Near the end of 2018, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex toured their future home, Frogmore Cottage, a historic white-brick house a stone's throw from state apartments in Windsor Castle. The cottage, part of a larger estate named for the riverside's marshy, amphibian-friendly habitat, is right down the street from Frogmore House, where Prince Harry and Meghan Markle held their wedding reception, and 20 miles from Kensington Palace, where they had been living—and where the mood had started to sour.
In hindsight, Harry and Meghan's escape from Kensington Palace may have been the beginning of the end of their royal lives. The pressures of that year had worn on everyone, from the family to their staff. There had been two weddings (the second being Princess Eugenie's to Jack Brooksbank), a slew of royal tours, and to top it off, allegations that Meghan was a bullying boss after various staff resignations (including that of her personal assistant). Meghan denied these rumors.
This kind of pressure, or the apertures through which it was filtered, was something new and different for a family accustomed to decades—centuries, depending on your read—of public and press scrutiny. A few years before, the family had opened Instagram and Twitter accounts, enthusiastically deploying them to share news and photos directly with royal watchers, altering the delicate relationship the royals had with traditional press. By 2017, they had become the place where the Windsors publicly celebrated birthdays and family moments, sharing the types of photographs you used to get only from paparazzi. The social media push furthermore put the royals at the hands of those watchers and the types of parasocial competition-pitting it seems to seize on and promote. Like Team Jen versus Team Angelina, or Liverpool versus Manchester United, or Gallagher versus Gallagher, aggressive and profane fights broke out between groups of self-described Meghan and Kate fans, and by late 2018, Cambridge versus Sussex had gone from digital match bait to, for better or worse, reality.
The royals have complained about the media as long as Britain has had journalists, or royals, but they have also seen journalists as partners. Because the monarchy's focus is on dignity and continuity, they varied little from the media playbook established in previous generations, even as the British press slowly became a fearsome and profitable machine. The Firm managed the fallout from that era internally, with different palace offices learning to wield power with selective disclosure.
Harry and Meghan seem to have reacted with more alacrity, perhaps owing to Meghan's previous media experience, or her American-ness and civilian background, or both; they've shifted their media approach to appeal to an American audience and a 24/7 news cycle. Nearly a year into Charles's reign, the rest of the royals still seem to be relying on a playbook from another century. When the Sussexes decamped, the palace kept at least one of the social media experts Harry and Meghan had recruited, and it shows in the family's emoji-laden Instagram captions. But Charles, William, and Kate have refused to push back against a media culture increasingly leaving Britons dispirited, polarized, and—as the aftermath of Brexit has proven—economically stagnant. It's still unclear if the monarchy will be able to tell a story persuasive enough to sway the younger generations who view the institution with unprecedented skepticism, but it's never been more obvious that they need to try.
“It used to be that you could afford to stay out of the discussion,” says Evan Nierman, the CEO of global PR firm Red Banyan. “You could listen but not comment, you would just keep your head down, your nose clean, and eventually it would all just go past. Now if you do that, you're going to get clobbered by the people who are telling a narrative that runs counter to what you want out there.”
The first test of the reign of King Charles III should have been his ability to carry on his duties despite the chaos in Parliament that led to the ouster of Liz Truss only weeks after that of Boris Johnson, his exit just days before Queen Elizabeth's death. But even amid shocking political instability, headlines about discord in his family covered front pages and filled news feeds, illustrating both the ardent interest of the press as well as that of readers. And it's more than just prurient: The family has become emblematic of a culture war in a deeply divided country. Despite its historic insistence on flouting politics, the royal family is now inherently political.
The Windsors' maxim of self-conduct, “Never complain, never explain,” widely attributed to 19th-century prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, occasionally came with a third imperative: “Never apologize.” With that addition, it's a canny observation about the exercise of power—true dominance doesn't need to be justified. Though the aphorism has been attributed as the attitude of a wide variety of figures in the 20th century—a 1981 biography of Henry Ford II took it as a title, for one—over time, it's come to be synonymous with the stoicism of Queen Elizabeth. The Queen Mother also seemed to be guided by the dictate as Disraeli first used it. The relationship between the royals and the press had already changed measurably by the early 1990s, when the Queen Mother watched the dissolution of her grandchildren's marriages splashed across the front pages of the tabloids with increasing weariness and dismay, as her equerry at the time, Major Colin Burgess, would later write in his memoir.
Engagement with the press is necessary in a democracy because the press itself is necessary. That the UK has retained its constitutional monarchy through centuries when many royal families were deposed is a reflection of its democratic support. In a previous era of rising anti-monarchist sentiment, the 19th-century constitutional theorist Walter Bagehot wagered that an emotional connection to the family would ensure that regular people support the institution it represented. It's an argument that continues to sit at the center of the Windsors' own self-conception.
“I try to be careful about how I use the term royal family versus how I use the term monarchy, because they are two different things,” said media theorist Laura Clancy. Public affection even varies among family members, and Charles has rarely inspired the same personal ardor as his mother. “Will that start to shift the conversation about the institution? The queen had such affective power, and beyond that you couldn't think of her as the CEO of an institution. She was just the queen.”
“It used to be that you could afford to stay out of the discussion. You could listen but not comment, and eventually, it would all just go past. Now if you do that, you're going to get clobbered.”
Understanding the importance of popularity, Buckingham Palace hired its first press secretary in 1918, the same year women won the right to vote (as long as they were over 30 and held a certain amount of property). Sculpting the royal family's relationship with the media eventually became an imperative part of royal work, especially around major events. Gossip printed in the press, even false, was seen as either benign or useful. In 1923, a tabloid printed a story claiming the Queen Mother had gotten engaged to the future Edward VIII. In reality, she was weighing a proposal from his younger brother, the future King George VI. In 1947, when the family announced Princess Elizabeth's engagement to Prince Philip, the press had been reporting on rumors for more than a year while the palace denied it. After Rupert Murdoch became a dominant player in the industry, the gossip and false reports rarely had such innocent purposes.
Nick Davies, a former Guardian reporter who helped break the hacking scandal, said the royal fear of the press is widespread among Britain's establishment. “They've got these two kinds of fear,” he said. “The fear that you'll have your private life exposed, the fear that your organization will be destabilized, and so they assert their power.”
When the elites who ran the newspapers had more similar aims to the royals themselves, the press took greater pains to protect royal reputations from lasting harm. In the early 1930s, for example, the British press barons agreed not to print stories about the affair between Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, even as European and American publications were covering it constantly. The abdication in 1937 began to change this culture of silence, as it discredited the press in the eyes of consumers.
It also had the unexpected effect of increasing Edward's popularity—at least as he left the throne and joined his wife in France. Sanitized versions of his exploits had filled the papers for decades without any of the details that caused those around him to question his character and fitness for the throne. Romantic stories had primed some to see his devotion to Simpson as an emotional success, making the Church of England and the royals into the villains. Perhaps the Edward experience, even more than what would follow with Margaret, Diana and Charles, or Andrew and Fergie, explains why the Windsors became so weary of seeing themselves as celebrities.
Courtiers were frustrated when Diana's glamour relegated the queen's events to the inner pages, and skirmishes have broken out over competing events on two royals' schedules. A single bombshell report in one tabloid—like Squidgygate or rumors of Charles's infidelity—could be a news item in all the others for weeks on end.
Yet even as the late queen occasionally felt frustrated by the media, she accepted it as an inevitable part of her role. In 1996, biographer Ben Pimlott pointed out that she was the only royal who didn't try to “have her cake and eat it, when it came to publicity.” Her children and relatives, on the other hand, cheered positive coverage while attempting to conceal private misbehavior. During her reign, one of the monarchy's main strategies with the press was a bit of appeasement in the form of inviting the royal correspondents to off-the-record drinks.
When Charles entered his 20s, the impact of a less deferential press was obvious, and in 1979, biographer Anthony Holden noted that the palace's press strategy meant that his reputation had been left to “fantasists.” At least for the queen, the bright line for legal action seemed to be the divulgences of former employees. The palace's first known action to bar publication of a story happened in 1983, when the queen sued The Sun to prevent coverage of Prince Andrew's relationship with American actor Koo Stark, drawn from the memoirs of a former palace employee. (He was reportedly forced to break up with her after the story hit the papers; the case was settled.) The queen sued again when a journalist from the Mirror infiltrated palace staff by getting a job as a footman and reported that she is served her cereal out of Tupperware. (Again, the parties settled.)
“Never complain, never explain,” widely attributed to 19th-century prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, occasionally came with a third imperative: “Never apologize.”
At some point during the late queen's reign, the original rationale for sticking to “Never complain, never explain”—the tabloids' triviality—became obsolete, only to be replaced by a lesson from modern media theory. The prevailing metaphor in crisis communications is the role of oxygen in a fire—to prevent it from spreading, don't give it air, lest you provoke the dreaded Streisand effect: In 2003, Barbra Streisand (incidentally one of the king's favorite performers) sued a photographer for posting an aerial shot of her house; the publicity around the suit led to even more widespread attention to the photo. The case was dismissed.
The wisdom of the strategy isn't always quite so straightforward when it comes to the modern royals. For one, they are themselves avid readers of the press. As Harry noted to Anderson Cooper in a 60 Minutes interview, a family breakfast is never complete without the papers on the table. Success for a senior royal means seeing yourself in the papers—for the right reasons. In light of the family's characteristic inability to communicate openly—they reportedly raise difficult family issues with one another through their secretaries and staffs—the perception of the family in the press starts to become an internalized reality.
By the mid-2010s, the big-name British tabloids had learned to ply their attention strategies online, paying plenty of attention to the chatter on social media. And while the daily papers delivered to the various royal residences haven't altered their design too much in decades, the ecosystem they exist in has changed entirely. Perhaps, in the decade between Prince William and Kate Middleton's engagement and Harry and Meghan's exit, the royals didn't realize they were dealing with something entirely changed.
By the time they planted a flag in the form of a policy, it was too late. One detail included in a handful of the 2018 and 2019 reports was the proliferation of a conspiracy theory that Meghan was faking her pregnancy, an increasingly common online accusation that has been unleashed on everyone from Beyoncé to Benedict Cumberbatch's wife, Sophie Hunter. Before Prince Archie was born, it seemed to have mostly popped up in comments on royal social media posts. By the time BuzzFeed looked into the phenomenon in March 2022, it was a torrent of content across platforms, monetized on YouTube, and promoted, the publication claimed, by Meghan's half sister Samantha herself. Samantha has denied the claims; her attorney has claimed that Samantha's accounts were hacked to make false statements. For the last few years, the chatter around Meghan specifically has remained relatively consistent regardless of what she does or says in public. Femail, the Daily Mail's section ostensibly for women, has a “Meghan Markle” web vertical devoted to covering the duchess, and it wrote near-daily stories about her in January and February, even though she avoided the press cycle for her husband's memoir and wasn't spotted in public until February 28.
Of these 100 stories, more than one speculated that Meghan is planning to restart The Tig, the blog she wrote from 2014 to 2017. The basis seemed to be that Meghan refiled her trademark, which she has done in the past to ensure that no one else can take over the site. Daily Mail used this supposed news as reason to revisit a blog post from July 2014, in which Meghan “reveals her true feelings about royal princesses,” including Kate.
The Mail has run a version of this tale several times, erroneously attributing quotes about the cartoon character She-Ra to Meghan. But two out of three quotes supposedly from The Tig that the Mail referenced in 2023 were actually written for Town & Country in December 2017. When another writer also got the attribution wrong, like a DNA mutation, the fact that Meghan had been very informed about palace life and wanted to be a “royal rebel”—contrary to what she insisted when she met Harry—began circulating. None of those records have been corrected. (Meghan has complained that the palace press team wasn't willing to correct various inaccuracies.)
Such a frenzy never coalesced around the late queen, who was grandmothered into the modern era. The theater of an event like the coronation will inevitably read differently without her because male leadership has a different valence in 2023. One sarcastic viral tweet put it simply: “Can't believe they are going to make a MAN queen. This woke nonsense has gone too far.” Though the barristers legally became the King's Counsel immediately upon the queen's death, not all changes have happened so quickly. King Charles will appear on Australian coins, as is required by law, but not on the five-dollar bill. (A government spokesperson has said the late queen's appearance was a “personal” honor.)
In his first televised address as king, Charles sent his “love for Harry and Meghan, as they continue to build their lives overseas.” It signaled his knowledge that some emotional embrace of the Sussexes would be necessary, if only to prove he isn't a deadbeat dad. They had a low-key presence during the Platinum Jubilee in June and the funeral rites in September as an act of cooperation. But any sense that the prodigal son would shy away from endangering his relationship with the family was shattered with the December release of Netflix's Harry & Meghan. By the time Spare was released in January, the couple had already stoked British outrage and heated discussion on both sides of the pond. Harry's memoir was so full of stunning allegations and heartbreaking asides that it isn't hyperbolic to say it represents a reputational crisis for the rest of the family.
Edward Coram James, CEO of London-based brand consultancy Go Up, said that by the time of Harry and Meghan's March 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview, the couple had already squandered the goodwill they would have needed to win a fight against the British press or best the monarchy. “In terms of crisis management, a huge factor is taking personal accountability,” he told me. “Shifting public opinion towards the belief that you are a victim—there are certain boxes that have to be ticked.”
He believes the royals had no need to respond. “I do have the inside track on it, and there is no animosity coming from the palace at all,” Coram James added. “They're having a huge amount of hostility and aggression being thrown at them, and they're not being aggressive at all in response. That alone is why the British press have surrounded and protected them.”
And yet the fingerprints are there. In the weeks after Spare was released, the palace remained as leaky as ever, with reports in the Independent and The Telegraph saying that internally the Windsors had decided that Harry had lost his mind. He was “taken in by the cult of psychotherapy and Meghan,” an anonymous source told an Independent writer the week the book came out. (Independent editor in chief Geordie Grieg is a longtime friend of Camilla's.)
This February, Frogmore reentered the narrative. The Sun reported that Charles had decided to offer the house to Andrew; the New York Post spoke to a source who said the eviction process began the day after Spare's release. The couple are due to depart the house for good after the coronation.
These stories—along with confusion about whether Harry and Meghan would attend the coronation and a muted response when the couple decided to use “prince” and “princess” titles for their children—make it seem like the king has chosen his standing with the press over his relationship with them. There is some wisdom to this—opinion around Meghan and Harry has been sharply negative since the royal exit. The disapproval has even spread to their toddlers, Archie and Lilibet. In March, the data analytics company YouGov UK found that 51 percent of British adults surveyed believed the children should not be given titles. (The leftist British podcast Trashfuture, commenting on the occasionally lackluster results for children as young as two or three in monarchy-related polls, has noted the absurdity that “Britain has a baby with an approval rating.”)
To Davies, his understanding of the scandal that led to the shuttering of News of the World in 2011 proved that royal treatment in the press matters because it reflects the risks they're willing to take with the rest of the public. The behavior of the tabloid's royal editor was the first to become public, in part because Scotland Yard, concerned with security risks to the family, decided to step in. Lawbreaking on that scale has stopped, he noted, but despite widespread dissatisfaction with the tenor of the discourse, “there is no significant political movement in this country to deal with the problems of the tabloid press, to stop their endless manipulation of falsehood.”
Ultimately, Charles's lack of popular affection could even be a boon to the monarchy in the long run, if it doesn't matter what the press insinuates about your motives so long as the royal family continues to function as an institution. But Davies thinks the biggest risk for the royals comes from thinking that press acceptance equals popular will.
“If you look at the scale of tabloid coverage of the royal family, you would think that must be because their readers are obsessed with royals,” he said. “But the weird thing is, they're not. This country is not nearly as interested in the royal family as Fleet Street pretends.”
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