Future historians of the British royal family’s media policy will probably one day trace the outburst by Prince Harry on Tuesday evening this week, in which he announced a legal challenge against the Mail on Sunday in highly emotional terms, back to a generous offer by Viscount Linley to lend the newly married Prince William and his bride Kate Middleton a villa in the South of France.
It was due to be sold, and Linley, a high-end cabinet maker, offered it free of charge to his cousins for a week.
William and Kate gladly accepted, and, as the happy couple settled down in the Provencal sunshine, Kate slipped off her bikini top.
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A mile away, on a public road, a shutter clicked. Two weeks later, while the couple were on a royal tour of the South Pacific, pictures of Kate, topless, were published in the French edition of gossip mag Closer.
In the wake of that nasty invasion of privacy, Prince William issued an emotional statement condemning the long lens pursuit of his wife, which shares with Harry’s new statement a tone of saddened outrage, and which, also like Harry’s message this week, invoked the memory of his dead mother, declaring, “The incident is reminiscent of the worst excesses of the press and paparazzi during the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, and all the more upsetting ... for being so.”
The pictures were published in 2012. It took until 2017 for the Cambridges to win a decidedly Pyrrhic victory, when a French court awarded the couple €100,000 (£91,000) in damages and interest from Closer.
The idea that the Cambridges should spend five years pursuing a French publication over photographs which were taken legally from a public road amazed many at the time, especially as the British press had been offered the pictures and immediately refused them. They were unpublishable as they violated U.K. privacy law.
However, William and Harry (who sources at the time said completely supported his brother’s confrontational approach) are nothing if not obstinate, and have ever since then pursued an aggressive strategy of facing down the press, complaining when they think they have a slam dunk case, and bypassing the media where possible to speak directly to their public via social media. It has all taken them a long way from the mantra of ‘never complain, never explain’ which served their grandmother so well.
Experienced advisers and press secretaries (namely Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton and Nick Loughran) who expressed reservations about the new way of doing things were quickly got rid of, and replaced with more amenable characters. The appointment of Jason Knauf, a young Canadian, to head up the Kensington Palace press operation (which then looked after William, Kate and Harry) represented the apogee of the process.
Although any journalist who covered the royals before the Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking will tell you that the royals today are treated with kid gloves in comparison to former decades, for staff of the young royals under Knauf it was an article of faith that the media were distorting their messages and representing the young royals unfairly.
So Knauf set about the task of setting up and maximizing social channels that would allow his principals to cut out the middleman and speak directly to their public.
Also, under Knauf, came an increasing use of the type of letter that Harry published this week—emotional appeals for privacy made directly to the public, which sought to cut across the press narratives, pointed out press hypocrisy and overtly or implicitly reminded the reader of the fate of Diana.
Knauf, then just 30, was the brains behind one of these letters, appealing for privacy for Prince George, that came with a bizarre mix of plaintive and also threatening tones, warning that a photographer might end up getting shot if the “dangerous and distressing” tactics of paparazzi photographers pursuing the royal children were not curtailed, but also that Prince George and Princess Charlotte were at risk of growing up “exclusively behind palace gates and in walled gardens.”
Well, boo hoo, was the general reaction to that one.
A similar self-pitying tone was deployed when another letter written by Knauf on behalf of Harry was published after his relationship with Meghan Markle became public knowledge.
Kensington Palace listed a string of (entirely valid) complaints in the letter, citing “nightly legal battles” to keep defamatory stories out of papers; Markle’s mother “having to struggle past photographers” in order to get to her front door; the attempts of “reporters and photographers to gain illegal entry to her home”; and “substantial bribes” being offered by papers to Markle’s ex-boyfriend along with the “bombardment of nearly every friend, co-worker, and loved one in her life” as papers sought information on her.
In an utterly bizarre piece of timing, the letter was released on the actual day of the U.S. presidential election and was swept from the news agenda as soon as polls in the U.S. closed and Donald Trump stormed to victory.
As the continuing coverage of Meghan reveals, it did not achieve its goal.
This time around, the timing of the publication of the letter has also been the subject of some stupefaction.
The offending article, which reproduced extensive and deeply personal extracts of a handwritten letter from Meghan to her dad (in alleged violation of copyright law) was published in February. Whilst there has been a steady stream of negative stories over the summer, triggered mainly by the couple’s use of private jets while promoting action on climate change, there didn’t appear to be any recent flashpoint.
In fact, it was rather the opposite. It had all appeared to be going so well. Harry was on the penultimate day of what until then had been a wildly successful tour of Southern Africa. The unveiling of baby Archie in the presence of Archbishop Desmond Tutu had been a triumph.
However, The Times of London reported that Harry had “insisted” on issuing the statement on Tuesday “against the advice of some of his most senior aides” who “warned that it would inevitably push the tour itself off the news agenda.”
The Times’ reporter Valentine Low, who was on the tour, added that royal aides were “visibly embarrassed” by the statement, which Harry wrote himself (although some see again the fingerprints of Knauf, not just in the linguistic tone, but also the fact that it was posted on a website created especially for the purpose, a distinctly Knaufian touch. The website, which was registered in March, contains nothing other than Harry’s statement.).
Incredibly, despite having spent a lot of money hiring PR expert Sara Latham, she was apparently not asked for advice. It is widely thought that the Queen, Charles and William were also not forewarned or even notified of what Harry was about to do.
Although most people have great sympathy for Harry, there is undeniably a tension between the couple’s wider liberal credentials and their apparent desire to control and curtail the media when it comes to them.
Indeed, Harry’s statement acknowledged this and began by saying, “As a couple, we believe in media freedom and objective, truthful reporting. We regard it as a cornerstone of democracy and in the current state of the world—on every level—we have never needed responsible media more.”
Having made this sweeping declaration, however, Harry didn’t try to explain the contradiction, merely ploughed on: “Unfortunately, my wife has become one of the latest victims of a British tabloid press that wages campaigns against individuals with no thought to the consequences—a ruthless campaign that has escalated over the past year, throughout her pregnancy and while raising our newborn son.”
Getting into his stride, Harry went on to describe the coverage as “relentless propaganda,” then added: “The positive coverage of the past week from these same publications exposes the double standards of this specific press pack that has vilified her almost daily for the past nine months; they have been able to create lie after lie at her expense simply because she has not been visible while on maternity leave.”
One gets Harry’s point—two-faced hypocrites!—but it seems rather odd to complain that relentless negative coverage has not been consistently maintained.
Camilla Tominey, the associate editor of The Daily Telegraph, spoke for many journalists when she wrote that Harry’s sweeping generalizations appeared to be “tarring the whole of the British tabloid press with the same brush.”
Unfortunately for Harry and Meghan (and anyone else who seeks to close down media criticism), the press still have way more penetration than a few social media feeds, especially when it comes to the crucial “floating voters” who don’t have a side and make up the vast majority of the public (social-media followers are more likely to be confirmed fans).
And they have been quick to retaliate—the newspapers are awash with negative coverage of Harry today.
The triumphs of the tour are forgotten and the narrative has once again become petty and personal: The Sun even went so far as to publish a video clip of Harry haughtily chastising Rhiannon Mills, Sky’s respected royal correspondent, as if she were a naughty little schoolchild when Mills was simply asking a question—which is her job.
Their message to Harry seemed to be that when it comes to directly trying to garner public sympathy, well, two can play at that game.
Just as Harry can make out the press to be a bunch of lying, deceiving hypocrites, they can make him out to be a haughty and entitled hypocrite.
Both cases can be made with equal validity.
Harry’s gamble is not that he can shout louder, but that he can cut through.
One can well understand the frustration and sadness that has led Harry to make this declaration, but the ill-thought-out execution along with previous experience suggests that of all the possible outcomes, the tabloid press moderating their critique of Harry and Meghan as a result is the most unlikely.
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