A member of my family often used to puzzle us by saying at the end of a television bulletin: “Now that was nice news.” We would think back over the catalogue of misery, evil, disaster and human frailty that had just been paraded before our eyes and wonder what she could possibly mean. Then the answer dawned: she only said this when an item about the royal family was included.
Michael Shea, the Queen’s press secretary for the past nine years, would be pleased by this story, for he has always recognised the time-honoured role of the royals – of cheering people up with colourful spectacle in a period of national self-doubt and international gloom.
It would also reinforce his belief that the public perceptions of royalty are fostered overwhelmingly these days by their appearances on television and not by the steamy, hysterical headlines in the popular press. Acting on this belief, Shea has deliberately switched palace media policy towards TV exposure.
This probably accounts for the Sun’s ungracious valediction last week (“Bye bye Mike”), when he announced that he was leaving the Queen’s service in June to earn more than twice as much in industry – though the paper may also have been stung by the painful memory of the £25,000 he recently extracted from them for breach of copyright in a letter by Prince Philip.
In the past nine years, the press and the palace have changed beyond recognition. Deprived by television of their prime news function, the papers have had to fall back increasingly on sensation and controversy – enlarging, distorting and sometimes inventing the slightest rumour of royal misconduct. King George VI is said to have kept a scrapbook called “Things My Daughters Never Did”. Periodically, Shea has also tried to keep a record of the fictional stories – Diana’s nose job, love on the royal train, Queen Mum’s betting secrets. Each time he has had to stop because he ran out of space.
In Shea’s time at least half a dozen new characters have been added to the script of the Dallas/Palace Royal soap opera – notably Princess Diana, the Duke and Duchess of York, Prince Edward, Prince William and Princess Michael. The last of these was perhaps unlucky to come along just when the press were seeking to cast someone for the Joan Collins part of the royal “bitch” – a role previously handed on by Princess Margaret to Princess Anne, who then disqualified herself by a series of heroic public acts.
When relations between palace and press reached a nadir in 1981, Shea arranged for newspaper editors to meet the Queen – something that hadn’t happened for a quarter of a century. The effect was salutary, Her Majesty seeing off the then editor of the News of the World with the immortal line: “Oh, what a pompous man you are!”
When the editors were brought together again, four years later, Princess Diana doubtless felt better after delivering a right royal rebuke to the then editor of the Daily Express for publishing untruths: “If I was 33 this might wash off my back, but I’m only 23 and it hurts,” she said with some feeling.
The best proof of Shea’s success is that he leaves at a time when the royal family has never been so popular. Fifty years after the abdication crisis, republicanism has died as an issue in British politics.Even the New Statesman has to admit that it put on sales when it pictured Princess Diana on the cover. Twenty years after the decolonisation of the Commonwealth, the Queen is still head of state in 18 countries.
Satellite television has turned the British royals into global media megastars. The Queen’s visit to the United States attracted four times as many pressmen as for any other head of state in the world – and twice as many as the Pope.
Will this process of Glasnost go on with Shea’s departure? My guess is that it is bound to, though perhaps after a period of relative quiet. I doubt, for example, if we’ll be seeing another Alastair Burnet fireside chat in the near future, or if four royals will ever again appear on the Wogan show in a single year, as they did in 1986.
The Queen has no reason to like the press. Her family has suffered from its intrusions and its vulgarity. It has angered her husband and distressed her children and daughters-in-law. At the same time, the Queen cannot rule effectively without the media – they condition public attitudes towards her. It is, in part, a measure of Shea’s achievement that the Queen has always managed to preserve that vital balance between aloofness and over-familiarity.
Donald Trelford became editor of the Observer in 1975. During his tenure, the Observer won Newspaper of the Year
