff that

recent problems including ‘the incorrect and misleading edit of Her Majesty the Queen in the BBC One seasonal launch tape’ defied ‘our values and threaten the precious relationship of trust between the BBC and our audiences’.