Are the tabloids out to takeihe glamour off the Royal Family?

Press, 20 November 1987, Page 20

Are the tabloids out to takeihe glamour off the Royal Family?

THE PUBLIC warmth and light-heartedness with which the Prince and Princess of Wales carried out their official visit to West Germany temporarily robbed the British tabloids of a promising drama.

The "News of the World” had one last try with a richly ornamented “DIANA RAGES AT QUEEN” extravaganza ("Furious Princess Di stormed out of a midnight meeting with the Queen over her troubled marriage” ... "Unhappy Charles trailed after his wife when the heart-to-heart broke down” ... “The angry walk-out came as the worried Queen tried desperately to patch up the couple’s wrecked relationship”), but the newspaper’s heart didn’t seem to be in it Still, the show has been playing to full houses for several weeks, and even the Left-of-Centre “Guardian,” normally disdainful of this sort of stuff, felt obliged to run an analysis of the affair a week or so ago.

The Fleet Street drama opened when it was noticed, some time around the middle of last month, that the couple had spent four

Laurence Marks,

of the ‘Observer,*

on the latest Palace fuss

weeks apart, the Prince in Scotland and the Princess with their two sons at home in London, a period that included their sixth wedding anniversary. Every tabloid in the land ran news stories and feature articles reporting or speculating about a rift in the Royal marriage. Beyond the bare fact of separation there was no news. The Buckingham Palace press secretariat does not comment on the private lives of its employers. Reporters specialising in this slippery field of journalism have to rely on second-hand (and often, third- or fourth-hand) sources among the outer circle of people who know the couple’s friends socially. London is not like Washington, where gossip is highly concentrated and almost everything that goes on inside the Beltway is eventually discoverable. English society is diffuse. Most Royal gossip consists of infrequent nuggets of hard fact tricked out with

knowledgeable guesswork to fill in the very big gaps. This was conspicuous in the language in which newspapers presented their explanations of the couple’s temporary separation. No evidence of a quarrel was clearly sourced, of course, for no-one who wishes to mix with the Royal set can risk being Identified. But, surprisingly, the stories carried scarcely any directly reported anecdotes or incidents of the couple’s relationship, even on an unattributable basis.

The Fleet Street stories quietened down for a few days, then revived when the couple were* reunited during an official visit to Wales at the end of last month but immediately went their separate ways again. There was another last bubble just before they left for Germany, when the Princess stayed away from a fashionable upper-class wedding in London attended by the Queen, Prince Charles, and

several other members of the Royal Family. What does it al! amount to? The probability is that the newspapers were indeed chronicling one of the downs in the ups-and-downs of matrimony from which even fairy-tale princesses are not, alas, spared — though even this is open to question, since the moeurs ot the English upper class do not conform to those of middle-class journalists or the working-class readers of the tabs. Longish periods of separation are easier to manage if you own more than one house. But who knows whether this particular down, if such it was, had anything to do with the wellknown fact that the Prince is a man of intellectual interests and the Prinfcess is fond of nightclubs and rock music? Certainly hot the tabloids, which have been speculating wildly. There ' is, however, a serious aspect of the affair which has to do with the public standing of the Royal Family. They are generally popular and respected in Britain for the attractive and conscientious way in which they carry Out their repetitive and presumably often tedious public

duties. But that popularity and respect are not indestructible. In 1968, the Queen and her advisers made a deliberate decision to use the intimacy of television as a means of projecting the British .Monarchy as an institution. It seemed to have worked well, particularly with the younger generation Of the Royal Family -4 and most of all with Princess ’ Diana whose beauty, charin and high spirit! made her a natural star. \ But the mass media can break \ as well as make stars, as the ' “Sun” pointed Out in a blunt leading article a few days ago, It said: "Princess Diana asks, ‘What ° have the newspapers ever done for me?’ The “Sup’’ can answer Her Loveliness irt one word —• s EVERYTHING! The have made her irito one of the most famous women in the world. They have given her an air of glamour and romance.” It sounded like a declaration of war. Many thoughtful British people are beginning to wonder whether that 1968 decision may not, after all, have been a mistake. Copyright—London Observer Service