The task of reporting on the royals is a fraught, fascinating process. After all, how do you write news about an institution that stems from the ancient idea of divine right, subject to no earthly authority? And how should the media report on a family who receive public funds and require coverage of their charitable work, but also, as humans do, transgress and become newsworthy for their behaviour?
The way it works on an official level is via the Royal Rota, launched 40 years ago, which sends one reporter, broadcaster and photographer to taxpayer-funded engagements and then pools the exclusive output to rota members, which includes the broadsheets, tabloids, BBC and ITV, among others. But not the i: this newspaper is not part of that system.
“The Royal Rota exists,” explains a former royal correspondent, “because you can’t have every single reporter and photographer at every single royal engagement because there isn’t enough space for everyone. So there’ll be a royal reporter there to cover it from all angles, and reporters in the royal press pack take it in turns to cover a job and on royal tours too. Then you all share what you’ve got so that everyone has got everything when they need it for their articles.”
Yet there’s more nuance to it than that. In Amol Rajan’s BBC documentary series The Princes and the Press, he talks about the relationship between the royals and press as “a complex set of dynamics”. The gist is that there is something he calls “the deal” between the royals and the media. Rajan, who was then the BBC media editor, puts it like this: “Journalists are always doing unspoken deals with people. I worked in newspapers for the best part of a decade; I cut a few deals myself. The Windsor deal is: The royals get to live in a palace, they get some tax-payer funding. In return — so long as they grant access and a steady supply of stories and pictures – they get favourable coverage. But that deal only works if both parties stick to their side of the bargain.”
After all, as well as being part of the Royal Rota, a reporter won’t only cover official royal engagements. They will independently be trying to get their own news stories and insight, just as a reporter would if their beat were politics, the environment or showbusiness. It was revealed in Rajan’s documentary that in the months following the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince William brought new advisers into the Kensington Palace household – “very clever, well-connected government professional communications officers” – in order to build a better rapport with some of the tabloid newspapers.
The Sussexes have repeatedly claimed that the Palace has betrayed them by briefing journalists against them, and that the Prince of Wales specifically authorised aides to brief. The couple’s lawyer Jenny Afia said she had seen evidence of “negative briefing from the Palace against Harry and Meghan to suit other people’s agendas”. Both Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace declined to comment on the claims.
Certainly, royal reporters in the UK argue this is not the case, and that things are not so cosy between the Palace and some parts of the press.
Valentine Low, royal correspondent at The Times and author of Courtiers: The Hidden Power Behind The Throne, was the journalist who broke the story concerning allegations of bullying made by former Palace staff against the Duchess of Sussex. “The Palace, like most institutions, sometimes says things officially on the record,” he tells i. “Sometimes they have more informal conversations with the journalists to cover that beat. That is a perfectly ordinary way of working – it’s how it works with politics, how it works with business, with crime.
“It’s standard that an institution like the Palace should be able to have conversations where they don’t necessarily want to be named but they want to share some information. Harry and Meghan say this went further than that and that the Palace was guilty of leaking harmful information, planting negative stories about them. I don’t recognise that picture at all, I really don’t. On the contrary, I would say the Palace press offices – that’s three different households – went out of their way to protect them.”
That’s not to say that royal reporters don’t build relationships with members of royal households. “Sometimes journalists get closer to one household than the other,” he says, “but I would say that the current crop of journalists from the last few years – I don’t think any of them have been particularly friendly to one household or the other. That can happen. For instance, it did happen in the Charles and Diana years, where there were papers more aligned with one or the other. But it’s not something I recognise from the last few years, or happening with Meghan and Harry.”
Katie Nicholl, royal reporter for Vanity Fair and author of The New Royals – Queen Elizabeth’s Legacy and the Future of the Crown, began her career in royal journalism after meeting Harry at a party at the Kensington Roof Gardens in 2006. She went on to cover the prince during his so-called “wild years”. She said: “My experience was that the Palace did everything they could to protect Harry, to keep the stories of him coming off the rails out of the press, and they were always incredibly protective of him.
“There were absolutely occasions where the Palace would give off the record guidance – some background to the story. Now sometimes that guidance was, ‘This is a load of nonsense, we’d advise you to stay away from it’. More often than not, it was ‘no comment’.”
Before all this, Prince Harry worked with the press to support his charity work, such as The Invictus Games, and he has been open about his desire to do that. Only someone devoid of empathy and imagination could fail to understand why Prince Harry feels so traumatised, angry and conflicted about the media. After all, he has spoken of the paparazzi taking a photograph of his mother while “she was still dying on the back seat of the car”, a memory that has added heartbreaking insight into his belief that his family has colluded with the press against him.
A former royal reporter remembers Prince Harry seeming more obviously conflicted about the press than other royals. “Occasionally Harry would tell royal correspondents he didn’t want them on his engagements and be quite stand-offish,” they say. “On others he’d been keen for any publicity he could get.”
The reporter says that they do not enjoy a cosy relationship with any of the royal households. “I can tell you with my hand on my heart, I have never been handed anything by the Palace. The Palace, over the years, I would say has treated me with a mixture of suspicion, mistrust and at times, contempt. They don’t like reporters finding stuff out. If a story breaks – or say, Harry publishes an autobiography full of explosive claims, then of course you go to the Palace for comment. But there are plenty of other sources you also seek to speak to who have nothing to do with the Palace. Are the couple really so naive that any negative briefing against them has only come from the Palace? They say ‘everything changed’ after the wedding. Why was that? Because dozens of people were party to their behaviour during the wedding, completely outside of the Palace’s control.”
The Royal Rota is an accepted part of royal life, but Prince Harry has been fiercely outspoken about how he believes it’s unfit for purpose. “My family have been briefing the press solidly for well over a decade,” he told Tom Bradby in an ITV interview this month, claiming that, “certain members” have decided to “get in bed with the Devil to rehabilitate their image”. In his memoir Spare, he writes: “I’d had it with the Royal Rota, both the individuals and the system, which was more outdated than the horse and cart. It had been devised some 40 years earlier, to give British print and broadcast reporters first crack at the Royal Family, and it stank to high heaven. It discouraged fair competition, engendered cronyism, encouraged a small mob of hacks to feel entitled.”
In 2020, before the Sussexes left the UK, they announced they would be bypassing the Royal Rota and dedicating their time instead to “credible sources”, young journalists, and outlets of their choosing. Members of the UK’s National Union of Journalists (NUJ) at the time voiced concern over the Sussexes’ plan. Michelle Stanistreet, general secretary of the NUJ, said: “The rota system is not perfect, but it does allow UK media to cover the British Royal Family – an institution maintained by the public purse. We cannot have a situation where journalists writing about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex can only do so if they have the royal seal of approval.”
While the arrival of the Royal Family’s official Instagram pages – the publicity route preferred by the Sussexes – feels very new, rota access itself is a fairly recent phenomenon. For most of the 20th century, monarchs and their families had a great degree of privacy from the press.
“There was a real mystique about monarchy in the first half of the 20th century, which very much kept reporters at bay,” says Elizabeth Norton, historian and author of England’s Queens and many other books on royal history. “Queen Victoria was particularly private, allowing only carefully selected glimpses into her private life. The future Edward VIII’s relationship with Wallis Simpson was almost entirely unreported, for example, with his decision to abdicate so that he could marry her in 1936 a real shock to most people in Britain.”
Queen Elizabeth II initially also felt a reluctance to allow greater insight into her daily life as monarch. “Royal events were not usually filmed,” says Norton, “and the Queen led the opposition to her Coronation being televised, seeing it as a sacred religious service. It was Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, who persuaded her to allow cameras to film most – but not all – of the ceremony. As part of this, close-ups of the ceremony were not allowed, so there were still limits to how much access the press and, through them, the public, was given.”
Members of the Royal Family are said to have worried that letting the public into their daily lives might be too intimate and have a negative effect. Their mystique was seen as vital to bolster the claims that the royals have been around forever, that they are permanent. Yet the Royal Family’s symbiotic relationship with the press was exemplified in 1969 when the Queen allowed the BBC to film her and her family for 12 months in an attempt to better engage with the public.
David Attenborough felt the film had been a misstep, and reportedly wrote to the producer: “You’re killing the monarchy, you know, with this film you’re making. The whole institution depends on a mystique.” In 2018, historical consultant Robert Lacey said the family realised if they did things like this too often they would “cheapen themselves, letting the magic seep out”.
After King Charles is crowned on 6 May, his relationship with the press is likely to continue to have its tensions and complexities. The new King has had legal run-ins with the media, and earlier this year, a 2002 letter written by Charles to a maid of Princess Alexandra went up for auction, which gives an insight into his thoughts. “Unfortunately,” Charles writes, “we [royals] are now to be treated as mere pawns in a terrifying and ongoing media circulation war where the actual facts are totally disregarded and vast sums of money are offered as bribes to former and current members of staff to exercise their pathetic jealousies and vendettas in public.”
During a 2005 photo call in Switzerland, Nicholas Witchell, then a BBC reporter, called across to Charles, William and Harry, asking how they felt about the Prince of Wales’s upcoming wedding to Camilla Parker-Bowles. Charles answered: “Well, it’s a nice thought. I am very glad you have heard of it anyway,” before saying under his breath to his sons: “These bloody people. I can’t bear that man. I mean, he’s so awful… he really is.”
Yet it is unlikely that King Charles will significantly alter the Royal Rota in years to come –although he made waves this year by having the BBC cover his first Christmas speech rather than ITV, despite it being the channel’s turn.
Jennie Bond, who spent 14 years as the BBC’s royal correspondent, says: “I don’t blame the royals – Charles included – for finding it difficult. Who wants to be scrutinised like that? Yet I’ve always sensed that the royals see the press as a necessary evil, because there’s not a lot of point in a monarchy that is invisible. That will be the case more than ever in the future.”
In spite of all this, the relationship between the media and the Royal Family can be intimate: in July of last year, Charles and Camilla appointed the Daily Mail’s co-deputy editor Tobyn Andreae as their press secretary, a classic poacher turned gamekeeper gambit.
“It is clear that King Charles, and other senior members of the royal family, do understand the need to build relationships – even unwillingly – with the press to ensure that they have some input into the way that they are presented,” says Norton.
“At present, King Charles is following the policy of his mother to ‘never complain, never explain’, although this may become more difficult, particularly when other members of the Royal Family might seek to put their point of view across, as Prince Harry has done. It will be interesting to see, but I think we may find that the King and senior royals start to defend themselves more in future.”
All rights reserved. © 2021 Associated Newspapers Limited.