BY STEWART SLATER

I recently went back in time. Not by inventing a time machine (that I’m willing to tell you about). Nor by going to one of those open air museums which make you wonder how any of your ancestors survived lives which were certainly nasty and brutish and also, in all likelihood, quite short. No, I logged on to X, specifically the “Royal Announcement” hashtag and immediately became one of those Victorians who would visit Bedlam for their afternoon kicks of a weekend.

For the denizens of the world’s cyber asylum had decided the Palace was on the verge of a major intervention and were working themselves into a lather over the fact that either the King had died, he was about to abdicate, or Wills and Kate were getting divorced. Diana was involved too, but I couldn’t really work out how. It is, I think, no spoiler to point out that, at the time of writing, none of these events has actually happened.

The first option seems to have arisen in the old Soviet Union – the British Embassies in both Kyiv and Moscow were forced to take to X to deny it, suggesting, perhaps, that there was an element of state-sponsored disinformation to it. A rumour had been seeded in the internet and allowed to blossom forth in the way and at the speed that medium for the time-rich and critical thinking-poor facilitates. 

It is worth taking a moment to reflect on how modern a phenomenon this is.

In the old world of 2003, there was mass media but no social media. Mass media controlled what the public could know. All news went through the hands of journalists who would check it, and editors who would check it again. There were gatekeepers who could ensure that there was a good chance that the news which reached the public was true. The system was not flawless, of course, sometimes news reached the consumers not because it was true, but because the gatekeepers wanted it to be true, but there were checks and balances. Social media has, of course, removed this middle man. What would have been no more than local rumours can now become global news instantly, passed directly from gullible consumer to gullible consumer at the click of a button.

But, it is not just the range of information which is new, it is the speed at which it travels. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were probably written in Russia c. 1902, but it was only after the Revolution of 1917 that they reached the West. We cannot tell when the recent rumours started, but it probably wasn’t 15 years ago. Social media allows an immediacy of spread which mass media cannot match and which makes it impossible to control.

As such, the legacy news organisations have had to alter their claim to eyeballs. No longer the only source of news, still less the only source of current news, they must now claim to be the only source of trustworthy news. You can get “news” from Facebook, X, whatever, but you can only get news you can believe from the BBC, New York Times, etc. Thus the raft of “fact-checkers” and “disinformation specialists” who have sprung up over recent years. Their output is not perfect – as we noted, journalists are no less prone to seeing the world as they wish it to be than the rest of us – but the impulse is clear and understandable. When a lower-cost, more agile competitor emerges, developing a premium product makes sense.

Which brings us back to the Royals.

For on the day that Charles was either dead or abdicating, two pieces of real news emerged. Firstly, footage was released of the Princess of Wales at a local farm shop (pop quiz: how many monarchs back do you have to go before the idea of them doing their own shopping becomes inconceivable?). While The Sun, whose scoop it was, was keen to trumpet the images, other organisations were more circumspect, saying that they “appeared” to show the princess or that they were “claimed” to.

Secondly, Getty Images announced that one of the last pictures of the late Queen had been “enhanced” by the palace before release.

Both, of course, are connected. The collapse within hours, the previous week, of the Princess of Wales’ Mothering Sunday photo had led to a wave of speculation about the real state of her health and had resulted in the major photo agencies withdrawing it from distribution and one even deciding the palace was no longer a “trusted source”.

Neither of these was unreasonable. There had been a news vacuum since the operation and the lesson of the modern world is that you either create content for your clients to consume or they will create their own (a lesson Downing Street may wish to take to heart). That the palace did not wish to say anything does not mean that the public did not want to hear something and at least a portion of it was willing to turn to whoever provided it. Maligned though he may be, Boris Johnson was at least savvy enough about the relationship between rulers and ruled to release a video the day of his release from hospital after Covid. If you do not control the news, the “news” will control you.

The photo agencies had no option but to withdraw the images. Their business exists because they are trusted to supply accurate pictures. The moment they are suspected of supplying fakes is the moment they lose their customers. That the palace admitted that Kate’s photograph had been altered made it incumbent on the agencies to check all its predecessors.

These problems do not mean that, as some have it, the Royals are in their eleventh hour. But they do show the difficulty of their current situation.

For, William and Kate, in particular, have been wildly successful at turning themselves into global icons. But in doing so, they have created demand for their product which they appear unwilling to meet. Their insistence on attention when they want it and privacy when they do not might have worked when there was nothing but legacy media which would play by their rules because it required access. But, in the modern world, when so much information is produced by unofficial sources (it was a private individual who took the footage of the Princess), their threats carry no weight. They may not like the speculation, but it is their own actions (and inaction) which have done so much to create it.

But if they can no longer control much of what is said about them, the implication of the past weeks is that they cannot control their image either. There is no reason to believe that the alterations to the pictures of Kate and the Queen were anything but attempts to enhance what was already there. As Royals have done since time immemorial (Holbein, van Dyke and chums did not earn the big bucks by painting the king warts and all…). But if these images are no longer acceptable to the press agencies, their replacements will need to be more realistic. No longer a perfect family with perfect children, but a relatively normal family with normal children. Wealthier and better dressed than most, to be sure, but substantially the same and having to play by the same rules. It remains to be seen how viable that is for an institution whose whole existence is based on difference.

In his essay Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell describes his experience of, well, shooting an elephant while a colonial police officer in Burma. Often cited as a work of anti-imperialism, one of the key themes which emerges is how little power Orwell has. He is the local representative of the Empire and is thus formally in charge. He does not want to shoot the elephant. But the villagers are insistent and he realises he has no choice. Power, he learns, does not lie where he thought it did.

It is hard not to see a similar process at work with the Royals. Where once the world bent to them, they are now being forced to bend to the world, a world which no longer sees helping them as doing its duty. Members of the class of celebrities certainly, but no longer members of a class of their own. Perhaps it is the death of the Queen which has changed things or perhaps it is part of the long, slow process of disenchantment (she after all, bent to the public after Diana’s death). Whichever. Sovereign is he who decides the exception. On the basis of Kategate, that is no longer the Windsors.

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.