Down With the Royals

O
N A BALM
Y
summer evening in late July 2013, I arrived at Buckingham Palace to find a curious spectacle. On one side of the Mall, within view of the palace, dozens if not hundreds of media organisations had set up their stalls, like a market selling second-hand broadcasting equipment. Thick cables snaked across the ground, catching the feet of the unwary, while excitable correspondents and bored camera crews waited for something to happen. Every now and then a reporter from somewhere in the world would start a piece-to-camera, pointing towards the palace gates and doing his or her best to disguise the fact that nothing had happened since the last bulletin. Deadlines passed, driving editors and producers mad
with frustration, but the gates remained stubbornly unadorned by the breathlessly anticipated (by the media, at least) announcement of a royal birth. I had been invited to take part in a live broadcast and at around 7.30 p.m., the news anchor standing next to me began a report for her channel’s main news programme of the day. Crowds had gathered, she said, gesturing towards the palace, to witness the moment when a royal servant would fix the announcement to the railings. I could not resist correcting her: crowds had
not
gathered, I pointed out. It was actually a quiet evening for the height of the tourist season, and the visitors who had turned out were easily outnumbered by members of the press. (In the event, it turned out that the Duchess of Cambridge’s son had already been born, but the announcement was held back while the new parents got used to the arrival.)

Contrast this anecdote with a vignette from just over a year earlier, when members of the royal family joined a flotilla of small boats on the river Thames to mark Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee. I did not think this was something to celebrate, given that the same unelected woman had been head of state since before I was born,
allowing me – and the rest of the population – no say in the matter. So I decided to join other republicans at a site on the south bank just outside City Hall, next to Tower Bridge, and take part in a demonstration calling for the replacement of the monarchy with a democratic system.

The protest was organised by Republic, the small but growing organisation that campaigns for an elected head of state. Its staff had negotiated in advance with the police and private security staff from local companies to ensure access to the riverbank on the day. The nearest Underground station was London Bridge and I arrived in the early afternoon to find the weather chilly and overcast, with occasional drizzle. At first I thought there were so many people in Tooley Street, which runs between London and Tower Bridges, because they were looking for shelter or somewhere to eat. Then, as I got closer to the Tower Bridge end of the street, I saw dozens of republican placards. I also spotted lines of private security guards blocking access to the protest site, and they flatly refused to let me through, even when I explained I was due to address the rally. In the end, I used my mobile to call one of the organisers and explain the problem; he
told me that the numbers on the riverbank were being strictly controlled, regardless of the agreement Republic had made in advance of the demonstration, and he would have to ask one of the protesters to leave so I could join it. When I finally managed to reach the protest, I saw he was right; it had been limited to a narrow stretch of the riverbank, giving the impression from the river that few demonstrators had turned up. Later, when I’d made my speech, I returned to Tooley Street, where I climbed on a wall and addressed the much larger crowd of republicans who had not been allowed through.

So how did the press report this demonstration and the fact that hundreds of demonstrators had not been allowed through to the river? Here is
The Guardian
’s fair and accurate account, which included an acknowledgement that the small crowd of demonstrators on the riverbank were not the only republicans who had turned up:

There was a crowd, but you wouldn’t have known it if you happened to read the popular press. The biggest-selling newspapers didn’t even make a stab at objective reporting, as this headline in the
Daily Mail
attests: ‘Spoilsports! Anti-monarchists stage Thames riverside protest against Jubilee pageant but spectators drown them out with jeers’. The paper had its own bit of jeering to do, continuing in this vein:

This is simply untrue. The
Daily Mail
also claimed that the demonstrators ‘taunted hundreds of families nearby’, which certainly did not happen in the couple of hours I spent on the riverbank. The
Daily Express
took a similar line, with one of its columnists unable to resist gloating about the supposed turn-out:

Even the picture captions were tendentious. In the
Daily Mail
, a picture of a cheerful protester holding up a rather mild-mannered message – ‘I want a head of state to embody my values’ – was captioned with the word ‘Anger’. Thus, even polite displays of support for a democratic system are misreported, lest anyone get the idea that opposition to the monarchy is rational, principled and becoming more widespread.

The bias revealed in these anecdotes is habitual across the UK media, and is so ingrained that the people responsible barely seem aware of it. It goes hand in hand with the air of unreality that surrounds any event involving members of the British royal family, which would not be tolerated in any other walk of life. The
worst offenders are people described in all seriousness as ‘royal correspondents’, suggesting that they do a job analogous to other journalists. But this would be true only if defence correspondents went misty-eyed over men in uniform – ‘the admiral was wearing a lovely uniform with a matching cap’ – and asked inane questions about how much they liked their ships. In reality, journalistic rigour and indeed common sense go out of the window when it comes to royal ‘stories’, which often amount to no more than a member of the royal family wearing clothes, getting out of a car and walking along a street. Here is a typical royal story from the
Daily Mail
website: ‘Blooming in black: Kate covers up her growing bump with £595 LBD as Duchess puts her severe morning sickness behind her in third public appearance since recovering from illness’. Like Princess Diana before her, the former Kate Middleton only has to wear the same coat twice to make headline news, with such mindless drivel regularly given the same prominence as famine in Africa or atrocities committed by Islamic State in Syria or Iraq.

In some degree, this is the legacy to the royals of the
late Princess Diana. She turned the family from a distant institution, which few people knew much about, into a branch of celebrity culture. Pitching for public sympathy in her battle with her estranged husband, Diana invited the media into her and their private lives, creating a form of royal soap opera. Many of her relatives-by-marriage didn’t like it, especially when the Princess’s sudden death in 1997 sent her popularity soaring and stuffier members of the family (including the Queen) found themselves called on to emote in public. Total strangers had no such inhibitions; on the morning after the fatal car crash in Paris, I was on my way to a BBC studio in Portland Place in central London when I spotted a homemade poster fixed to a lamp-post. It was well above head height, although I suppose that bringing a ladder was no trouble to someone who had gone to the effort of finding a photo of the Princess
and
a ‘picture’ of Jesus; he or she had pasted them on a large piece of card with a caption reading, ‘If Jesus was the Son of God, who is Diana?’ Nor was that the limit of the madness: on the evening before the Princess’s funeral, I was startled to hear a Radio 4 presenter introduce an
interview with a man who had had an 18-inch portrait of Diana tattooed on his thigh. Even the late Princess, with her insatiable appetite for the attention of total strangers, might have baulked at this ‘tribute’. Such anecdotes illustrate two iron rules of royal ‘stories’: nothing much happens most of the time, and reporters end up trying to extract sound bites from people they’d normally run a mile to avoid.

One effect of Diana’s unexpected death was that the monarchy got its most recent crisis in early, before bankers and MPs, and has had longer to recover. In that sense, the Princess did the royals a favour in the long run, stimulating an appetite for royal ‘news’ that fireproofed the family against temporary spurts of unpopularity. Much of what passes for royal ‘reporting’ is trivial, fawning and uncritical; actions that the rest of us carry out every day, without too much expense of effort, are greeted as something remarkable. The standard riposte of editors, on the rare occasions that they are challenged about this saturation coverage of the royal family, is that they are merely responding to public demand. They point to the crowds who turn out for royal events, ignoring the huge
numbers of people who aren’t interested and don’t bother to turn up. In the run-up to the wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William in 2011, we were told that an excited populace couldn’t wait for the event and that street parties were being organised up and down the country. Then a story appeared in the
Daily Telegraph
revealing that so many people were
leaving
the country that the charity that organises street parties was urging people to postpone them. It went on:

Something similar happened the following year, at the time of another costly obsession, the diamond jubilee. Before it happened, the Centre for Retail Research predicted that the event would ‘boost UK spending by almost £509 million’; it claimed that a small drop in output caused by the double bank holiday would be more than offset by increases in spending on souvenirs and tourism, predicting a net boost to the economy of £409 million.
5
But the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, sounded a warning note when he appeared before a House of Lords committee, suggesting that the jubilee could throw the economy into reverse; he said it was ‘quite possible’ that UK output would contract in the second quarter of 2012 as a result of the extra holiday.
6
Opinion polls suggested he was right to dampen expectations, with only a third of people saying they would personally be celebrating the jubilee; fully half the population said they didn’t intend to celebrate
it at all. Fifty-two per cent said they would watch it at home on TV, which didn’t bode well for predictions of lavish public spending.
7
King was proved right later in the year when the Office for National Statistics estimated that the event had shaved between 0.3 and 0.4 per cent off GDP. The
FT
reported:

In a decade when the family seemed intent on producing annual extravaganzas even though the country was in the grip of a punishing economic recession, the next
big royal event was the birth of Prince George. More or less from the day she got engaged, Kate Middleton had rarely appeared in public without a supporting cast of bashful children or teenagers; in a dynasty where gender roles are fixed in stone (if not the Stone Age), it may be that this amounted to a series of prompts, reminding her that her duty lay in pregnancy and motherhood. She duly obliged on that July day in 2013, giving birth in the private wing of St Mary’s hospital in Padding-ton, a mile or so north of Buckingham Palace. No one knew anything about the infant, other than the fact that he was a healthy boy, but he nevertheless displaced his Uncle Harry as third in line to the throne. The whole notion of the royal succession is innately ridiculous, but Harry’s displacement made it visibly so; the notion that a tiny baby automatically has the qualities to do anything, whether it’s becoming a plumber or a monarch, belongs in the Middle Ages.