I’m Calling It: We’re Watching the Beginning of the End of the British Monarchy
By stacy lee kong
Image: instagram.com/princeandprincessofwales
I would just like to say that I knew this would happen. Not the part where Kate Middleton, a.k.a. Catherine, Princess of Wales, became the subject of rampant conspiracy theories after stepping back from public duties in December following her abdominal surgery, leading to my various social media timelines becoming largely populated with the royal-watcher versions of Charlie Day in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Not even the part where the Palace encouraged those conspiracy theories through sheer incompetence, including allowing a poorly Photoshopped and/or straight-up faked photo of Kate and her three children to be published on Mother’s Day in the U.K. and allowing Kate to take the blame for the terrible editing when people noticed how janky it was.
But the part where the royal family has sounded their own death knell, simply by demonstrating how pointless the monarchy is as an institution, and showing us all that the Firm (the unofficial nickname for the royal family and their staff, courtiers, etc.) is actually inept at, and worse, uninterested in navigating our current social and political climate? Yeah, I called that back in 2021, following Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s internet-breaking interview with Oprah—and I think it’s even more true now.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand why the conspiracy theories are so compelling. Ranging from the plausible (she and Prince William are on the brink of divorce; her surgery recovery requires a colostomy bag, which the Firm doesn’t think is ‘on brand’) to the entertaining (if she’s not on The Masked Singer, then please, please, please let her show up to the Royals’ Easter church service with a BBL) to the downright sinister (domestic violence; a secret pregnancy; a different secret pregnancy; that she’s actually in a coma—or dead), there’s really something for every variety of amateur internet sleuth. But I genuinely think the truth about Kate’s whereabouts is not nefarious at all. It probably is just taking longer than expected to recover from surgery—and, okay, maybe the divorce thing, too.
But… that’s also not the real story.
To me, what’s most interesting about this whole debacle is what it reveals about the space the royal family now occupies in our cultural landscape, what’s behind this shift—and whether they even know and/or care that things have changed.
The PR team is terribly incompetent, though
However! Before we get into that, can I have the tiniest rant that is not quite about the royals’ cultural significance? Because I need to express how bizarre it is that an incredibly wealthy institution that has a long history of needing, and using, the press, and has employed a PR department for literal decades, if not longer, now works with professional public relations strategists who are consistently bad at their jobs. Like… is no one embarrassed at the failing up that’s happening here????? If you saw the photos that came out of Will and Kate’s 2022 Royal Tour of the Caribbean, you already knew that no one on their team was great at navigating optics. But even if you missed that, the past few months have absolutely proven that they do not have access to a single person who understands how the internet works. Or they’re not listening, if they do.
I mean… it doesn’t look good for a princess who is the wife of the heir to disappear from public view while the king is being treated for cancer and the spare has been banished from the kingdom! So, if she must step back from her royal duties for aforementioned health or divorce-related reasons, perhaps it would be smart to quash any ridiculous rumours with a clear, unadulterated photo of said princess—or better yet, a video where she is speaking, and maybe holding that day’s newspaper? Because it is also completely and utterly predictable for the internet to go feral over any hint of scandal or mystery, which is why a PR person with any sort of training (or, frankly, any person with a brain in their heads and/or a passing familiarity with the Streisand Effect) would know blurry photos that may or may not be Kate aren’t going to cut it, and neither are photos that have been edited so poorly that speculation about them being AI-generated and/or Frankensteined together from older images seems fair. Also literally not one person on this planet believes Kate Middleton is doing her own Photoshop. I mean, come on.
Okay, I feel better now. Onto my actual argument.
The British royal family just isn’t as powerful as they once were
I said a version of this on CBC’s Here & Now this week, but I want to make this argument here, too: I think this massive PR fail, and especially the fallout that we’re already seeing, shows us how much the monarchy has slipped in relevance and power over the past decade, and particularly since Queen Elizabeth II died in 2022. And okay, I know it sounds weird to say the people who’ve been at the centre of a weeks-long news cycle aren’t as relevant as they once were, but stick with me.
First, it’s notable that they’re addressing it at all. The Queen’s, and by extension entire royal family’s, unofficial mantra has been “never complain, never explain” for decades. They do not typically comment on, or even acknowledge, rumours or scandals. In fact, as BuzzFeed’s former royal reporter, Ellie Hall, explained to the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, the royal press offices rarely go on the record about anything, though they will sometimes brief specific members of the British press (known as the Royal Rota). Those reporters generally aren’t allowed to say the information came from the Palace, though. So yeah, the fact that they’ve gone on the record three times since December to address rumours about Kate is weird, and to me indicates they no longer feel their brand is strong enough to operate without this type of overt PR management, which they’ve largely avoided in the past. That being said, I do think the ham-fisted social media photo, and the fact that they won’t produce a clear, unedited photo, video or live appearance that demonstrates Kate is okay, signals some resistance to this new state of affairs. (Or maybe it’s an indicator that they can’t produce these things, because Kate showed up on Harry and Meghan’s doorstep two months ago, children in tow, and she’s not answering their increasingly panicked phone calls. One or the other!)
Second, while I’m not sure that the public had any massive amount of trust in the royal family, per se, international press did have confidence that Kensington Palace would provide them with accurate photography that met their editorial standards, and now they know better. Posting an obviously doctored photo to social media might seem silly or like no big deal, but that photo was also distributed to news agencies like the Associated Press and Reuters, which published it on their wire services for use in publications around the world, all of which expect the materials they syndicate from these services to be accurate. It was a huge deal when those news agencies issued a kill notice for the photo, which means they barred their entire networks from using it and instructed anyone who had already published it to replace it. According to Phil Chetwynd, global news director of Agence France-Presse (AFP), it’s very rare for that to happen because of doctoring a photo. “To kill something on the basis of manipulation [is rare. We do it] once a year maybe, I hope less. The previous kills we’ve had have been from the North Korean news agency or the Iranian news agency,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Media Show.
But we’re also seeing more fallout from the Firm’s decision to release that photo, which has literally damaged the royals’ standing with international press agencies. Most recently, AFP “has reviewed its relationship with the Prince and Princess of Wales and will rigorously inspect future picture handouts from the royals,” Deadline reported on Thursday. CNN says it’ll be doing the same—and frankly, all news outlets will likely be taking a similar approach, because in a time of plummeting trust in media, they can’t afford to be publishing doctored photos. So yeah… from an international relations perspective, to go from being among the most trusted institutions in the world, to being in the same category as North Korea or Iran is a dramatic change, and a bad sign for a political and cultural entity’s wider reputation.
Third, I think it’s notable that the royals are seemingly losing the British press. Or at least, members of the British press seem to be chafing at the restrictions they’ve always had to operate under. And those restrictions are ridiculous, btw. As BuzzFeed’s Hall noted after the Oprah interview, “it’s important to understand the outsize influence the Palace press office wields as it manages the UK media’s voracious hunger for royal family coverage. It can try to kill false or misleading stories before publication (journalists have said as much); it can contest claims made by anonymous sources by going on the record; it can use pressure, particularly in the form of access to the royals or legal threats, to reframe false or unflattering articles.” This is not to say the British press is never critical of the royals—it certainly had a lot to say about Meghan Markle, and I mean that in the worst possible way—but by and large, it seems like British outlets accepted the Firm’s interference, even if they didn’t like it. But now, some cracks are showing. Journalists employed by Royal Rota publications are publicly speculating about the photo, outlets that have long been pro-Kate Middleton are suddenly being very critical of her and earlier this week, the British Press Photographers' Association put out what Town & Country calls a “strongly worded statement” urging Kensington Palace to release an unedited version of the Mother’s Day photo. Of course, many members of the Royal Rota and other British outlets are (unsurprisingly) being super predictable and trying to drag Meghan Markle into this mess, and I don’t imagine they’re all going to turn their backs on the access and opportunity they get by complying with the royals’ wishes. But I do think these small but public-facing moments of discontent with the status quo are notable.
All of that being said, I do want to poke a hole in the idea that news outlets publishing explainers about Prince William’s alleged mistress, Rose Hanbury, the Marchioness of Cholmondeley, is proof that the royal family is trying to soft-launch Kate’s replacement. Babes, that is an SEO play if I ever saw one. People are organically searching for that lady, and these outlets are just making the smart business move of updating the articles they wrote when the cheating rumours first appeared in 2019.
This is low-stakes gossip, it’s true. But there are also wider implications to consider
It would be overly simplistic to say Queen Elizabeth is gone and now everything is falling apart. There’s been an anti-monarchist movement in the U.K., its colonies and former colonies for decades, and the public’s trust in, affection for and deference to the royal family has been shaky since at least the days of Princess Diana. (Though there was a notable spike in the family’s popularity that lasted from just before Will and Kate’s 2011 wedding to around the time of Harry and Meghan’s wedding in 2018.) But I do think her absence plays a role. When she died, I was struck by how many news outlets were resistant to critiquing her reign. When I gave interviews about the Queen and her heirs benefiting from, and sometimes upholding, colonization, I was explicitly asked to be sensitive in my critique because she was deserving of respect, and what’s more, audiences were so upset about her death. Maybe that’s not so surprising; she read to people as a kindly, unproblematic grandma, in part because she was on the throne for so long, and in part because of that “never complain, never explain” mantra, which was “a very good strategy because [it] meant that people [could] read whatever they want into her behaviors and kind of identify with her,” as Pauline Maclaran, professor at the Royal Holloway University of London, told People a few months before her death. Unfortunately for the rest of the family, none of them inspire the same loyalty, affection or deference.
There’s also other stuff going on, of course. Social and political movements focused on racism, anti-Blackness, colonization, Indigenous sovereignty, capitalism, and most recently Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine all eventually make their way back to the OG colonizers, right? So no wonder this institution has declined in not just popularity but perceived importance (that’s the relevance piece I was talking about earlier). And it really has declined, btw. Just before King Charles’ coronation last April, a National Centre for Social Research survey found support for the monarchy within the U.K. was at a “historic low.” Almost half (45%) of respondents thought it should be abolished or wasn’t important at all, while the number of people who consider the monarchy to be “very important” fell to 29% from 38% in 2022. Also, that’s within the U.K.—in other parts of the world, it’s even worse. Several Caribbean islands have already taken steps to remove the monarch as their head of state, or have straight-up done so. Meanwhile, in Canada, only 20% of Canadians believe the country should remain a constitutional monarchy, down from 58% in 2011. I wrote an article last year about how we’d go about abolishing the monarchy and how likely it was that we actually would, and at the time it seemed like a case of too much work and not enough political interest to actually pursue, but I’m interested to see what happens to that interest as the royals’ popularity and power continues to slump.
Lastly, I think it’s fair to wonder about the larger social and political consequences of this news cycle, and especially the rumours about trouble in Will and Kate’s marriage. Back in 2021, I wrote about how I had once thought they’d be the modernizing force for the monarchy, and how their behaviour in the years after their marriage, and especially in the lead-up to Harry and Meghan’s wedding, showed me how wrong I was. They have clearly demonstrated how dedicated they are to maintaining the status quo, even if that approach hurt Harry, his children, or their own brands. Still, they remain far more popular than the actual King or Camilla, the Queen Consort, whose approval ratings for Q3 of 2023 hover at 51% and 41% respectively, compared to Will and Kate’s 68% and 63%. More recently, an Ipsos poll conducted pre-Photoshop fiasco actually found Kate was the U.K.’s favourite royal at 38% compared to Will’s 36%. I’m just not sure how long that will last, especially once we find out what’s really going on with her.
I do know one thing though: it will be so incredibly ironic if the royals responsible for ushering in the monarchy’s downfall isn’t the duo who tried to change everything, but instead the ones who pinned their ascension strategy on keeping everything the same.
And Did You Hear About…
This wild Cosmopolitan article about what it’s like to be a child influencer. Spoiler: awful.
All the TikToks in this Twitter thread, which double as proof why the U.S. government shouldn’t ban the app. (My pick: this one.) (Also: this is a good explainer on what’s happening with the ban, and how likely it is to be enacted.)
Comedian Chloe Petts’ hilarious set from Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agender comedy special.
This absolute roller-coaster of a feature about the party promoters who’ve been squatting in a Beverly Hills mansion to the absolute horror of the neighbourhood.
Paul Alexander, who died this week at the age of 78 after being hospitalized with COVID-19. Alexander was paralyzed from the neck down after contracting polio as a child; for the rest of his life, an iron lung kept him alive. This Guardian profile of him that ran at the beginning of the pandemic is definitely worth a read.
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