The Great Survivors

by Peter Conradi

  The activities of foreign princes and princesses, on the other hand, have been greeted with indifference in Britain, apart from a small number of hard-core royalists. The Monégasque royal family are the exception: the Grimaldis had been entertaining readers, listeners and viewers since Prince Rainier married Grace Kelly in 1956, neatly merging the worlds of royalty and show business. By the 1980s the colourful love lives of their daughters Caroline and Stéphanie were the source of rich pickings. Yet their appeal too has faded in recent years, although Caroline’s children, Andrea, Charlotte and Pierre, now in their twenties and with a series of high-profile relationships behind them, have started to take their place.

  The Continental monarchies watched the obsessive media attention that Diana generated with a mixture of bemusement and relief at how much quieter things were at home in comparison. Yet by the mid-1990s attitudes were beginning to change, as a new generation of royals came of age. Philippe, Willem-Alexander, Frederik, Haakon, Felipe and Victoria were young, glamorous and attractive to young readers, especially once they started to enjoy themselves socially and fall for members of the opposite sex. Paris Match, of course, had been charting the ups and downs of the love lives of Europe’s royals for years. Given that France had no royal family of its own, it had followed everyone else’s – starting with the Grimaldis. Across Europe, other magazines and the newly emerging “lifestyle” sections of newspapers started to follow its lead.

  Royals were portrayed as celebrities whose private lives were worthy of the same treatment as those of pop singers or television or film stars. Magazines such as ¡Hola!, Bunte or Oggi still used the posed photographs and photo opportunities arranged by the palaces, but supplemented them with informal images of the royals at play taken by paparazzi, who were generously paid for their exclusives. For readers wanting a more reverent approach there were specialist royal magazines such as Britain’s Majesty or the Dutch Vorsten Royale. The pictures are formal ones; the stories describe engagements carried out by members of the various royal families or talk about their jewellery, palaces or history. Their selling point is that they provide an “insider’s” – or maybe that should be courtier’s – view of what goes on behind the walls of the royal palace.

  Britain’s Majesty, founded in 1980, sums itself up thus on its website: “Every month Majesty gives its readers a colourful insight into the privileged lives of the royal families of the world. Personalities, lifestyles and fashion are all captured in exciting features and stunning photographs. Majesty records all the important royal engagements and takes an in-depth look at the dramatic history of Britain’s monarchs. Month by month it builds into a beautiful and authoritative collection.”

  Within the countries that are still monarchies, interest is necessarily concentrated on the national royal family, with foreign ones playing a supporting role. The German media, with a voracious appetite for royalty but like the French no ruling family of their own, have simply adopted everyone else’s instead: the Swedish royal family has come to enjoy a special role, though, thanks to German-born Queen Silvia – “unsere Königin” (“our Queen”). This fascination was reflected in the huge coverage the German media gave to Crown Princess Victoria’s wedding in June 2010.

  The changing relationship between royalty and magazines over recent decades is well illustrated by the transformation of Sweden’s Svensk Damtidning, a glossy women’s magazine that sells 140,000 copies a week. Back in the 1950s, when King Carl XVI Gustaf and his four elder sisters were growing up, it used to publish sweet photographs of the royal children. Over the following decades, however, the royals were only a relatively small part of their coverage. That suddenly changed in the mid-1990s following the revelation that Crown Princess Victoria was suffering from anorexia.

  Karin Lennmor, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, had previously assumed her readership was composed of middle-aged or older women. Now she found a new generation of young girls who identified with the twenty-year-old Princess and wanted to read about her and her friends. “Victoria became a trendsetter: where she went, where she went on vacation, the kind of labels ‌she would buy,” Lennmor recalls.11 So the magazine was revamped with the strapline “Den Kungliga Veckotidningen” (“The Royal Weekly”) and a little crown on its cover, and began to follow the Princess and her younger siblings, Carl Philip and Madeleine, who were also beginning to make their way in the world.

  Inevitably, the emphasis is on the positive, so when the magazine’s journalists heard in early 2010 of problems in Princess Madeleine’s relationship with her fiancé, Jonas Bergström, they did not print them. Instead it was the Norwegian magazine Se og Hør that effectively precipitated the break-up by publishing the claims of the Norwegian woman who said she had slept with him.

  Alongside such magazines there are also television programmes. While Belgium has Royalty and Place Royale, Dutch television has Blauw Bloed, a weekly show running since 2004 in which host Jeroen Snel presents a mixture of news and history about both the country’s own royal family and the other European ones. Snel also co-hosts a quiz programme, De grootste Royaltykenner van Nederland (The Greatest Royalty Expert in the Netherlands), in which contestants compete to answer obscure questions about the Dutch royal house.

  Such programmes are not a permanent fixture elsewhere in Europe, although in Sweden, in the three months preceding the marriage of Crown Princess Victoria in June 2010, SVT, the main state television channel, screened Det kungliga bröllopet (The Royal Wedding), in a one-hour, prime-time slot every Monday evening. The show, presented by Ebba von Sydow, a former magazine editor, drew audiences of up to one million people with a mixture of footage of past royal events and reports on everything from the pastry chef charged with making the wedding cake to the groom Daniel Westling’s home town of Ockelbo.

  As in Britain, much of the reporting has concentrated on the glitz, the history and ceremonial of monarchy or else on the private lives of royals. Yet some newspapers have mounted serious investigations into royal activities – and especially into the background of the prospective crown princesses who emerged in the late 1990s – with dramatic results: Mette-Marit, for example, was obliged to come clean about her previous drug use, while Máxima’s father, Jorge Zorreguieta, had to keep away from his daughter’s wedding following revelations of his role as a minister in the country’s former ruling military junta. Interest has continued since the weddings, with the media seizing on suggestions that their unions might be anything less than happy or, in the case of Mary’s marriage to Frederik, the Crown Prince of Denmark, hinting at the reappearance of old flames.

  Even more far-reaching were, as we have seen, the Dutch media’s investigations into the past of Mabel Wisse Smit, which forced Prince Friso to renounce his claim to the throne when he married her. While the methods used were, in most cases, conventional journalistic ones, there have also been examples of the kind of tabloid techniques used by Britain’s News of the World and Daily Mirror – as shown most graphically by Håvard Melnæs and other reporters at the Norwegian gossip magazine Se og Hør in their investigations into Mette-Marit’s past.

  For the Belgian media, interest came from a different quarter. During his forty-two-year reign, the devoutly religious King Baudouin and his wife Queen Fabiola had provided the press with little to get their teeth into. The accession in 1993 of his younger brother Albert, whose marriage had been a much stormier affair, was to be more fruitful for them – including the revelation of the existence of the King’s love child in 1999. The speed with which the Belgian media identified and tracked down Delphine Boël was impressive.

  However loud the criticism of individual members of the royal families, Europe’s media devote little space to the questioning of the institution of monarchy and its continued relevance in the twenty-first century – and republican groups must fight hard to get any coverage at all. Andrew Marr’s high-profile three-part television series, Diamond Queen, broadcast on BBC 1 in February 2012, was distinctly hagiogra
phical in tone. As two observers of the British media scene have argued, the media tends to depoliticize and trivialize the monarchy in favour of a relentless focus on the activities of ‌the royals as family members.12 Such a focus tends to squeeze out a broader debate about monarchy as a whole. Yet it is impossible to separate the two completely. As has been shown on plenty of occasions in Britain and elsewhere, popular unhappiness with the behaviour of individual royals can spill over into a decline in support for the institution.

  Such coverage is also an inevitable by-product of the blurring of monarchy with celebrity that has become common even in the more heavyweight newspapers. Politicians frequently complain that too much emphasis is put on personality rather than on policy. Yet with members of the royal family there is no policy to discuss – quite the opposite: in contrast to their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors, who still ruled as well as reigned, modern-day monarchs are at pains not to involve themselves in the political process or do so only according to carefully circumscribed rules. The result is to leave only the personal for the media to report.

  The palaces have responded in different ways to the new demands placed upon them – especially when it comes to interviews. Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, for example, does not give interviews; nor did her parents before her. The only time her mother gave one was when, as Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, she became engaged to her “beloved Bertie”, the future King George VI. She talked to a journalist about her engagement ring and said how she enjoyed tennis and hunting – all of which proved too much for the palace, which reminded her that such openness was not appropriate. She never spoke to the newspapers again.

  The Scandinavian monarchs have been far more accessible: Sweden’s Carl XVI Gustaf frequently talks with journalists, especially during royal trips. Margrethe II of Denmark has not confined herself to her many appearances in documentaries: she frequently gives newspaper and television interviews and has even cooperated with the authors of books; in the most recent one, published in April 2010 to coincide with her seventieth birthday, she reflected among other things on her childhood, her family and her role as head of state. In the unlikely event that Britain’s Queen agreed to such a publication, it would be seized upon by royal watchers desperate for an insight into her views. In Denmark, by contrast, reviewers complained that their Queen had already spoken so extensively about herself that she had little new left to say.

  Denmark is also unusual in that Prince Henrik, the Queen’s French-born husband, published a book of his own, Destin Oblige, in 1996. In it he writes of life both before and after he became prince consort – and does so with considerable frankness. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine, say, Prince Philip, talking so openly about the problems he has faced since marrying into the royal family. For many years the Danish royal couple also used to invite journalists to their chateau in the south of France, where they answered questions in an informal setting. In 2009 the event was cancelled. No official reason was given, but some at the palace clearly believed the royal family were in danger of becoming overexposed.

  The heirs to the throne and other members of the royal families are far more willing to give newspaper or television interviews – especially at the time they become engaged, when they will typically give a press conference or television interview jointly with their partner. In Britain, the ritual of the pre-wedding interview was initiated by Princess Anne and Mark Phillips before their marriage in 1973. Sometimes the subject matter can be tough – such as when Mette-Marit of Norway was forced to reveal her past as a drug-user. Equally memorable was the interview Prince Charles gave with Diana Spencer before they married in 1981 when, asked if he was in love, the heir to the throne replied “whatever that is” – the words were to be quoted against him long afterwards. (Diana, by contrast, had replied, “Of course.”) Undaunted, Charles has continued to talk to journalists, often on favourite subjects such as architecture and the environment. His Continental counterparts have often followed suit. Prince William and Kate Middleton observed the tradition when they announced their engagement.

  Such interviews are inevitably soft in tone. Those members of a royal family who agree to subject themselves to an interview are largely spared the tough questions that politicians or business leaders routinely endure. Strict rules also apply during coverage of royal visits and events: certain occasions are intended purely as opportunities to film and take photographs – not to ask questions. Occasionally, however, a journalist will challenge such protocol, as happened in Belgium in August 2009, at the height of the controversy over King Albert and Queen Paola’s new yacht. During a fête at the Palace of Laeken to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary, the royal couple were challenged over the purchase by Christophe Deborsu, a journalist for Belgian television. And why not, retorted Queen Paola. “We find that it is terribly unjust… especially since we’ve had yachts since our marriage, that is to say for fifty years. We have always had them. We started with a little boat measuring two metres… no, five metres.”

  Albert himself said nothing, apparently stunned by such a breach of etiquette. Pierre-Emmanuel De Bauw, the palace spokesman, complained afterwards that it was forbidden for journalists to try to pose questions when the microphones were on. For Belgian royal watchers, the fact that the journalist concerned was from the traditionally more royalist French-speaking part of the country rather than the more republican Flanders was significant.

  This remains the exception, though. Most interactions with royalty are characterized by a form of deference and an acceptance of the ground rules set by the palace. It is almost as if those interviewing them – like members of the public who go weak at the knees after a royal encounter – cannot entirely free themselves from the feeling that they are mere subjects and must behave accordingly in the presence of their rulers. Even the most experienced television interrogators are not immune: when Christiane Amanpour, the veteran foreign correspondent, interviewed Haakon and Mette-Marit in October 2009 on CNN, she gave them a considerably gentler ride than she would have done a politician.

  Media coverage of royalty in Britain in particular has acquired an extra dimension thanks to a small number of courtiers and other royal officials who have been tempted, usually by the prospect of considerable financial reward, to publish inside accounts of life within the palace. Most notorious of them all was Marion Crawford, who spent fifteen years as a governess to the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. After she retired in 1949 at the age of forty, Crawfie, as she was known, was asked by the American magazine Ladies’ Home Journal to write articles or a book about them.

  Crawfie asked the Queen, who at a meeting told her she should say “No no no to offers of dollars for articles about something as private & precious as our family”, and offered instead to help her ‌find a new teaching post.13 Crawfie initially appeared to comply, but the lure of the money on offer was too great and she went ahead with the project. Her account boosted the circulation of the Ladies’ Home Journal by half a million and was also published in Britain by Women’s Own and in book form. After years on a meagre royal salary, Crawfie became a very rich woman indeed: she was paid £30,000 for world rights by her British publisher George Newnes and another $6,000 for its serialization in the United States in Ladies’ Home Journal.

  The contents of the book were innocuous enough and painted a fairly touching portrait of royal life. Indeed, the publishers even sent a manuscript to the palace and agreed to remove certain inaccuracies pointed out to them. But that was not the point as far as the King and Queen were concerned. The former governess was guilty of the worst kind of breach of trust – and “doing a Crawfie” thereafter became the term used for betrayal. For the palace, she had become a “non person”.

  Crawfie nevertheless continued to write – or at least have people write under her own name. Her career came to an abrupt end in 1955, however, when an article was published under her name describing the Trooping the Colour ceremony and the Ascot races, ev
en though both had been cancelled that year because of a strike. Crawfie retired to her native Scotland, to a cottage close to Balmoral Castle, but no member of the royal family ever visited; when she died in 1988 neither the Queen, the Queen Mother nor Princess Margaret sent a wreath.

  The death of Diana – and the massive market for books about her – brought forth a crop of latter-day Crawfies; among them was Paul Burrell, her former butler. His autobiographical book, A Royal Duty, published in 2003, denounced by Prince William and Harry as “a cold and overt betrayal” of their mother, was an international best-seller and launched him on a second career based largely on cashing in on his royal past. This included everything from appearing on television reality and game shows to launching his own “Royal Butler” range of furniture, rugs and wine, aimed largely at buyers in America, which became his home for several years.

  Such “insider” memoirs have been rarer elsewhere in Europe – one of the few exceptions being a book by Jesper Lundorf, the former bodyguard of Crown Prince Frederik, in which, among other things, he discusses the time he spent training with him in the elite Frømandskorpset.

  Europe’s royal families have generally responded to such intrusions into their privacy either by journalists or former associates in silence, refusing to confirm or deny what is reported. Occasionally, though, they will let slip their real feelings. In a speech at dinner in aid of sick and impoverished journalists in May 1930, the future King George VI reflected on the huge media attention his young family was attracting. “I owe a rather special debt of gratitude to the gossip columns of our newspapers for, if I am in doubt as to what is happening in my own home, I need only turn to the gossip in the Daily Wonder and I find all the ‌information I require,” he said.14

  While George VI seemed amused rather than angered by the attention, tempers can sometimes flare – as famously happened during a royal photo opportunity in the Swiss Alps in March 2005, a few weeks before Prince Charles married Camilla. Asked by Nicholas Witchell, the BBC’s royal reporter, whether he was looking forward to the wedding, Charles gave a sarcastic reply before turning to his sons and saying softly, “These bloody people. I can’t bear that man. I mean, he’s so awful, he really is… I hate these people.” Unfortunately for Charles, his comments were picked up, leaving his communications director to insist the Prince “doesn’t have contempt for the media”.