The Great Survivors

by Peter Conradi

  Sometimes, though, the media will be perceived to have gone just too far – prompting a royal response. In Britain, injunctions such as the one against the account and photographs of palace life published in the Daily Mirror in November 2003 after one of its reporters, Ryan Parry, managed to get employed for two months as a footman are relatively rare. Such is the media’s acknowledgement of its reliance on cooperation with the palace than it can be brought into line with a warning – as happened when the newly married Princess Diana was pregnant with her first child and could not leave Highgrove, their country estate in Gloucestershire, without being photographed. “The Princess of Wales feels totally beleaguered,” Michael Shea, the Queen’s press secretary, complained. “She has coped extremely well, she has come through with flying colours. But now the people who love her and care for her are anxious at ‌the reaction it is having.”15

  Almost two decades later there were fears that Kate Middleton, yet to become engaged to Prince William, could suffer similar harassment. In December 2009, as the royal family prepared to celebrate Christmas at their Sandringham estate, the Queen issued a strong warning to newspapers not to publish paparazzi pictures of the royal family.

  Middleton herself was reported in February 2010 to be in line to receive at least £10,000 in damages, plus substantial legal costs, after threatening to sue a photographer and two British picture agencies over photographs taken of her while she was playing tennis at Christmas 2009 – even though the pictures were taken from a public place with a camera with a normal rather than a telephoto lens and were published only in Germany and not in Britain. The claim rested on privacy law, a rapidly developing area that draws on the European Convention on Human Rights.

  A precedent was set by the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in June 2004 that photographs published by Germany’s Bunte, Neue Post and Freizeit Revue showing Princess Caroline of Monaco skiing, horse-riding, sitting in a café and playing tennis with her husband Prince Ernst August of Hanover infringed her privacy. The “Caroline ruling”, which had significant implications for the tabloid media across Europe, overturned a German decision dating from 1999, which said that as a public figure she had to accept being photographed in public.

  Princess Caroline’s legal action was only one of many by Monaco’s royals, whose colourful lifestyle has increased media interest. That October her five-year-old daughter Alexandra was awarded a record €76,693.78 in compensation from the German supreme court after two magazines, Die Aktuelle and Die Zwei, published paparazzi pictures of her when she was a baby. Years earlier, in 1996, Caroline had been awarded 180,000 Deutschmarks (£77,000) after the magazine Bunte was found to have made up an interview with her and €102,000 from another scandal sheet, Gala, in 2001.

  Acting for Caroline was Matthias Prinz, one of Germany’s most high-profile media lawyers, whose father Günter, ironically enough, was editor of the tabloid Bild Zeitung for most of the 1970s and 1980s. In an interview with the news magazine Der Spiegel in 2009, Prinz rejected suggestions he was stifling freedom of expression. The situation faced by Caroline when she moved to the French village of Saint-Rémy after the death of her second husband Stefano Casiraghi was “catastrophic”, he said. He recalled a visit there in 1992, counting as many as twenty paparazzi outside the front door and another fifteen outside the school, attended by her three children, in the hope ‌of getting shots of them.16

  Prinz has also acted for the Swedish royal family over the many legal actions it has pursued – most dramatically in December 2004, when he sued Klambt, one of Germany’s biggest magazine publishers, over what he claimed were 1,588 made-up stories, including more than five hundred front-page “exclusives”. Among them were claims the King had been unfaithful with a mystery blonde and that the Queen had been suffering from cancer but was cured by a miraculous wristband. The reaction of Rudiger Dienst, a Klambt executive, who called himself a “repentant sinner” and vowed not to print any more inaccurate stories, was revealing. “We have learnt our lesson,” he said. “We admit that we may have embellished some reports, but we have done nothing different to other tabloids. This kind of reporting has been going on for fifty years, and I don’t understand why all of a sudden the Swedish royal family are taking action against us now.”

  In a further royal legal victory, a Hamburg court in July 2009 ordered another German publishing house, Sonnenverlag, to pay Sweden’s Princess Madeleine €400,000 in damages for fabricating stories about her – including erroneous claims she was pregnant. The Princess pledged to give the money to charity.

  The Dutch royals have also often had recourse to the courts – largely, again, in cases against German publications. In 1968, Prince Bernhard, the husband of Queen Juliana, became the first member of the country’s royal family to take legal action against a gossip magazine after Neue Welt published a report claiming that his daughter Princess Irene had had an abortion. It took three years, but the Prince eventually won and was awarded the equivalent of over £40,000 damages, which he ‌donated to the Red Cross.17

  Other members of the Dutch royal family followed suit, especially Bernhard’s son-in-law, Prince Claus, whose own relationship with the press got off to a difficult start after he was “outed” in May 1965 by Britain’s Daily Express as the man in the life of the future Queen Beatrix, despite a request by the palace to give the couple a little more time together out of the limelight. Claus went on to pursue several cases successfully against the press – including one over claims by Privé magazine in 1985 that Crown Prince Willem-Alexander, still just eighteen, had spent a night in the Amsterdam ‌Hilton with an unknown woman.18 Other legal actions followed – the last of which the Prince won just days before his death in 2002.

  Willem-Alexander has enthusiastically taken up the baton, especially after the beginning of his relationship with his future wife, Máxima. The couple have been especially determined to prevent publication of what they consider intrusive pictures of their three daughters, Catharina-Amalia, Alexia and Ariane. Nor is it just mass-market magazines such as Privé or Shownieuws that have come into conflict with the palace. In August 2009 the royal family won a legal battle with Associated Press, the American news agency, after it sent its clients photographs of Crown Prince Willem-Alexander and his family on holiday in Argentina. In weighing freedom of expression against the right of privacy, a Dutch court ruled that members of the royal family, while they take the risk of media scrutiny when performing their public duties, do have an expectation of privacy in their personal lives.

  Such cases, though, are relatively rare given the sheer amount of royal reporting – a reflection of the fundamental interdependence of royalty and the media. While the various royal families may find some of the coverage of their lives intrusive, they would be even more concerned if the media simply stopped covering them at all. With their function these days largely a representational one, it would be a first step towards irrelevance and possibly extinction.

  For the media, meanwhile, the royals are a useful source of material to fill newspapers or television programmes. Hence the often pragmatic deals struck between the two: official royal trips are carefully orchestrated to provide photographers and cameramen the shots they need. In the case of the British royal family this principle is extended to some private holidays too, such as when Prince Charles goes skiing with his sons: photographers are granted a photo opportunity in return for agreeing to leave them in peace for the rest of the time. An extreme example of such an arrangement was the agreement between the palace and the British media over Prince Harry’s deployment to Afghanistan – significantly, it was an American website rather than the British media that broke the embargo.

  Illuminating is the example of the Independent, which, when it was launched in 1986, vowed to ignore royal stories. Andreas Whittam-Smith, who edited the newspaper for its first eight years, claimed later to have had a private bet with himself that a successful newspaper could manage without royalty. He lost, however
, and after a time the Independent abandoned its stance and began to report the Windsors’ activities like other newspapers. “For good commercial reasons, national newspapers as a whole cannot any longer manage without daily coverage [of the royal family],” Whittam-Smith concluded in 2000. “The doings of the various members of the House of Windsor provide the raw material for the most powerful of narrative forms – invented as it was by television, drawing its inspiration from nineteenth-century novels – the soap opera. ‌A large cast is essential.”19

  Other newspapers and magazines elsewhere in Europe have come to a similar conclusion. In Denmark Ekstra Bladet, a strident tabloid, has been a fierce critic of the monarchy – but this has not prevented it from running plenty of stories about both its country’s royal family and royalty elsewhere. The Danish edition of the weekly magazine Se og Hør has also proved itself as enthusiastic a pursuer of the royals as its Norwegian namesake; curiously, the magazine is owned by the same media group as Billed Bladet, a pro-royalty weekly, and both are run out of the same spectacular building on the Copenhagen waterfront. The motivation appears largely commercial: targeting both monarchists and republicans means they have the whole market covered.

  The last years of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first brought a new challenge – and opportunity: the Internet. The British royal family has been a pioneer, setting up its website in the late 1990s following the arrival of a new press chief, Simon Lewis. The site (www.royal.gov.uk) has grown enormously since, and offers a huge mixture of news, history, photographs and information as well as clever features such as an interactive map that allows you to find royal visits past and present in your area. Since October 2007, there has been a “Royal Channel” on YouTube, which as of April 2012 has 465 professional-quality videos and boasts more than thirty-six million views. Then in November 2010 it was announced that the British monarchy was to get its own page on Facebook. Unlike her subjects, however, the Queen would not be accepting friends or, it was assumed, writing her own entries. It was nevertheless a success: more than 40,000 people rushed to “like” the Queen an hour after the page was launched – although some went on to post abusive comments, many of them about her daughter-in-law Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall.

  The other royal families also have websites of their own, although they are less comprehensive and professional than the British one, notably the Belgian (www.monarchie.be) and Spanish (www.casareal.es) sites. But they too are becoming more sophisticated. In May 2009 the Dutch royal family followed the British by setting up their own YouTube channel, which includes both contemporary material and clips dating back to the enthronement of Queen Wilhelmina in 1898. Those curious about the activities of Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon and Crown Princess Mette-Marit, meanwhile, can follow their activities on Twitter. Some of the entries, the palace claims, are even written by the royal couple rather than by their spin doctors: “kph” at the end means Haakon, “kpm” stands for Mette-Marit and “kpp” denotes a joint effort. They also have their own Facebook page.

  Many of the websites of Europe’s newspaper and television channels have set up separate royal sections – in a reflection of the popularity of such news with readers. Hello! magazine’s website, for example, has not just news and photographs but also background information such as family trees and descriptions of palaces.

  Countless stand-alone websites and networks have also sprung up – some fairly professional and well-funded affairs, others little more than one-person blogs written from some of the more unlikely locations on earth. Some do little more than collect together links to stories on mainstream media, while others run forums and chatrooms for readers interested in royalty across the world to ask each other questions or share ideas. One of the most comprehensive, www.royalforums.com, which has more than 30,000 registered members and presumably many more casual users, has a bewildering variety of chatrooms, links and discussion strands covering royal families past as well as current, not just in Europe but also in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

  And then there are the more personal blogs, some of which are both well written and learned. For anyone interested in the Scandinavian monarchies, one of the best is undoubtedly the blog written by Trond Norén Isaksen, a young Norwegian historian who is the author of several books and many articles on different aspects of monarchy (trondni.blogspot.com). Exhibiting an extraordinarily detailed knowledge of his subject, Isaksen (who writes in perfect English) reflects on royal news and also runs often critical reviews of the latest royal literature. Equally serious but very different in tone is crossoflaeken.blogspot.com, which describes itself as “dedicated to the Catholic monarchs of Belgium, and other topics of historical, cultural, human, political and religious interest”. Belgium’s monarchs – especially Léopold III – have a chequered history, but the writer portrays them as martyrs.

  There are also a few quirky or more light-hearted blogs – one of the oddest of which is madhattery.royalroundup.com, which features photographs of different members of royal families in hats and tiaras, the more exotic the better. “My goal here is always to entertain,” writes Ella Kay, the American-based author. “This is primarily a blog about silliness – I have a healthy respect for the British royals and royals around the world, and I do not intend to belittle. It’s about frivolous fashion and nothing more than that, really.” Kay, a teacher who developed her love for all things royal during a semester spent abroad in England as a student, also runs a more serious blog, www.royaltywithellakay.com.

  ‌Chapter 15

  ‌Vive la République

  On an unusually warm Saturday in June, the heirs of Oliver Cromwell are sitting in a rented room in a building behind Euston station in London listening to speaker after speaker denounce the British monarchy. They have gathered here for the annual conference of Republic, an organization with the mission of “campaigning for a democratic alternative to the monarchy”. To call Republic a mass movement would be an exaggeration: although the organization claims 1,500 members, a mere hundred or so have turned up today. They are predominantly male, middle class and over fifty.

  The discussions are calm and largely devoid of passion, although the atmosphere livens up when Geoffrey Robertson, one of Britain’s best-known human-rights lawyers, presents a glowing tribute to Cromwell and the men who tried and executed King Charles I in 1649. The French revolutionaries of 1789 also come in for praise. His audience are not about to man the barricades themselves, however. If this is all the support the republicans can muster, then the Queen – or Elizabeth Windsor as they prefer to call her – has little to fear.

  The high point of the day’s debates is a discussion about the “meddling” of Prince Charles and the way he uses the influence that comes with his position to lobby for his pet causes. Charles is good news for republicans. While few can fault his mother’s behaviour as Queen, her son and his apparent disregard for the convention of royal neutrality can annoy people. One of the speakers, Peter Jenkins, an architect, says he has been drawn into republicanism by the Prince’s campaign against modern architecture. David Colquhoun, a professor of pharmacology at University College, London, is outraged by the way the heir to the throne lends respectability to some of the wackier forms of alternative medicine. “The influence he has exerted has been consistently malign,” he says.

  Others present complain about the cost of the monarchy and oppose any proposals to increase the Queen’s Civil List at a time when other government spending is being cut back. There is talk too of the bad behaviour of some members of the royal family: it is only a few weeks since Sarah Ferguson has been trapped by the “Fake Sheik” from News of the World.

  For Graham Smith, Republic’s full-time campaign manager, the issue is far more fundamental than that: the monarchy is a serious obstacle to the modernization of the British political system and to the abolition of such historical anomalies as an unelected House of Lords and the highly secretive Privy Council. “Some reformers dismiss
monarchy as a decorative bauble,” says Smith. “But it’s the central pillar of our feudal constitution.”

  The argument has acquired a particular resonance following the general election of May 2010, the first in more than thirty years not to give a single party a majority of seats in the House of Commons. The price that David Cameron, the Conservative leader, had to pay in order to become prime minister was to promise the Liberal Democrats, the country’s third party, a reform of Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system. Although voters went on the following April to reject change in a referendum, constitutional reform was back on the agenda, and some hoped this could lead to discussion of the role of the monarchy. The uncertainty that followed the election has also focused attention on the powers of the Queen – or rather what was seen as her determination not to be involved in politics, leaving Britain alone among Europe’s democracies in not having a figure, whether a monarch or an elected president, steering the coalition-building process.

  It is ironic that Britain, the country with the most deeply entrenched and best-known monarchy in Europe, and probably the world, should have been the first to try republicanism. Indeed, the eleven years between the execution of Charles I and the restoration of his brother Charles II in 1660 are not generally considered a good advertisement for republican rule. However admirable the motives of many who backed him, Cromwell did not prove himself a model democrat, dissolving parliament when it did not agree with him. By having himself appointed Lord Protector for life and naming his ineffectual son Richard to succeed him after his death, Cromwell became a king in all but name.