The world of royal correspondents is very small. You’re talking about 13 or 14 print and wire reporters and another smallish group of broadcasters and producers and photographers. Some colleagues say that being a royal correspondent is a funny mix, sort of midway between being a political correspondent and a showbiz correspondent. We spend our lives chronicling the ups and downs of the House of Windsor, and there have been so many crises down the years and so many highs. The highs for me are Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding, and the summer of 2012 when we had the Jubilee and the London Olympics, and then a year later Prince George’s birth. But certainly it’s turning out to be another annus horribilis for the royal family.
The life of a royal correspondent is structured around the official engagement. It wasn’t always the case, but as the job has changed, the official engagements are the best chance to see the working royals in action and the best chance to talk to officials, the people who work for them. Those official engagements are very choreographed, and often the story is when the choreography goes wrong or when something unexpected happens. So when they first announced on the same day that both Kate and Charles were going into hospital and both were going to need a period of recuperation, I think the feeling was, What are we going to do? There’s not going to be anything to write for a couple of months.
Of course, it hasn’t turned out like that. It’s been crazy. The working day has partly been reacting to all the rumors. It was pressure from editors to come up with a fresh story, a fresh line, trying to weigh how seriously to take some of the stuff that you are reading from elsewhere, from abroad in particular—because don’t forget, the American press has been deeply involved in all of this. We were always in a difficult position. I just thought that being a reporter meant you just get the facts and then you tell the readers what the facts were. But on the royal beat, it’s much more than that. You have to think, Well, what are the readers going to say? The editors think, How is this going to look? We had that situation where Kate hadn’t been seen since Christmas, and then Backgrid had taken a picture of her in the car traveling with her mother. A couple of people claimed that the British papers decided not to run that picture because the palace put huge pressure on them not to do it. As far as I’m aware, that’s not the case. I think papers decided it’s probably not going to be a good look if we run those pictures.
Always at the back of anybody in the media’s mind is the feeling that the readers are going to say, “They’re doing to her what they did to Diana.” The days of the British media just blindly ignoring requests from the palace are long gone. You have to ask yourself: Well, how did they get that picture? Did they chase the car? Then you cannot use that picture. In that particular situation, my personal view was that the papers and the broadcasters could have used those pictures of Kate with her mother. It was interesting that they didn’t. Then they did use a picture of William with her in the car, which wasn’t a very good picture. I mean, she was looking away. The only difference I could point to is that William was on his way to an official engagement in the second picture, whereas in the first one, they were very much going about their private business. But of course, it didn’t worry overseas media in the U.S. particularly.
Of course, the readers themselves are hypocrites. Just about every person I’ve met in the last three months, whether they are ardent monarchists, strong republicans, or just completely indifferent, have asked me, “So what’s really wrong with Kate? And what about the king? What type of cancer he’s got?” The truth is I don’t think anybody in the media knew, but I think everybody thinks, Oh, they really know what’s going on, but we didn’t.
The royal press pack is quite a sensitive group of people, and it’s a lot less brutal than the politics beat is. On a personal level, the members of the royal press pack will never be friends with William and Kate or the king and Camilla. Sometimes we might exchange a bit of banter or conversation, but we know we’re never going to be their friends. Still, when the Mother’s Day photo created that frenzy, I think a lot of the reporters genuinely felt for the couple, and even more so for the press office staff who worked for them. And I think quite a few people messaged the communications secretary at Kensington Palace and others, saying, “We feel for you, and don’t worry too much.”
This period took me back to the last days of the queen and Prince Philip, when there were constant rumors like, “Oh, Prince Philip died. Can you ring the palace and check?” As a special correspondent, you get absolutely fed up with it. You’re tempted to just say, “Of course he hasn’t died. Don’t be ridiculous.” But you’re also worried that the one time you say that will be the one time that, gosh, shit, it really has happened. That happened to me with Prince Philip, where the news desk rang and said, “Some of the photographers seem to think that Prince Philip’s died.” And I nearly let fly and said, “How many times are we going to have this?” Then I thought, I better check. So I rang the Buckingham Palace switchboard and they said, “The press office is not taking any calls. Can you email in?” And I thought, Yeah, there’s definitely something up now.
The last weeks were similar: There was this frenzy, day after day, that the palace is going to be making a big announcement today and all of us thinking, Nobody’s told us anything. But again, you don’t want to look a fool if you’re wrong. On the Friday they released Kate’s video, I heard there was going to be an announcement, but I’d read that every other day as well. The British press was told at 3:30 that there’s going to be an off-the-record briefing at four o’clock. Everybody was scrambling to make sure that they were by a computer and with a link to tune in.
Now everybody’s looking to see, Well, what happens next? Are the king and Kate both going to make a full recovery? I think the British monarchy is going to need to make a bit of a splash perhaps in the second half of this year or early next year to get things back on track because it does feel as if things have been derailed. If they don’t come back that strongly, then that I think will be a worry for the British monarchy because there’s a very small cast of characters who people actually care about. To be frank with you, I think Edward and Sophie are lovely, and Princess Anne is very popular and is admired for just doing that old-fashioned work: opening the hospitals, going to charity shops, whatever. But it’s really just the king and queen and William and Kate who are the box office. And of course, we did have Harry and Meghan, and that’s the other element to it, that in spite of what a lot of people abroad think, the British press wanted Harry and Meghan to be there. They embraced Meghan. They thought that she was fantastic box-office material who would help sell a lot of papers, bring about a lot of clicks. But we’ve lost them, and I don’t think there’s much prospect of them coming back for now, because I don’t think the future of the monarchy lies in part-time royals who are off making money.
On Easter Sunday, we saw Charles out at the royal family’s traditional Easter Sunday service. That was quite a significant event because not only did he go to an event where there were lots of other people present; he then went on a walkabout afterwards and I think he shook hands 56 times with people. And a palace source briefed the royal rota that he is responding well to treatment, that he hopes to gradually build up the number of official engagements he undertakes as the summer approaches. So that was all quite upbeat and the first solid bit of information about the king’s treatment that we’ve had for some time.
