Monarchy’s golden future

In a recent issue of The Spectator Freddy Gray warned that some royal press officers now resemble celebrity publicists, spoon-feeding whole narratives to lapdog hacks, ultimately to the detriment of the monarchy.

Gray traced the poisonous origins of the current glossy operation. In the late Nineties senior St James’s Palace courtiers fell for political-style PR (aka spin) as a clever way to transform Prince Charles’s then-mistress into a future queen. Some very unsavoury tactics followed. In one example (not cited by Gray, but proving his thesis) in a bid to discredit William’s newly dead mother, one top adviser lent his personal support to a royal biographer to air a quack ‘diagnosis’ that Diana had been mentally ill. The intention was clearly to imply that Camilla might not be everybody’s cup of tea but at least she wasn’t a fruitcake.

Pretty shameful from the office of our future head of state, you might think, and I would agree with you. We might guess that Diana’s children didn’t much like it either. That biographer was of course Penny Junor and the resultant book Charles: Victim or Villain? (1998) is a reminder of the depths some royal spin doctors were prepared to plumb.

The author of Prince William: Born to be King is a very different Penny. With the zeal of a penitent, she roundly condemns those who could stoop so low. Forsaking ‘the mire of cunning spin and favouritism’, she embraces the enlightened doctrine Prince William has laid down for his handlers: ‘Please, please always, always tell the truth.’ Hallelujah!

This being a more overt Palace/Penny co-operation, don’t expect shocking insights or disclosures. Her recycled stories of Charles and Diana’s titanically misconceived televised confessions almost inspire a twitch of nostalgia. Back then there was at least the chance of someone going spectacularly off-message.