Her failure to appreciate these important differences would lead her down a very slippery slope. Had she tried to understand what she was dealing with, and why it functioned as it did, she might have stood a chance. But in her ignorance she lost the ability to cope.
Britain has more national newspapers than any other country on earth. There are too many to enumerate, but aside from the ones listed above, the most popular are the Sun, the People, the Star, and the Mirror. No other country has a freer or more vigorous press, and none has as many titles fighting for a share of the available readership. The result is that competition is fiercer than it is in any other territory in the rest of the world. In the United States, for instance, there really is not one significant daily newspaper that is read by the broad mass of people nationwide. There is the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and their more downmarket brethren such as the New York Post, all of which are locals. Nowhere is there a major national publication to compete with them. In any given area, therefore, the competition is less intense than in England, where each paper has to fight its corner against the incursions of its competitors.
The combination of competitiveness and iconoclasm is exacerbated by another feature unique to Britain. The United States, Canada and most of the European nations long ago acknowledged the levelling of their societies, either because they became republics, or, if they remained monarchies, their royal families were perceived as being powerless and purely ceremonial representatives of the state. Despite the fact that Britain is at least as egalitarian and meritocratic a society as any other Western democracy, and is more so than many others, the fallacy persists in many segments of British society that the old hierarchy remains in place, powerful and obstructionistic as ever. This misconception gives added bite to many a transaction in daily life, because several organs of the press, whether popular or broadsheet, pander to outdated prejudices as if they were still relevant today. In doing so, they perpetuate damaging and misleading myths about the structure of British society.
Of course, there are sound commercial reasons why various publications behave as they do. By playing upon the prejudices, envy, fears, hopes and dreams of their readers, they sell their papers to readerships whose opinions they shape as well as reflect. A more dispassionate take would result in commercial failure, so they justify their actions and sometimes even convince themselves that they believe the fantasies they purvey.
Beyond the infighting, there is also the courtesy one shark has for another. Like many politicians and lawyers, they recognise that, irrespective of which side they’re on, they’re all in the game together. I have seen many a journalist best of friends with an adversary whose every principle is antithetical to his own. I know of cases where they’ve knowingly destroyed the lives of innocent people to achieve what they regard as a more important objective, such as the unseemly display in 2016 when certain publications set out to ruin the reputation of someone I know in the hope of bringing down the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth. When I intervened on this individual’s behalf with one of the publications, I was told that they had nothing against him personally, but the destruction of his life would be a small price to pay if they got rid of Baroness Scotland.
Harry, of course, knew only too well what a viper’s nest the British press can be. He had a real hatred of it born of his belief that they had killed his mother. In fairness to them, they had done no such thing. Diana would have survived that car crash had she been wearing a seat belt. She was also responsible for the press following her that night. She had telephoned journalists before leaving Sardinia to tip them off about her arrival in Paris. She continued tipping them off once she arrived in that city. If you are being chased by people you have encouraged to chase you, you surely bear responsibility for creating the chase.
Of course, Harry was only twelve when his mother died. He was too young to have a mature judgement about her as an individual. By his own account, when he met Meghan he had still not worked through the trauma of her death. This was not necessarily a failing on his part. There have been reams written on the emotional impact, to children below the age of fourteen, when a parent dies. Failure to Mourn, and Melancholia by Jonathan R. Pedder (1982) carried on from Sigmund Freud‘s Mourning and Melancholia (1917) and Erna Furman’s A Child’s Parent Dies (1974) which was informed by her own experiences at Theresienstadt Concentration Camp when her mother died there. Harry’s failure to grieve was therefore a natural part of the phenomenon of a child losing its parent. But that does not mean the press were to blame.
Most people in Britain with positions that warrant press attention have a healthy suspicion of the media. Sadly, most of them also have an exaggerated fear that triggers hysterical and irrational responses at the very moment level-headedness is called for. In this regard, I speak from a lifetime of experience. I was fortunate enough to spend the first twenty four years of
