This was not William and Kate’s fault, of course. But that extra trip of the Flybe jet meant that the environment-saving ‘budget’ flight with the royal party on board had actually generated an additional 4.5 tonnes of carbon emissions.
24
Different Paths
‘I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces.’
(Prince Harry, 2 October 2019)
Prince William’s non-ecological ‘budget’ flight to Scotland on 22 August 2019 proved something of an ‘own goal’, but there were many more goals to play for in the Cambridge–Sussex match – which, as summer waned, seemed to be heading towards a draw. The splitting apart of the two princes’ homes, offices and charitable activities in the early months of the year had been reflected in a sprightly new Instagram account called @sussexroyal, controlled by Harry and Meghan and designed to signal their own philosophy and identity.
Indulge us for a moment, please, you younger readers, while this elderly author explains to his fellow members of the non-digital generation that an Instagram account is a platform or site on the Internet on which you post photographs or videos, usually of yourself and your family, with a few words of explanation, illustrating the latest incidents and people in your life. Babies and pets are especially popular in the genre – plus the occasional poem and reflection on the meaning of existence.
People who like what you have posted will sign up to be your ‘followers’, and since 2010 showbiz celebrities – and trendy royals – have used Instagram to grow their fan bases in a dynamic way that was not possible before the Internet. The older platform of Facebook also offers similar content-sharing, and if you are a politician or journalist you will probably have signed up to Twitter, because that is all about words and ‘tweeting’ out your arguments and opinions. But Instagram is definitely the 2020-ish route to broadcast your beliefs and lifestyle to the world, and to demonstrate your popularity through the number of followers that you can attract.
So in 2019 social media, and Instagram in particular, became the arena in which the royal brothers, William and Harry, competed for influence. Established on 2 April, @sussexroyal set a Guinness World Record for reaching a million followers faster than any previous account in Instagram history – in five hours and forty-five minutes. This would take @sussexroyal close to, but not ahead of, the brothers’ original @kensingtonroyal account, which they had hitherto shared, but which now became the vehicle of William and Kate. Through the spring and summer the two brothers’ competing accounts each commanded similar allegiances in the region of 11.2 million to 11.3 million followers.
The dramatic and immediate success of @sussexroyal owed much to ‘Digital Dave’ – David Watkins, twenty-seven, a young Irish social media whiz noted for his visionary video skills, who had been poached by the Sussex team from Burberry. Watkins had made his reputation through his Internet role in the smoothing and sharpening of the old and fuddy-duddy image of the fashion house into a successful, modern and even hipster-ish brand. As the summer months went by, Digital Dave brilliantly used events like the birth of Archie to draw in followers and take the new @sussexroyal site right up alongside the 11 million-plus level of @kensingtonroyal, securing the desirable draw.
Dave was a workaholic – like Meghan. From the moment of her arrival, the American duchess had been annoying palace people with her emails and texts that she pinged off at dawn. Dave belonged to the same fellowship of early risers – some called it the ‘5 a.m. Club’: ‘Winning starts at your Beginning.’ In his short life Watkins had already met the swimming-cycling-running endurance challenge of the Ironman in Thailand and he had completed marathons in both London and Paris. According to his personal website, he liked to ‘recognise the positives in a situation’ and he believed in ‘constantly challenging the status quo with a “start with why” attitude’.
Does that remind you of anyone we have met recently? Dave was clearly the digital ally that Meghan and Harry needed as the autumn of 2019 approached.
In September the Sunshine Sachs public relations agency was contemplating Meghan’s ‘Forces for CHANGE’ PR disaster and the dramatic deterioration in its client’s image that had occurred in recent months in the UK. There was no point in arguing that Meghan had edited her special issue of Vogue with the best of intentions – and there was even less point in maintaining that her messages of social activism and female empowerment were ‘right’. The harsh reality was that the gospel according to Meghan was simply not royal nor in harmony with mainstream, ‘un-woke’ British opinion.
William and all the senior members of the royal family – not least Prince Charles and the Queen – had come to feel the same, and this growing disapproval at the top had started seeping downwards. The honeymoon was over. On the talk shows, Meghan and Harry had become topics of national controversy instead of celebration. Digital Dave might be doing a brilliant job ‘challenging the status quo’ with the younger generation on Sussex Royal’s Instagram following, but that was not the mainstream. There was an urgent need for the image of the Harry–Meghan brand to be turned around in the eyes of Her Majesty’s subjects.
Sunshine Sachs was an expert at this. Crisis management and image salvation were its trademarks – as it had demonstrated in 2013 with the notorious rearrangement of supermodel Naomi Campbell’s Internet identity when mention of its client’s ‘several highly publicised convictions for assault’ had been surreptitiously removed from her Wikipedia entry.
The agency had employed a ‘Wiki wizard’ who clicked the keys to delete the last three words of Wikipedia’s sentence about Campbell’s
