Two members of the same high-profile family go into the hospital for planned medical treatments. Both are shocked when tests show they have cancer. The older member breaks with convention, makes public details of his condition, and is praised for his openness. The other, a woman more than 30 years his junior, sticks with tradition and says little, creating a hysterical guessing game.
Has she died and been replaced with a body double? Has her marriage fallen apart? Has she had cosmetic surgery that has gone wrong? To try to lance the speculation, she releases a family photograph, but it turns out to have been so badly Photoshopped that newspapers unpublish it. Cue even more lurid speculation—before she reveals all in a moving video.
There is no right or wrong way to talk about illness. Nobody should have to reveal anything they don’t want to. But there are lessons for the British royal family from the recent cancer diagnoses of both King Charles and the Princess of Wales. One is that the days when the royals could stick to the dusty formula “Never complain, never explain” are over. Britain’s tabloid newspapers have been chipping away at that strategy ever since Buckingham Palace sought to deny what reporters already knew: that Charles’s marriage to Princess Diana was on the rocks. Last week social media blew up what was left of it. X and TikTok drove the news cycle, forcing the royals to both explain and complain.
It is also clear that the P.R. game has changed. Buckingham Palace, where the King and Queen’s press team works, and Kensington Palace, where William and Catherine’s spin doctors labor, are far less involved in the day-to-day business of engagements and royal tours, and increasingly embroiled in crisis management. Recent royal scandals—Megxit, Prince Andrew’s legal travails, carrier bags of cash delivered to Charles as donations to his charities, to name just a few—would all test the most hardened flack.
Are the palaces’ finest up to the job? You might think that the younger, more digitally native royals and their advisers would be more adept at handling the modern media environment, while fuddy-duddy Charles and Camilla would not. But one of the most surprising subplots of the medical drama that has played out in London over the past few months is how well Charles and Camilla have played their hand compared with William and Catherine.
The days when the royals could stick to the dusty formula “Never complain, never explain” are over.
It is even more remarkable when you consider that when he was appointed as communications director a year and a half ago, many wondered whether Tobyn Andreae was the right man for the job. It was not just that he was former co–deputy editor of the Daily Mail, a title whose reverence for the institution of the monarchy does not stop it putting the boot in. Prince Harry is suing the paper’s owner, Associated Newspapers Limited, for invasion of privacy, and it was the Daily Mail that coined the term “Waity Katie” to describe the then Kate Middleton’s long courtship of Prince William, a nickname she apparently despised, not to mention scoffing at her “social-climbing” family. Andreae was also said not to have the proper touch for a communications head. He was “too posh to gauge the mood of the man or woman in the street,” one member of the royal press pack observed.
Yet Charles, guided by Andreae, exhibited a clear understanding of what the public required in his hour of need and a moment of peril for the monarchy. In a statement issued to coincide with prime-time broadcast news bulletins, he told the world that following his recent treatment for an enlarged prostate, tests revealed that he had cancer. He would be stepping back from royal duties to receive treatment, supported by his wife and family.
To calm fears over the seriousness of his condition, footage was released of him working from home. Doctors and cancer charities praised the King for doing what most men don’t: responding quickly to symptoms of illness and speaking frankly. Even Prince Harry rallied round, flying to London to meet his father for the first time in months. There will be no more Stateside histrionics for a while, merely an American Riviera Orchard. (It should be said that “American Riviera” is a term nobody but nobody in Montecito uses.)
The Waleses, guided by Lee Thompson, who cut his teeth at Freud Communications, a P.R. agency, before moving to CNBC and NBCUniversal, where he was praised for his digital and social-media skills, were less sure-footed. Their initial decision to give no details of Catherine’s surgery in January but to simply indicate it was serious—two weeks in the hospital, followed by months recuperating at home—created a vacuum that social media was only too eager to fill.
William’s last-minute decision to pull out of speaking at a memorial service for his godfather, King Constantine of Greece, in February, citing a “personal matter,” further cranked the rumor mill.
Kate’s amateurish Photoshopping of her family photograph, released on Mother’s Day in the U.K., revved up the global online guessing game about her health. Her apology for the “confusion” the image had caused, but not her decision to doctor it, opened up her and her family to derision.
Has she died and been replaced with a body double?
By now distrust of Kensington Palace was such that when the Waleses allowed newspapers to publish a grainy image of them during a visit to a farm shop in Windsor, many wondered if it wasn’t them at all, but rather doppelgängers.
Thompson and the Waleses appear no match for Andreae and the King and Queen, but those close to both Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace say other forces are at play. Paddy Harverson, a media strategist who has worked with most of the senior royals, points out that Catherine and William needed time to come to terms with her diagnosis and explain it to their three young children. True and reasonable. But with 20/20 hindsight, waiting weeks and weeks to reveal the truth was far too long. Those close to the Waleses also criticize newspapers for reporting on the social-media speculation, “which they knew to be batshit crazy but ran with it anyway because it produced headlines and clicks, which generate revenue.”
Some observers draw a distinction between the Waleses’ and the King and Queen’s attitudes to the press. One seasoned royal correspondent points out that Charles and Camilla are “much more experienced in crisis management than any other members of the royal family. They have seen it all and have the scars to prove it and, as a result, are much more relaxed these days about how much information they share.”
By contrast, “William and Kate are more private and can be very stubborn,” he says. “When they get an idea in their head—for instance, ‘we won’t share any medical details’ or ‘here is the one picture we want to release to the media’—it can be hard to shift them.”
He adds that “thanks to Harry’s endless court cases in London, people assume that he is the brother who loathes the press, but, if anything, William hates the media more. He naturally wants to protect his family, but that does not always mean he and Catherine make the right decision.” Some observers, for instance, say it was a misstep not to follow Charles’s lead and release some private pictures of Catherine at home reading “Get Well Soon” cards.
What Charles and Camilla seem to know is that while the newspapers might be sweet-talked and occasionally bullied into playing the “we need you, you need us” royal media game, no institution can win a firefight with unregulated social media. Not least when it turns out the keyboard warriors have a point: Kensington Palace was not telling the full truth, whether Catherine might have wanted to reveal it or not.
Expect more candor and less talk of “routine medical procedures” and “good spirits” the next time a crisis breaks.
John Arlidge covers business at The Times of London. He is also a fellow of the Orwell Prize for Journalism