The National:

THE King is not dead, the UK Government has insisted.

The news comes from the UK’s official embassies in Ukraine and Russia and is in response to claims that the monarch had passed on “unexpectedly”.

Several Russian news outlets had wrongly reported Charles’s death as fact.

The Russian news agency Sputnik reported: “King Charles III of Great Britain has died at the age of 75, according to media reports.

“There is no information about this on the royal family website or in the British media.”

The lack of information may have been something of a clue. When the Queen died, it wasn’t exactly a secret.

In fact, the wall-to-wall coverage became something of a talking point, and was openly mocked in foreign media.

But the UK Government takes people telling porkies about the King very seriously, and so someone high up decided to issue a counter-statement.

“We would like to inform you that the news about the death of King Charles III is fake,” the UK embassy in Ukraine wrote on social media.

Chris Ship, ITV's royal editor, wrote on social media: "The world has officially gone mad…"

Sharing an image of a media story, he added: "King Charles is not dead, insist sources, despite a Russian media agency killing him off… Oh my days."

Fakeness is something of a theme for stories around the royals at the moment.

Kensington Palace has been caught red-handed issuing edited photographs – of both Kate Middleton and the late Queen Elizabeth.