Monarchy’s golden future

In a recent issue of The Spectator Freddy Gray warned that some royal press officers now resemble celebrity publicists, spoon-feeding whole narratives to lapdog hacks, ultimately to the detriment of the monarchy.

Gray traced the poisonous origins of the current glossy operation. In the late Nineties senior St James’s Palace courtiers fell for political-style PR (aka spin) as a clever way to transform Prince Charles’s then-mistress into a future queen. Some very unsavoury tactics followed. In one example (not cited by Gray, but proving his thesis) in a bid to discredit William’s newly dead mother, one top adviser lent his personal support to a royal biographer to air a quack ‘diagnosis’ that Diana had been mentally ill. The intention was clearly to imply that Camilla might not be everybody’s cup of tea but at least she wasn’t a fruitcake.

Pretty shameful from the office of our future head of state, you might think, and I would agree with you.