Endgame, p.33
Endgame, page 33
13
A Dangerous Game
Royals and the Media
The press is our chief ideological weapon.
—Nikita Khrushchev (former premier of the Soviet Union), 1957, speech
If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.
—Jon Stewart, 2010, speech at “Rally to Restore Sanity”
Sitting in a dimly lit corner of a South London pub on a brisk autumnal evening, Prince William was about as incognito as a future King could get. Swapping his usual uniform of a crisp Oxford shirt and chinos for a more casual jeans and baseball cap combo, the then Duke of Cambridge would have looked like any other patron if it weren’t for his protection officers sitting nearby. Not that anyone would have noticed—the buzz around the October 11, 2019, England vs. Czech Republic football game on the venue’s TV screens had the most pub-goers cheering on the Three Lions in their UEFA Euro qualifier match (which they were about to lose, 2–1). William was one of them, but he also had other business to attend to.
While the senior royal is no stranger to a pint or two at the pub with friends, this visit was different. He was there to meet Sunday Times editor in chief and News Corp executive Martin Ivens. William first established a professional relationship with Ivens when he took on the newspaper’s top job in 2013, and there was a mutual respect between the two—and an appreciation of football. But they weren’t here to talk match stats. On the top of William’s mind was Prince Harry, who had just seven days earlier announced phone-hacking lawsuits against News Corp’s Sun newspaper and MGN, the former owners of the Mirror. Around the same time, Meghan announced she was suing the publisher of the Mail on Sunday after they published a handwritten letter she sent to her estranged father. The announcement of their lawsuits stunned the rest of the royal family, who found out the news with the rest of the world while Harry and Meghan were touring southern Africa.
When news outlets reported on the lawsuits, William immediately turned to his aides to vent. “It was a step too far in his opinion,” said a former Kensington Palace staffer. “You just don’t take on the press like that . . . It’s a recipe for disaster.” Added another, “William felt this would jeopardize his own relationships [with the press].” Around this time, William was already in the process of meeting a number of big-name newspaper editors to personally strengthen his connections, so someone (especially his brother) putting them at risk was not an option. After a contact had tipped him off, William was aware that Harry had also discussed their “tensions” and “different paths” with journalist Tom Bradby for a forthcoming prime-time ITV documentary about the Sussexes’ royal tour. Both William and his private secretary Simon Case felt that Harry’s candid confessions were going to be “a problem.”
So, by the time William sat down with Ivens at the pub, it didn’t take long for him to open up about Harry. “I’ve put my arm around my brother all our lives and I can’t do that anymore; we’re separate entities,” he confessed. “I’m sad about that. All we can do, and all I can do, is try and support them and hope that the time comes when we’re all singing from the same page. I want everyone to play on the team.”
As the relationship between the Sussexes, the institution, and the royal family continued to disintegrate, William’s frustrations with Harry intensified. When Harry and Meghan announced on January 8, 2020, that they would completely step back from their royal roles, William took action to deal with the oncoming Sussex storm. “He had conversations with a few in his team about getting ahead of what he felt would soon be Harry blaming them all for not doing enough [to support himself and Meghan],” said a Kensington Palace aide who has since left the royal household. Palace officials advised William to bite his tongue until he could join the Queen and Charles for a proper sit-down with Harry, a meeting already scheduled for a week later in Sandringham. But his patience was, as usual, running thin, so he discreetly took matters into his own hands.
Just a day before the now-famous Sandringham Summit, William’s disapproval over his brother’s decision to step back was loud and clear on the front page of The Sunday Times: “I’ve put my arm around my brother all our lives. I can’t do it anymore.” The article quoted William speaking to an anonymous “friend” (guess who) and positioned the heir as a caring older brother who had done everything to help his hapless sibling. When it first came out at midnight, Kensington Palace didn’t like its tone. Calls were made. By early morning, the second editions of the paper made their way around the country with an updated front page: “William to Harry: We need to be team players.” Perfect.
For years, the axiom “never complain, never explain” has been synonymous with the royal family. Dating back to the 1800s, legend has it that it was British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli who first uttered the phrase, but it was soon adopted by high-ranking Brits across the military, royalty, and even future prime ministers, including Winston Churchill. During the Victorian age and beyond, the maxim reflected an established position for the royal family and those in the institution. Today, however, it’s nothing more than an empty promise. Queen Elizabeth II may have genuinely kept calm and carried on, but the go-to move for most other senior family members now is to reveal their thoughts, plans, and grievances via anonymous source quotes through their staff and well-timed leaks to preferred newspapers.
This sacrosanct relationship between two of Britain’s oldest institutions, the monarchy and the press, is now a symbiotic one where each leans on the other for its survival. Without the acres of coverage and the visibility the British newspapers provide, the royal family would be a shadow of itself. This drift into irrelevance has already happened to many European monarchies. And without the access, photos, and scoops from the family’s constant drama that drives their revenue, the flagging industry of tabloids and broadsheet newspapers would be even closer to death’s door.
While printed media is fast becoming a thing of the past, newspapers and their brands still sit at the core of the nation’s media realm as many publications have found new leases on life online. Influential, expedient, subsidized by deep pockets, and fueled by an information-obsessed public, the likes of the Daily Mail, The Sun, The Telegraph, and The Times have the ability to influence political votes, public opinion, and the national mood. They’ve wielded this power for centuries, sometimes for good, but often not. The arrival of publications such as the London Gazette in 1665 saw pages filled with eye-catching headlines, exaggerated tales, and titillating rumors, creating a sense of communal belonging among a widely dispersed British public. They were outraged and intrigued by the same things, motivated by the same opinions. And as a result, says openDemocracy journalist Adam Ramsay, “demands for democracy—that these publics have a say—advanced.”
This synchronicity of opinion and demand for a more democratic system created a new form of nationalism among the population, one that sprung from the bottom instead of being decreed from the top. The establishment was forced to acknowledge and respond. King Charles I disregarded public and parliamentary opinion during the birth of this new nationalist era which resulted in his beheading. The late political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson pointed out that the country’s ruling class, including its media-owning elite, quickly realized the advantages of maintaining pomp and ceremony, “[it] kept the plebs reverential and society hierarchical, and propped it up.”
The cofounder of the National Review and editor of the Economist in the 1860s, Walter Bagehot, maintained that the British monarchy’s raison d’être was to “impress the many” while Westminster and Whitehall press on with “governing the many.” The Crown is the “dignified” part of the constitution—the monarchy is there to “excite and preserve the reverence of the population.” Strategically, this located the hereditary principle—a dynasty of white privilege and the rusty class system that goes with it—right at the heart of British identity. The emergence of radio and TV amplified this notion. Lord Reith, the first managing director of the BBC, said in 1929 that the national broadcasting corporation would guarantee that the ringing bells of Big Ben, “the clock which beats the time over the Houses of Parliament, in the center of Empire,” would echo “in the loneliest cottages in the land.”
In 1924, Reith convinced King George V to address his subjects over the radio via the BBC with great success. Twenty years later, for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, the royal family fully embraced modern media, allowing TV cameras inside Westminster Abbey to broadcast the ceremony for the first time. This historic occasion doubled the number of television owners in Britain and established royal pageantry as a form of entertainment. Because the sovereign’s roles include the head of British Armed Forces and the head of the Church of England, the monarchy was already conjoined with the institutions of the military and religion. But after Her Majesty’s coronation, the institution of the media—one that now was connected to the people by way of a TV or radio in virtually every British home—also became an essential component of the royal pantomime.
The media kept the appeal of the royal family alive throughout Queen Elizabeth II’s reign and beyond. And the monarchy has needed it. The huge decline in religion (only 6 percent of the adult British population currently identify as a practicing Christian) and a vast reduction in the country’s military power have left the media as the only viable institution left to effectively prop up the monarchical system. As a result, the institution has heavily leaned on the media for connection and prominence. Some new media efforts worked (Charles and Camilla’s assorted appearances on popular British TV shows such as The Repair Shop, Gardeners’ World, and Antiques Roadshow have been solid PR boosts, particularly among older Brits) and some were misfires. In 1969, Prince Philip encouraged Buckingham Palace to commission the BBC documentary Royal Family, which was essentially a one-episode reality show that followed the royals for just over three months. It revealed never-before-seen intimate moments such as family mealtimes and Balmoral barbecues. Publicly it was a well-received program, but it also briefly destabilized the family. The “behind the palace walls” approach allowed too much access to the monarchy, and the portrait of a somewhat “normal” family cut through the carefully maintained veil of secrecy and fantasy that is so vital to the monarchy’s existence. If the people who were supposedly given divine sanction to rule are just like us, then what was the point of it all? The Palace’s successful campaign to remove the 110-minute special from all archives has left behind only bootleg cuts to occasionally surface on the internet.
This “now you see, now you don’t” relationship is what made the second half of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign so interesting. While she gave plenty of scripted speeches in front of the cameras, and even shared stories about the Crown Jewels in a 2018 BBC documentary, the Queen famously never gave a full-length interview. The public rarely knew her opinion on matters beyond horse racing and corgis; as for her personal life, much of it remains a mystery even after her death. Kate, the Princess of Wales, has mostly followed the same model, while the majority of the family have clearly deviated from it. The disastrous results that come from more forthcoming moments reveal just how important having a protective media strategy is for the monarchy—their secrecy is their weapon.
Of course, apace with this give-and-take relationship with the traditional media come their tortured alliances with Britain’s newspapers and manic tabloids. For many of those outside the United Kingdom, the country’s tabloid culture is hard to fathom. In the United States and most of Europe, tabloid periodicals are rarely taken seriously—they are trivial publications (in the past referred to as “yellow journalism”) usually relegated to grocery store checkout lines and doctor’s waiting rooms. But for those living in Britain, they are part of the national fabric and the country’s collective conversations. Even for those who purposefully avoid such material, there is little escape from tabloid journalism. When the more elevated outlets like BBC News, Sky News, and BBC Radio 4 analyze the day’s newspaper front pages across numerous shows, tabloid headlines are discussed as seriously as the stories from the Financial Times or the Guardian. Whether people want it or not, the narratives from the likes of The Sun and the Daily Mail easily become part of one’s subconscious—whether it is through other media or their presence at the front of every corner shop, supermarket, and gas station in the country. And in any case, for a society obsessed with surfaces and superficialities, addicted to gossip and celebrity, and demanding of beauty and gore in equal measure, the tabloids give people what they want (even if they will rarely admit it). As Martin Amis said, “They wouldn’t be there if there wasn’t something in the British character that wanted it to be so.” Too much junk food, however, can make you sick.
Where British newspapers were once clearly separated into a trio of categories: broadsheets (The Times, the Telegraph, the Independent), the mid-markets (Daily Mail, Express), and the tabloids (The Sun, the Mirror, the Daily Star), the lines are now blurred. While The Times of London may posture and advance a more elevated style (and it does contain some of the country’s finest hard news coverage), when it comes to royal news, the contents are often no more or less salacious and gossip-ridden than the stories found down a rung in the Mail. And while one was once guaranteed a break from the screeches and tawdry gossip of the Mirror or The Sun by opening the pages of the Telegraph, that supposedly high-minded paper is now home to some of the most coarse, tabloid-style royal articles out there, including gossipy fiction such as Prince Harry spending nights alone in a Montecito hotel to get away from his wife. For the royals, this means nowhere is safe—every publication is capable of sinking to this kind of questionable, even vicious, coverage.
* * *
While they are constantly evolving, the relationships between the press and the institution can be separated into three silos: the royal rota; sources, leaks, and briefings; and the darker world of interference, obstruction, and control.
For years, the royal rota has been the official way for media to access taxpayer-funded royal engagements and activities. Similar to the White House press corps, members from this assemblage of journalists from various print outlets take turns reporting back to the group the relevant information and scuttlebutt from engagements where open coverage isn’t possible—usually intimate gatherings in venues with limited space, or when the general humdrumness of it all doesn’t require more than a reporter or two. For each engagement there is usually one print reporter, a representative from the Press Association, one TV camera (broadcasters have their own pool system, too), and a couple of photographers—everyone else, including those who aren’t part of the official rota, waits outside in a “fixed point” pen to capture the royal departures and arrivals.
The rota’s existence ensures that nothing is missed as members of the royal family carry out their work, but it’s not a system without flaws. Established British national newspapers are the only ones allowed in from the print world, and journalists of all stripes from the Commonwealth—including Australia, New Zealand, and Canada—are banned from joining. Some exceptions have been made for the London-only Evening Standard newspaper and the glossy royal-friendly Hello! magazine. Even though online outlets are now the dominant news source for people across the world, journalists from the U.K. divisions of all-digital news organizations, such as HuffPost (which William and Kate have even contributed opinion articles for) and Newsweek, are also blocked from the rota.
With newspaper sales on a fast decline and newsrooms shrinking, it’s no wonder that, unlike the White House press pool (which is open to any permanent U.S.-based editorial staff working across any platform), access to the rota (and its reporting notes) is fiercely managed and maintained by its members, which at the time of the writing of this book is just ten print journalists. Though there is much more to royal coverage than just engagement reporting, the additional rota-only briefings and front-row access to major occasions, such as funerals and weddings (though Harry controversially banned them from his nuptials), means rota members have become indispensable assets to their newspaper bosses. Front-page stories on the royals still guarantee a boost in newsstand sales of up to 15 percent.
Though it was the Palace who green-lit the group’s formation more than forty years ago, the implementation was left to a British trade body, the News Media Association (NMA), who assigned a “captain” to manage the pool. For the past thirteen years that captain has been the royal editor of the Daily Mail, Rebecca English, who is solely in charge of managing the rotation of members covering each royal engagement and ensuring reporting is filed among the group. “We call them the cartel—it’s a strange system that has a complete monopoly on coverage [of royal engagements]. And no one wants to change the system,” a Buckingham Palace communications aide once told me. Even among the rota there has been frustration over English’s seemingly permanent role. “They essentially put the Mail in charge of it all,” a royal reporter at a popular newspaper told me. “She often rigs things to make sure she gets all the good engagements, gatekeeps certain information [from the Palace], and will do anything to make sure the rota doesn’t grow.” There’s also the glaring fact that the captain of the rota has been accused, with evidence in a court of law, of illegally paying a private investigator to spy on Prince Harry and track one of his former girlfriends. She has refused to comment on the matter.
Prior to Meghan’s arrival, a couple of us in the royal press pack enjoyed rota access in a more honorary fashion. As members of the U.S. media, we didn’t meet the official criteria, but because we offered continual royal coverage for American publications that cater to a different audience (i.e., not considered industry competition), the rota reluctantly allowed us full access to the pooled reporting notes and rota positions on engagements. From 2011 to 2017, all was fine. But as I grew closer to the Sussexes’ team (a situation that led a few reporters to privately complain to the Palace about my “unfair” access) my rota privileges were restricted. “I’d love to help but . . . you’re in more of a TV role now,” English said with a sigh, referring to my ABC News gig and conveniently ignoring my role as royal editor for Harper’s Bazaar. The other honorary member, who also worked for a U.S. outlet with close connections to the Duchess of Sussex’s inner circle, also had their rota access reduced.
