Word: royals
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When game is afoot, royal-watchers routinely engage in round-the-clock stakeouts, read lips with binoculars, suborn servants, hire little girls to give flowers to the royals and big girls (in the case of Prince Charles in his bachelor years) to give them kisses, chase their prey at crazy speeds in high-powered cars. There has been so much of this mad motoring that the wonder is that no member of the royal family or the public has been killed. One reporter has even been known to steal a colleague's photos. Others lay out misleading clues to send...
Author Robert Lacey (Majesty) suggests that the press, with Whitaker very much in the lead, also deserves credit for forcing Charles to marry Diana. It is not simply that in the touchy period before the engagement, as Whitaker admits in a book about the royal courtship (Settling Down), that he gave her fatherly advice for dealing with the press, including himself ("There will be times when I will ask you a question to which I need an answer desperately. I am telling you now, don't answer me"). Prince Charles was over 30, explains Lacey, and "his image...
When the Sun and the Star ran the pictures of the royal tummy naked and protruding, the expected protests lit up the switchboards, and the standard apologies were printed. The papers said jointly that they had run the photos out of "deep affection" for Diana. The Sun ran the photos a second time, with the apology, so that everyone would know what was being discussed...
Creeping about in the undergrowth is not the style of the Daily Mail's influential gossip columnist Nigel Dempster. He claims that he attends many parties that royals do, and when he is leaving he sees Whitaker in the bushes. He insists that he is not a royal-watcher but a "social policeman." About the time that Whitaker diagnosed anorexia, however, Dempster indulged himself with a lofty and fairly encyclopedic denunciation of Diana's faults. It was he who said that she was spoiled, fiendish and a monster, that she was spending too much money on clothes shaming the nation...
...rubbishy News of the World called Dempster's outburst rubbish too. Like Whitaker, he is unruffled. Royal-watchers tend to identify themselves with the family and even imagine that they are on intimate terms. "She should be brought up short," the avuncular Dempster explains. "The message got through to Diana that she cannot behave badly and that she'd better start pulling up her socks. Since then, she has been out all day, visiting hospitals and talking to children. She is showing more interest in Charles' hobbies. She is wearing the same clothes over again. What I am saying...