I wonder if we will come to look back on that supposed great virtue of our age – controlling the narrative – and see it for the cornered form of submission it so often is? I felt nothing but immense pity for the cancer-stricken Princess of Wales before the release of her intimate family video yesterday, and the sheer weirdness of the resulting enterprise has only magnified the pathos of her situation. Watching the three-minute film, shot by some ad man, I wondered who could possibly feel it was anything but sad that a recovering post-chemo mother should feel that this is her best option for keeping “well-wishers” at bay a little longer.
A lot of people could, it seems from the feverish coverage since it dropped – meaning that convention demands I couch the notion that the existence of the video is in any way weird as “my unpopular opinion”. In which case, allow me to chuck in another unpopular opinion: this sort of thing appeals precisely to the grownups who when Diana died demanded that the then Queen leave off comforting her grieving 12- and 15-year-old grandsons in Scotland to come back to London – in effect to look after them instead. The selfishness and self-importance of a certain stripe of loyal subject is at best demandingly prurient and at worst grotesque. We hear a lot about the male gaze. The royalist’s gaze could do with more unpicking.
Hilary Mantel understood this voraciousness where royalty was concerned – recognised it even in herself. Royal Bodies, her epic 2013 essay for the London Review of Books, began with a passage on Kate – itself disingenuously and enthusiastically misconstrued by the tabloids. Later on in the piece, the Wolf Hall author described coming up close to the late Queen at a palace reception. Mantel confessed: “I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones.”
And so to Kate’s video, shot by a man who has also shot campaigns for Uber Eats, and who made Tesco’s Food Love Stories commercials. Something else is being served up here, which for some reason he has decided to make look like a Center Parcs ad. Despite artfully included clips of Prince George asking of a camera “Is this filming?”, the video was not captured by a GoPro on a picnic rug, but by a crew and a significant post-production operation, who made studied use of filters and slow motion, switching from sweeping shots to grainy scenes designed to ape cine film. Unlike the private home movies in the opening titles of Succession, the footage shows a happy family – but for my money, the sense of menace is still there. But whereas the Roys are menaced from within, the menace to the Waleses comes from the outside – and it is the endless and thankless task of appeasing it that dictates that this video must exist at all.
Various media have added to the threats that always beset the throne, and, with its scenes of picnics and secluded country days, this video explicitly echoes Queen Elizabeth II’s famous decision to allow the cameras into her private family life in 1969 for the famous/infamous Royal Family documentary. That was an attempt by the crown and its courtiers to meet the medium of television on its own terms. Decades later, opinion is still divided as to whether it was a PR masterstroke or the moment the rot set in. “It was difficult,” concluded the historian Ben Pimlott in his biography of the late Queen, “once the genie of this kind of publicity had been let out of the bottle, to put it back in again.”
Fifty-five years on, the Princess of Wales’s video feels like an attempt to meet social media on its own terms. Social media is, of course, the arena in which hunting Kate became a jolly global blood sport earlier this year, when – despite having been explicitly told that she would not appear in public before Easter owing to significant illness – the #BeKind brigade grew bored within weeks and whipped up a vicious feeding frenzy of conspiracy theories as to her absence and the reasons for it. Despite condemning the ghouls of social media, sections of the traditional media merely put quote marks round their vileness, running coded versions of precisely the same hounding. Kate tried silencing it with a Mother’s Day photo; minor editing glitches immediately became a “scandal”, for which she absurdly felt obliged to formally apologise. Next, multiple royal experts and headline writers explained that the true problem was that the palace had “lost control of the narrative”. Eventually, a video in which a poised yet fragile Kate revealed her cancer diagnosis was judged the only way to regain it.
Inevitably, meanwhile, the same critics who detest Harry and Meghan’s barefoot California content decline to look at the style of the Waleses’ video and consider that the Meghanisation of the royal family continues apace. Things that are bad when the Beckhams do them are axiomatically good when royals do them, selling the crown being an activity from which the news media arguably profit most of all. This accounts for much of their magnanimity towards Kate’s latest video.
But service is not the same as people feeling forced to serve themselves up. It was often said, back in the mid-90s, that Diana learned to control the narrative. Did she really, though? As David Beckham stagily remarked in infinitely lighter circumstances in a recent candid film of his own: “Be honest.”
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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