They’ve let in too much light

A former court correspondent explains how the British royal family lost its mystique and became part of celebrity culture

Clement Attlee stepped out of 10 Downing Street and paused on the doorstep. A BBC man approached diffidently, holding a microphone the size of a soup plate.

“Have you anything to say, prime minister?“ “No,” said Atlee, “I have nothing to say.” “Thank you, prime minister.” With that, Mr Attlee gave a wintery smile and got in his car, satisfied that his duty to the Fourth Estate had been fulfilled. Deference was built into British society until comparatively recently. To my mother and most ordinary people in Britain after World War Two, the medallists in the Respect Olympics were: the Holy Trinity (Gold), the Royal Family (Silver), and the Prime Minister of the Day (Bronze), preferably Winston Churchill but others were acceptable.

Royalty were big beneficiaries of this. No one would have dreamed of waving a microphone under a royal nose. When Lord Altrincham ventured mild criticisms of the Queen, saying she spoke “like a prissy schoolgirl”, the newspapers in 1957 condemned his attacks on her dignity, although they were fair, which she acknowledged by changing her tone.

As late as 1965, when the great Richard Dimbleby, who reinvented royalty for the television age, inadvertently blasphemed on air – saying “Jesus wept!”, not realising he was live, after repeated technical failures on the live feed of pictures from West Germany during the Queen’s historic first state visit – the uproar continued until he dropped a coin in the swear box at the start of his next Panorama.

Even 20 years later, in 1985, when I was “volunteered” to be BBC TV’s court correspondent, accredited to Buckingham Palace and allowed to park my red BBC Rover 216 in the courtyard, my respect for the royal institution was taken for granted by my bosses, but it would no longer be unconditional respect. The story, I insisted, had to come first.

Things had already started to change. The ground rules were bending. And it was, in Sun speak, “The Royals Wot Started It”. Or rather, it was a short, neatly dressed man from Australia with charm and a slight speech impediment. William Heseltine might have been the son of a train driver, but he was a diplomat and courtier to his manicured fingertips.

He was a breath of fresh air at Buckingham Palace after turgid years in which the Queen’s press secretary had been the Abominable No Man, declining comment on most stories and refusing access of any kind, whenever and wherever possible. Clever Bill convinced The Firm’s CEO, the Duke of Edinburgh, to allow up-close and personal filming which, in due course, would become The Royal Family, a 1969 documentary of staged tableaux with a few precious sequences that were spontaneous and therefore revealing.

Stepping down from their pedestal for a television programme was dangerous. Some precautions were taken. The film was made by the BBC, but the Queen insisted upon retaining the copyright. That meant that it has never been shown in its entirety since the original 1969 broadcasts, with excerpts shown only by special permission.

I say “broadcasts” because the Queen also insisted that the film be freely available to ITV, which showed it after the BBC. The Queen was adamant that no news organisation should ever have a royal exclusive. If that happened, she knew that it would, first, annoy those not granted the exclusive, and, secondly, create aggressive competition for exclusives, as subsequently happened with disastrous results.

That was also the reasoning behind the royal rota. There was nothing mysterious about it, but it is now seriously misunderstood by Prince Harry and his wife, who both clearly believe the rota is a means by which Buckingham Palace controls the press. As if. No. In my day, the royal rota was an elegant lady called Lydia Rider who perched in the corner of the reporters’ room at BBC Television News, with her cacti and cheese plants. Lydia sent out the rota passes, on an even-handed basis, to news organisations to make sure everyone had equal access to royal events, with those not accommodated entitled to the copy and images on a pool basis.

This was eminently sensible. It took the pressure off the Palace and news media alike. It all went wrong – and this was the historic parting of the ways – when in 1985 ITN was secretly given exclusive access to Prince Charles and Princess Diana for a year, a whole year!

This deal was cooked up by Alastair Burnet, the hard-drinking former editor of the Daily Express who had become the star newscaster at ITN, over drinks with the Queen Mother at Sandown Park racecourse in 1984. She undertook to persuade her favourite grandson, Prince Charles, to agree to this unprecedented arrangement.

He did, and it resulted in two hour-long documentaries, run in tandem: The Prince and Princess of Wales in Public and then, even more enticingly,…in Private. ITN made a lot of money from the twin programmes. They were sold internationally from 1985. If this was not the shot that was heard around the world, it was certainly the start of open season on the royal family.

They had put themselves in the shop window, to be admired. Now, they were undeniably a commercial property. But some of the coverage would not be what they intended. It would be critical, and robustly so. The flattering follow-spot on Prince Charming and Cinderella could instantly become the lurid glare that signals the entry of the Ugly Sisters, as Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson would become, alternating between being In or Out of favour with the newspapers.

It was a Right Royal Disaster

The 1987 broadcast of the BBC’s It’s a Royal Knockout, starring Prince Andrew, Sarah Ferguson, Princess Anne, and the putative showbiz titan Prince Edward as its producer, contributed to the coming media disaster. For an institution that had flourished by being discreet this departure was trouble in the making. And it came just as the number of news outlets was increasing. With increased competition came the growing appetite for personality-led “news” and celebrity culture. The royal family had stooped to conquer. Even though there was not a single good reason for doing so, they had cast themselves as celebrities. Inevitably, it all became very ugly.

The monstering of Princess Diana was, in my view, disgusting. I heard paparazzi – thugs with cameras – boasting “I just hit Diana” or “I did Diana”. There was something undeniably sexual about the pursuit. And huge sums of money were there to be made. The French paparazzo who shot “The Kiss”, a long-range photograph purporting to show Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed embracing on the deck of a yacht in the summer of 1997, got £250,000 for his fuzzy image from Tina Weaver, editor of the Sunday Mirror. And that was by no means the record price for an intrusive snap of royalty off-duty or off-guard.

And so it continued until, as her brother Earl Spencer said in his funeral eulogy at Westminster Abbey, Diana the huntress of Greek mythology became Diana the Hunted, pursued to her death in the Alma tunnel in Paris in the early hours of August 31, 1997, the paparazzi motordrives continuing to whirr as the Princess, conscious and able to speak, fought for her life in the back seat of the car. There was a collective sigh of relief in Fleet Street that no British publication had a photographer at the crash scene, though some papers were offered the pictures which, in a late show of compassion and discretion, they didn’t publish but did put in the safe.

The shock of the Princess’s death initiated a partial clean-up of the British press. But the phone-hacking scandals were yet to come, only exposed when the News of the World hacked a recorded message left by Tom Bradby of ITN on the phone of the private secretary of Prince William and Prince Harry, offering to loan them some expensive ITN equipment for a private video project – fresh evidence of the strange, ambiguous, symbiotic relationship between royalty and reporters. My phone was hacked by the same team at the now-defunct News of the World. They went to jail. Their conduct was disgraceful, but it did not shake my belief in the importance of a free press, needed now more than ever.

Were the great 19th century constitutional writer Walter Bagehot around today, he would not be warning against letting light in upon the magic of monarchy. It’s too late for that. Rather, Bagehot would be advising that decency, honesty, and plain dealing should shape the relationship between King Charles III and the media because a constitutional monarchy suits the British temperament in many ways. Its demise would be a loss to both sovereign and his subjects.