By incorrectly assessing the extent of their success in seeing off negative publicity, Harry and Meghan were opening themselves up to a host of misconceptions regarding their control over the press. It is a pity Harry was too young when his mother was alive, to appreciate how utterly her attempts to influence the press had rebounded to her detriment. As for Meghan, she was utterly ignorant of the way the British press works. She was confusing American and Canadian publications which had given her publicity, with an entirely more subversive, inquisitorial, irreverent, and chippy lot. She was like a child whose beloved pet is a docile and loving Cavalier King Charles Spaniel walking into a lion’s den thinking that she can train it. She tweaks its nose, pulls its cheeks, threatens it with her fists and orders it to sit still. She walks away confident that she has it under her control, little realising that it simply can’t be bothered to show her who’s boss. But the next time will be different.
No public figure in Britain can function without an in-depth understanding of how the British press works. It is unique. There is no other press like it in the world. It is so radically different from the North American press that Meghan was used to, that she was totally unprepared for what living with its attentions would mean to her life. Had she and Harry not bought themselves the respite they did by issuing that statement, she might have understood before her marriage that she was like a swimmer used to a well heated door pool being plunged into the icy chill of the North Sea in winter.
The press worldwide is tame compared with the British. This is as true of the American and Canadian as it is of the European, Middle Eastern, Asian, or Sub-Continental. The only press that has faint echoes of the British is the Australian, but even so, it is a very muted affair compared with Fleet Street. This is largely because in Britain we have a tradition of robust iconoclasm dating back to the eighteenth century. At a time when monarchies in Europe were both secure and autocratic, with the press rigidly controlled and public opinion shaped by the Crown, the British monarch was a usurper, invited by Parliament, to sit upon the throne while the real king stewed in exile across the water. This inevitably led to instability and the possibility of regime change, causing divided loyalties which drove dissent and gave a voice to those who would not otherwise have had one. The world’s freest press was born. No one thereafter would be impervious to the reach of journalists: no king, prince, aristocrat, government, official, public figure or even private individual who caught the attention of scribes.
By 1714, the first club of satirists had been formed. The Scriblerus Club’s members included two of the age’s most powerful writers, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. They paved the way later in the century for William Hogarth, the social critic, pictorial satirist and editorial cartoonist whose best known works are A Rake’s Progress and A Harlot’s Progress.
By the end of the century, satirists such as James Gillray were so well established as social commentators that they could get away with poking the most outrageous fun at all public figures, including King George III and his family, especially his heir the future George IV. To his credit, the Prince Regent had enough of a sense of humour to frame some of the cartoons which mocked him, and Farmer George, as his father was known, also embraced the affectionate ribbing.
It was against this bedrock of satire that the British tabloids (so called because they were the popular press, despite some being of broadsheet size) were born in the twentieth century. My sister-in-law’s grandfather Lord Beaverbrook and his competitors Lords Northcliffe and Rothermere were the titans of the popular press. Through their efforts, the satirical tradition was converted into something equally populistic and insouciant, but more palatable to a vast reading public. They were soon joined by other newspaper magnates such as Cecil Harmsworth King, maternal nephew of both Northcliffe and Rothermere, and Sir William Emsley Carr, who edited the News of the World for fifty years. To them, no story should be written exactly as told by the subject of an interview. A journalist’s role was not to report uncritically what the subject of an interview said or did, but to portray the subject without deference and with enough sensationalism to bring the story alive while bringing the subject down a peg or two. It was taken for granted that public figures always take themselves more seriously than others are willing to take them, so a dose of irreverence was healthy. Even when these publications were writing flatteringly, they managed to include just enough pokes to make the point that everyone and everything was imperfect and it was their duty to balance the positive with the negative. Their message was: we are no respecter of persons. This has remained true till now.
Despite this, the more upmarket broadsheets such as the rightist Times and Telegraph, or the leftist Guardian and its sister paper, the Observer (the oldest Sunday paper in the world), were not iconoclastic. They did not seek to reduce everyone or everything in the self-conscious way their more populistic peers did. When writing their articles, they did not puncture people’s balloons for the mere sake of it. If denigration was beside the point, they did not gratuitously include it the way the popular press did. This remained true even after the arrival of Rupert Murdoch in England in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Although he altered the tone and content of the most august broadsheet in
