The royal family and Fleet Street have had an on-again-off-again-on-again relationship for decades, if not centuries. But until relatively recently, Buckingham Palace was calling the shots. At times it used the press to leak the information it wanted to get out; at other moments it requested and got a conspiracy of silence. Elizabeth II was the first British ruler to exploit the media fully. " I am not a film star," she once said. But she realized the value of controlled exposure: it could bridge the gulf between queen and commoner, give life to an abstract and archaic symbol of power, bring the throne room into everyone’s living room. To be seen was to be believed. “The monarchy is in the visibility business,” says royal historian David Cannadine. Somewhere along the line, however, the process began to go badly awry. Seeing the public’s apparently insatiable appetite for insider gossip, the tabloid press realized it had a lucrative franchise and began turning the idea of visibility into voyeurism, churning out headlines like SEPARATE BEDS AT HIGHGROVE! and WHERE THE PHUKET IS FERGIE? That the crown couldn’t control its younger members was not, historically speaking, news. But suddenly, it was news.
Long ago the private lives of princes were simply off-limits to journalists. “Above all this our royalty is to be reverenced,” Walter Bagehot wrote 125 years ago. “In its mystery is its life. We must not let daylight in upon magic.” Queen Victoria guarded her privacy utterly; she was occasionally satirized in the press as " Mrs. Brown" (referring to her friendship with Scottish servant John Brown) but may not even have known it, since she never stooped to reading newspapers. Edward VIII kept his affair with divorcee Wallis Simpson under wraps–muzzling a compliant press that feared being sued for libel–until shortly before he abdicated.
Elizabeth II turned out to be a media queen. Forbidden by her father, George VI, to marry Prince Philip in front of TV cameras, she insisted that her 1953 coronation be televised by the BBC. The event was covered by the first court correspondents. Seizing the opportunity to communicate with her subjects on her own terms, Queen Elizabeth broadcast annual Christmas messages and appointed a press secretary. When newspapers reported the public’s growing indifference to the crown in the late 1960s, she took the radical step of approving a BBC documentary, “Royal Family,” that gave 23 million television viewers their first intimate look inside Buckingham Palace. “The royals suddenly came out from behind the woodwork, appearing as a normal family,” says John Pearson, author of “The Selling of the Royal Family.” " The soap opera complex began, based on a belief they could use television to promote their interests."
But prying open the palace gates was a bit like jimmying Pandora’s box. Once it got a taste of royal jelly, the public clamored for more. Rupert Murdoch, who bought The Sun in 1969, eagerly served up great gobs of palace gossip, and rival tabs quickly caught on. Then came Diana and Charles’s wedding, seen by some 700 million people worldwide. The new princess brought the fusty House of Windsor fresh attention and adulation, which in turn magnified the family’s flaws. But while the press was playing by new rules, the palace stuck to old practices, declining to comment on rumors and refusing to sue for libel. The tabloids could print what they wanted-and print and print and print. Bagehot got it half right: letting daylight in endangered the royal mystique but also turned it into a fascinating addiction.
