It is a scene that surely The Crown creator Peter Morgan must be salivating over to get the chance to recreate in all its agony for the small screen: A frumpy, wellie-wearing Camilla Parker Bowles nipping into a supermarket at some stage in the ‘90s to do a quick shop only to be pelted with rolls.
While I’m making an educated guess about her actual attire (the woman does love a gumboot) the story of Camilla And The Bread Barrage has long passed into royal lore and offers a perfect, tragic glimpse about what being Prince Charles’ mistress actually meant day-to-day for the mother-of-two back then.
Because, in ‘90s Britain, there was no more hated person than Camilla, who lived under siege with hordes of Fleet Street hacks perpetually surrounding her Wiltshire home while she tried to get on with the business of raising two children.
Being the publicly recognised mistress of the Prince of Wales would be scandalous enough; however the fact that the prince had chosen a country-loving, happy-to-muck-out-the-horses woman with a ‘70s shaggy hairdo as the woman he wanted, a woman who was the absolute apotheosis of his impossibly glamorous and beautiful wife Diana, provided a truly mythic Beauty and the Beast-quality to the whole mess.
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Given all this, it is truly remarkable that Charles, aided by a hand-picked team of spin doctors, managed to turn around his bit-on-the-side’s image such that by the early aughties they were living together and that by 2005 he was able to root around in the family diamond drawer, find a suitably massive sparkler and pop the question to his love of 35-odd years.
Since then, we have all experienced a certain collective amnesia about the origins of Charles’ second marriage, impressed by Camilla’s boot-like dependability, work ethic and the time she cheekily winked at the media after meeting Donald Trump. She has been an eternal good sport who has gone off on dozens of international tours, despite suffering from a severe fear of flying, and who has thrown herself into charity work with gusto.
Added to which, there is something oddly touching about the couple’s union; they seem to always look so damned cheerful in one another’s presence and one gets the sneaky suspicion that the septuagenarian duo are still very much at it.
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And then, The Crown season four was released earlier this month and suddenly the world remembered all that mucky history about Charles and Camilla’s relationship; all of that sneaking around Gloucestershire laneways for furtive assignations and bed hopping their way between sympathetic upper crust mates’ stately homes. Oh, and that time the world learned that Charles awfully wanted to become a tampon, hardly the dignified stuff of a future King and head of a church.
In the weeks since then, the couple has faced a wave of horrendous PR, which is far from a shock and it would seem that the courtiers of Buckingham Palace and Clarence House, the official residence of Charmilla, have been quietly beavering away on a counter strategy.
Last weekend, the Daily Mail ran a story featuring an impressive gaggle of a politician, royal friend and a Windsor biographer in what seemed very much like a coordinated fight back, castigating the TV series’ portrayal of the couple.
Likewise, a number of veteran and respected royal writers, who are by no means known Windsor sycophants, have been lining up to tell the world just how beastly the show’s portrayal of the Queen’s son and current daughter-in-law is.
Sally Beddell Smith told the Daily Mail that The Crown’s Peter Morgan was “almost Trumpian with his alternative facts” and that “There has been extreme and egregious misrepresentation.
“While the earlier seasons were period pieces, series four is recent history, so it seems more cruel in its false depictions.”
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Meanwhile, Penny Junor, author of Charles; Villain or Victim? (spoiler alert: Junor argues very persuasively that everyone involved was a victim) that the representation of the central characters in the Netflix hit have been “wildly distorted for dramatic effect.”
However, here is where things get particularly sticky: The palace has proven they are perfectly adept at carefully calibrated PR manoeuvres, all undertaken to protect the image of Camilla from swelling public dislike and online hate.
So why, if they could do this for the Duchess of Cornwall, couldn’t they muster the same zeal and organisation during the brief royal tenure of Meghan Duchess of Sussex?
The former Suits star’s entree into the royal orbit was rocky from word go. Only days after her relationship with Prince Harry was made public in October 2016, the LA-native faced a bombardment of tabloid antagonism and became the focus for a stream of racist online attacks. Harry responded by getting out his trusty Pacer pencil and writing an extraordinary and stinging statement excoriating the media and addressing the abuse Meghan was facing.
We all know what happened next, a sort of Cinderella story for the Instagram age: They jetted back and forth across the Atlantic for another year, to hell with the carbon footprint, enjoying a transcontinental clandestine romance. In 2017, Meghan shut her pastel-hued, kinda derivative blog The Tig, closed her personal Instagram (vale her one million followers), quit Suits, and moved to London where the totally expected happened: Harry popped the question and Meghan began the transition to HRH-dom.
And there the fairytale well and truly stopped because Cinderella was never accused of enjoying an afternoon bite that supported terrorism (“Is Meghan’s favourite snack fuelling drought and murder?” screeched the Daily Mail), terrorising her staff by having the temerity to wake up early and send emails at 5am, trouncing tradition by shutting her own car door and having the horrifying impudence of flouting the Queen’s alleged style dictate and wearing dark nail polish.
The. HORROR.
Things took a turn for the particularly terrifying in February 2018 when Scotland Yard was called in after a letter addressed to the couple arrived at St James’s Palace containing a suspicious white powder, with the police treating the incident as a “racist hate crime.”
Still, despite displaying a work ethic that would nearly put the industrious, indefatigable Princess Anne to shame and throwing herself into two royal tours while pregnant, Meghan still found herself on the receiving end of an endless wave of criticism.
As the months wore on, so did the media brickbats, though many were self-inflicted with the duo proving to be spectacularly adept at creating PR controversies of their own accord, for example, Meghan’s decision to jet off to New York for a celebrity-stuffed baby shower. (Harpist and macaron tower anyone?)
There was their choice to ditch the 20-room Kensington Palace apartment that had been made available for them, with the previous tenants the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester having moved out after 50 years living there, deciding instead they wanted to enjoy a pastoral idyll in Windsor. Only thing: Opting to set up home at Frogmore Cottage meant that the Sovereign Grant had to stump up more than $4 million to renovate up the building, setting off a media uproar. (To be fair though, Frogmore would at some stage have required doing up even if the Sussexes had not chosen to move in.)
But wait! Next came the Sussexes’ new-found penchant for private jet travel despite Harry’s ecowarrior stance and the time Meghan went to Wimbledon and sat in a sea of curiously empty seats, a head scratcher given other members of the royal family regularly attend the tennis tournament and sit among the crowd.
No matter who was to blame for which particular publicity catastrophe, surely it would have been in the best interests of the palace machine to try and step in and attempt some sort of calculated fight back. While they did push back against a number of erroneous stories, such as a report that Meghan had pressured Harry to not take part in a pheasant shoot; that she and Kate were locked in a feud and one magazine’s claim that they planned to raise their then-unborn child “with a fluid approach to gender,” there was never any evidence pointing to some royal master plan to try and protect Meghan from the bombardment of carping and criticism she constantly faced.
Where exactly was the overarching strategy? Where was the bigger picture plan to shield the palace’s most dazzling new recruit in a generation from the opprobrium being flung her way?
Finding Freedom, the much-hyped biography about the Sussexes (and which now forms part of the Mail on Sunday’s defence strategy against Meghan’s privacy lawsuit against them) revealed that Harry felt “unprotected” by his family.
In Freedom, authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand write: “No one could deny the fact that the couple were emotionally exhausted, whether they had brought it on themselves or were victims of a merciless machine. ‘They felt under pressure,’ a source said. ‘They felt that they were alone.’”
Ultimately, for this and many, many other reasons, Harry and Meghan ultimately decided they wanted out, managing to allegedly blindside the Queen and Charles in January this year when they told the world they were quitting as full-time working members of the royal family via Instagram. (Where else?)
While it is very tempting to try and apportion blame for who is responsible for the house of Windsor managing to lose it’s two biggest stars in a hail of horrendous publicity, the reality is far more complex and nuanced.
What isn’t, and is in fact seemingly quite straightforward, is that more – so much more – could have been done to help Meghan as she faced an unthinkable onslaught of daily denunciations and what amounts to a seismic wave of hate.
The reaction by the palace to The Crown’s latest season and its brutal portrait of both Charles and Camilla is proof that The Firm’s press flacks and spin doctors can stage a coordinated campaign of PR countermeasures.
And thus we are left with a very thorny question indeed: Why could the palace circle the press wagons so efficiently for one duchess and not the other?
It is horribly fitting that this week, after Meghan published a personal essay in the New York Times revealing she had suffered from a miscarriage earlier this year, that the palace and Clarence House have both remained tight-lipped, refusing to publicly comment or to offer any sort of public sympathy for the couple.
As the hubbub over the release of season four of the hit show starts to quieten down, there must be some comfort for the so-called Men In Grey (as Diana dubbed the shadowy, pinstriped legion who run the palace) who have until 2022 to prepare for the next onslaught. And if they need any help crafting some sort of Duke of Wellington-worthy defensive strategy, unfortunately the one woman who would have been perfectly placed to help them has long since left the palace.
Daniela Elser is a royal expert and writer with more than 15 years experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiqgFodHRwczovL3d3dy5uZXdzLmNvbS5hdS9lbnRlcnRhaW5tZW50L2NlbGVicml0eS1saWZlL3JveWFscy9wYWxhY2VzLXJlYWN0aW9uLXRvLWNhbWlsbGEtYmFja2xhc2gtcHJvdmVzLW1lZ2hhbi1kb3VibGUtc3RhbmRhcmQvbmV3cy1zdG9yeS82NWIxMjNmMWE0Yzg3YTY3OGFiZTAxYTU0YzdmOWFkN9IBqgFodHRwczovL2FtcC5uZXdzLmNvbS5hdS9lbnRlcnRhaW5tZW50L2NlbGVicml0eS1saWZlL3JveWFscy9wYWxhY2VzLXJlYWN0aW9uLXRvLWNhbWlsbGEtYmFja2xhc2gtcHJvdmVzLW1lZ2hhbi1kb3VibGUtc3RhbmRhcmQvbmV3cy1zdG9yeS82NWIxMjNmMWE0Yzg3YTY3OGFiZTAxYTU0YzdmOWFkNw?oc=5
2020-11-28 05:35:17Z
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