What’s the collective noun for royal correspondents? A crown? A tiara? A slick? A sycophancy? Whatever it is, they can all be seen enjoying themselves mightily in Amol Rajan’s new documentary series, The Princes and the Press. Urged to divulge her sources, Camilla Tominey of the Daily Telegraph in particular looks like she might be about to faint with happiness (“No, no, no, Amol!” she doesn’t quite scream).
However, this is emphatically not to suggest that royal stories are the exclusive province of royal correspondents. “It did take someone like me,” says Dan Wootton, about the decision, when he was at the Sun, to break ranks with the palace specialists and tell readers all about the Queen’s bollocking of stroppy Harry (or was it stroppy Meghan?) before their wedding in 2018. Apparently, Wootton sees himself as an outsider, and while this may well be true – he works at GB News now, so he probably knows all about social exclusion – it also suggests that full-time royal corrs are insiders, which I regard as borderline preposterous. As Rajan sombrely notes, royal reporting is not “scripture”, by which he means, I suppose, that it is basically gossip, as delivered by a servant. (Not that he’s interested in gossip; no, he is preoccupied only with “how or why narratives emerge”.)
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