Posts Tagged ‘prince william’

Thirty years ago, a nation that was a tad more patriotic and compliant with the notion of monarchy was overjoyed to celebrate the ill-starred union of Lady Diana Spencer to Prince Charles. Crowds swarmed over the Capital, street parties and bunting were a happy distraction from the riots of Toxteth and Brixton. It was a huge success.

In 1981, history tells us that Diana, the broodmare, changed the entire Royal ball game. She was a kicker and the House of Windsor quickly found that it had to reinvent and professionalise its media management, or die. It’s come a long way. Friday’s festival was no cliché; there were no heavy-handed implications that Kate was a virgin bride. It signified a relaunch; pretence was dropped as the Establishment attempted to structure a conversation around a new desire to create brand transparency.

The marriage of Diana’s son was the first major step in a new beginning – the Windsor Brand. William is the great white hope, a fresh face with his mother’s heart and compassion. He will, in time, lead the Firm into a new age. The question is when. The relaunch of the brand involved an extraordinary, experiential three ring circus full of pomp and pageantry.

Tinged with a bourgeois romance and a certain playfulness, the wedding was sealed with a snog that adorned the front pages from Stockport to Shanghai. It overwhelmed the globe with its flawless exactitude. The trending topic on Twitter was #proudtobebritish, demonstrating that the public conversation engaged with its authenticity. The vulgar and outrageous ghost of the Mall that many thought might haunt the occasion with all those guttering candles, teddy bears and cellophane bouquets was exorcised by the success of the rebrand: Operation Reconnect.
Read the rest of this entry »

In 1981 serious riots swept the country, but the Royal Wedding still comforted and distracted the great unwashed with sumptuous street parties and lit beacons of hope.

30 years later, thanks to the digital enlightenment and the forces of social media, we might well find ourselves experiencing significant social unrest at the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton – according to the Sun, at least, who lead today’s paper with the ever-so-slightly lubricious headline: ‘Anarchists Target Wills & Kate’.

So has the meticulously planned publicity stunt fallen apart already? Do anarchists rule? Is this pure hype – a cheap Monday morning headline – or have we significantly changed as a nation?

Read the rest of this entry »

The “Fairy Tale” Royal engagement, announced yesterday, prompted an outpouring of joy in this morning’s papers. The red tops in particular are euphoric, filled to the brim with jubilant headlines and rapturous copy. I suspect the coverage arouses hope that the event will provide succour to their declining readership and influence. Past trends suggest papers do sell on these occasions, but beware the thread of over-optimism.

Hypnotised by the acres of print and online clamour, I have become absorbed by the stratagems and apparatus of the rejuvenated Royal PR pixies. This was not a unrehearsed, impromptu public announcement. The manoeuvre was contrived and pre-planned and immensely successful. Gobbets of positive content were distributed by sources close to the couple as well as the disconnected, well-prepared Royal experts. There was no vacuous emptiness on display. The proceeding nine years of official and off piste snapped moments, images of the couples’ courtship were all recycled and resulted in a gluttonous feeding frenzy. In the information age, nine years is a lifetime, generating a huge amount of detritus to reprocess and attribute.

Back in 1981 two thirds of the great British unwashed thought a Royal wedding was a good idea. Can the same be said now? Will they be put off by the fact that, just as we see the flowering of sensible Royal PR, we are also enduring the PR cliche, the spew and slew of endless opportunist press releases, cashing in on the euphoria?
Read the rest of this entry »

And so the day has come! Prince William is to marry Kate Middleton. Be of good cheer, Britain, there’s new blood being drafted into the old firm!

It really is fabulous news, in such tough economic times, that the cuts will not affect everything. In 2011 there will be something for the whole nation to celebrate, especially the merchandise sellers, caterers and makers of bunting. It’s really an early Christmas present for them all.

And better still, it’ll take place 30 years after Charles and Diana’s wedding. We will have a new Princess of Hearts – and the same sort of economic straits then as now. Perhaps we’ll get anniversary riots in Brixton and Toxteth too, only to have the wedding calm them down.

Read the rest of this entry »

We are living in a karaoke media culture – everything we see is a pale, recycled copy of something that’s gone before and, worse still, this sincere flattery of icons and iconography past is being actively encouraged.

Miley Cyrus is heading off down the well-trodden path of over-sexualised image that has been presented 1000 times before and is well known to end in ruin at least half the time. Even Kylie has got in on the act, kissing Ana Matronic from the Scissor Sisters; a direct echo of Madonna and Britney’s “lesbian” kiss.

Prince Albert of Monaco is doing a karaoke version of his father by marrying an American celeb, who is a pale imitation of Grace Kelly. And then there’s the Princes, William and Harry: William is currently back with Kate Middleton, whom the press insist shares much in common with his mother, Princess Diana; Harry is off clearing mines in a bid to be like his mother. A Freudian could no doubt get some considerable mileage from the undercurrents created by the media’s presentation of them.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Borkowski poet in residence imagines what Prince Charles would like for his birthday…

I’d like tea with Lord Mountbatten
I’d like a gin with dear old gran
I’d like a brand new book by van der Post
I’d like poetry to scan

I’d like a son who didn’t dress up
like Max Moseley just for fun
and a chance to stop my sons’ lives
from appearing in The Sun

I’d like my plants to answer back for once
and tell me what they feel
I’d like houses built from Portland stone
and not from glass and steel

I’d like a handy time machine
to take me back to 71
so I could marry Camilla then
& have her as mother to my sons

I would like a peaceful life
for the press to bugger off
I’d like them to stop presenting me
as an out of touch old toff

But I would give that all up
if mother would just say
‘Charles it’s your turn to be King,
I’m stepping down today’.

The Best Gift by Adam Horovitz [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

What is the best present could Prince Charles hope to be unwrapping on his 60th birthday, today? He will get many, but I suspect that the period of calm that has prevailed at Clarence House over the last five years, interrupted occasionally by the binge drinking bouts and going-to-parties-dressed-in-Nazi-regalia adolescent antics of his 20-something sons, is the one he will be valuing most, as it will allow him to celebrate his birthday in relative peace.

For decades, the Prince, as part of the Royal Family, one of the biggest brands going, has suffered the slings and arrows of outraged and outrageous press coverage. He was, for a long time, damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. But things have changed of late; the Prince and, more importantly, the people he has surrounded himself with, have reengineered his public, charitable and state image and reinvigorated the Duchy Originals commercial brand as a going organic concern, despite the occasional hiccup over high salt and fat content, which has seen the Prince marry successfully his public and private concerns.

It’s a long time ago, now, since the Gymkhana days of the 1950s, when the Royal Family were closed for business at the weekend, and it is strange to think that there really was a time when one could phone up on a Friday at 5 p.m. and find that the pearly-necklaced debs who ran the public face of the Royal Family had all shuffled off to Gloucestershire and would not be back in until Monday.

That changed with the arrival of Princess Diana and the wedding of Charles and Diana in 1981. Diana’s cataclysmic arrival marked a sea change in the press – it was the beginning of the soap opera days and it took decades for the Royal Family to understand what had happened, let alone begin to cope with the consequences. It marked the beginning of the Heat and Closer era, where an unhealthy interest in the minutiae of a celebrity’s life was the order of the day.

The Royal Family simply couldn’t cope with this massive increase in daily interest; nor could they cope with a press who were less and less willing to kowtow to their way of running brand Windsor. Suddenly men like Kelvin Mackenzie at The Sun were refusing to play ball with brand Windsor’s cosy PR agenda. Princess Diana and, later, Fergie were “hold the front page” news. As a consequence, Diana and Fergie got to grips with the new PR agenda far more quickly than Prince Charles and the rest of brand Windsor.

This just amplified in the wake of Charles and Diana’s separation in 1993. Diana was a masterful player of personality PR, as the interview with Martin Bashir proved. Revelation after revelation tumbled like lead onto the head of Charles – his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles being the most damaging one, along with the reaction to Diana’s death from the Royal Family, which was out of step and out of tune with the rest of the country.

Since then, the people behind brand Windsor and particularly Prince Charles have been trying to re-brand their clients and understand how modern PR can be made to work for them. In the last 10 years, most celebrities have come to recognise that they are brands, but if you’d said that in the 1980s you would have been ignored and, in the case of brand Windsor, laughed out of court. It helps that the heir to the throne has always engaged in good works, but resentment, for many years, was never far from the surface of the popular press.

The last five years have seen something of a sea change in the perception of the Prince and his dealings with the world. His sons are part of this – apart from the odd fancy dress faux pas, they have inherited their mother’s easiness with the press. But the real power behind the man one step away from the throne is Paddy Harverson, who was appointed communications secretary at Clarence House in 2003.

There is no doubt that the Prince has needed people around him who recognise the importance of the brand, given the changing nature of the press and the rise of the importance of branding. They had to find someone they could trust, someone who was not part of the Royal Family’s usual coterie, so they brought in Harverson, whose reputation as a man who could make the best of troublesome situations preceded him. Working for the Royal Family is not the most rewarding job in PR. They needed someone with the skill to manage the most difficult of situations.

Harverson is certainly a man who understands how to manage difficult brands, supercharged egos and constant press attention – he left his job as the FT’s first sports correspondent to become the inaugural communications director at Manchester United, arguably the second largest British global brand after the Royal Family and equally full of different, difficult and diverse characters. He oversaw the departure of David Beckham, Rio Ferdinand’s drugs test and a great deal more in his three-year tenure at the club. Since 2003 he has set up an entirely new era in communications for Prince Charles and his sons, whilst maintaining a discreet low profile, again in a post especially created by Clarence House for him.

It was an inspired choice; in the last five years, he has managed the press relating to Harry’s Afghan trip, William’s relationship with Kate Middleton and, most importantly, the slow embrace by press and public of Camilla Parker Bowles in the run up to and wake of her marriage to Prince Charles, keeping a careful eye on breaking stories all the while.

Much of the antagonism towards Prince Charles and Camilla has dissipated on Harverson’s watch. Although there are still problems – as one might expect from the Royal Family – the focus has shifted away from them – the press now deals more with a prince who has married the woman he truly loves, whose work with the Prince’s Trust is much admired, whose opinions on green issues are, on the whole, respected.

Make no mistake, there will always be problems – Harverson has two boisterous, highly privileged young men to deal with and the honeymoon period of Charles and Camilla’s reintegration into the public’s affection is definitely over. If Prince Charles is to take the crown he needs to avoid the elephant traps that will always be there, waiting for him.

With Harverson looking out for him, however, Prince Charles has finally become the sort of man the British public might accept as their next monarch – quite a feat, given the travails of the 1980s and 1990s – and that really must be the best present a PR man can give. As long as Harverson keeps a weather eye out for the traps and doesn’t leave, everything will be fine, barring some horrendous revelation. Harverson would, without doubt, be a tough act to follow.