Amol, out of love: Why the BBC's golden goose lost some shine for talking about the media's right royal dirty deals
Rajan will continue his dubious ascent through the corporation but he's catching flack from the tabloids because they don't like the attention.
Sometimes you need to extract an idea from its specific context and return to first principles to see its true weirdness. In the second episode of the BBC documentary The Princes and the Press — presented by irritating Zelig of the corporation’s schedules, Amol Rajan — there is a section when a succession of royal reporters complain that they were denied specific details on the Duchess of Sussex’s labour and not allowed sufficient time to gawp at her first child.
In the snow globe of sycophancy1 and snide insinuation that makes up the British press pack pursuing the Royal Family, the idea that a pregnant woman might not be particularly keen on a load of strangers having up-to-the-minute information on the dilation of her cervix is unthinkable.
The Evening Standard’s Royal Editor, Robert Jobson — picture the landlord of a flat-roof pub called the Bulldog & Piss — began the whining:
It used to work very well; remember a baby being born is a very happy, positive story, and we all like that. It’s good for the monarchy and it works for them. When Diana and Fergie when they had their babies, they go in, the father turns up — all excited — and they eventually emerge as this perfect happy couple with their baby… photographs are taken, Union Jacks [sic] are flying, town cryer is ringing his bell, everybody’s happy. That happened perfectly with William’s children…
It’s this kind of quote that makes repeated press claims that there’s no “deal” between the Monarchy and the media sound very hollow. This section is illustrated with footage of Harry himself being presented to the media by his parents as if he should have allowed himself to be, in his words, “bullied into the game that ultimately killed [his] mum”.
That Meghan and Harry offered a short photo call after Archie’s birth along with an Instagram post is a source of festering resentment for the royal reporters. That is most clear in the quote from Richard Palmer, Royal Correspondent at the Daily Express, who recalls bitterly:
… when Archie was born, that was another thing! They told us that there would be positions out in Windsor, outside the castle, where there would be media briefings. Then, on the day that he was born, they announced: “She’s gone into labour”. And so, we’re all rushing to Windsor and then you find out she’s given birth but actually she’d given birth hours ago.
… they made it so difficult for us and, you know, it felt like they’d deliberately gone out of their way to make the British media look stupid.
Making the British media look stupid doesn’t take much; they do it to themselves daily. But look at the entitlement in that quote. It’s because royal ‘reporters’ are nothing of the sort. They are royal stenographers, eager little birds waiting with their beaks open to be fed some pre-digested lines and angles by spokespeople and ‘sources’. Real stories about the Monarchy are never broken by the royal reporters whose need to maintain access and stick to “the deal” is paramount.
Camilla Tominey, the Daily Telegraph Associate Editor who has appeared in this newsletter on several occasions, makes Palmer look reasonable. With a ‘just licked piss off a nettle’ look on her face, she recalls how she felt on the day of Archie’s birth:
Oh right! So, the baby was born in the early hours of this morning and I’m in a taxi on the way to report that she’s in labour when, in fact, it’s a fait accompli and, by the way, they’re not going to tell us much, including where the baby’s been born, so if I’m asked live on air where the baby’s been born, I won’t be able to say that.
This is the world of trivia treated as gold that the royal correspondents operate in; while pretending to be something ‘better’ than gossip columnists they perch themselves on sofas and talk about the tiny cast of characters they are paid to obsess over, pretending to intimately know a family that despises them.
Beyond the well-worn example of Prince Charles being caught on a hot mic calling Nicholas Witchell “that awful man”2 back in 2005, The Princes and the Press includes a moment from 2019 when, at the end of a visit to a hospital in Malawi, Sky News’ Royal Correspondent, Rhiannon Mills tried to ask Harry a question as he was attempting to get into a car.
In the clip, her first attempt (“That short conversation, what do you hope to achieve through it?”) prompts the Prince to reply, “What? Ask them,” and point towards the hospital, implying that she should talk to the people he was speaking with. She tries again (“Is that why it’s important for you to come and talk to them?”) and he gestures for her to move away, saying: “Rhiannon, don’t behave like this.”
Mills reflects on the moment in Rajan’s documentary, admitting that she knew that “doorstepping”3 was a “no-no” but going on to say that she’d done it in the past and had got a result:
He doesn’t stop and give me a full interview but he acknowledges me or whatever. This one played out differently. Most people looked at it and thought, well, hang on, it was a polite question, why did it blow up? But looking back at it now, I had basically kicked the wasps’ nest.
The encounter between Mills and Harry happened just a few hours before the Prince put out his statement complaining about “relentless propaganda” against his wife in the British media.
Of course you can argue that Mills’ question was innocuous, but imagine being Harry: Already feeling deeply upset about how the press is treating your wife and having the most basic of rules about when you’re available for interview not being followed. You can argue that it’s “what he signed up for” but he didn’t; he was — as the documentary makes heavy work of showing — born into it, an object of media fascination while he was still in the womb.
And consider again the entitlement present in Mills’ quote about Archie’s birth:
When we, finally, were introduced to Archie, it was three days after he was born and they decided that they wanted to do a very small photo call.
“Finally”. Archie was three days old when he was presented to the press but that was still not enough because that’s not the way the papers are used to it being.
That pique about Harry and Meghan not delivering4 as expected was expressed most clearly in the documentary by the Times columnist Trevor Phillips:
They made it clear that the historic convention, for example, about pictures of a new infant, they weren’t going to go with it.
At that point, it became clear that either they had not really grasped that, in return for the fairy tale, you have to give the people outside the castle something or they just decided they didn’t want to play the game. And the point at which you decide you’re not going to play the game then don’t expect other people to play by the rules.
In what fairytale does the princess die in tunnel? In what fairytale is her 12-year-old son obliged to walk in public beside her coffin5? We’re back at that trick of pulling something from its context to look at it from first principles: Prince Harry is trapped by the circumstances of birth, in a high-class Hotel California where if he says nothing they’ll chase him and anything he does say will be wrong.
The press has the story and it’s angry that Prince Harry is no longer willing to comply. Private Eye editor, Ian Hislop, offered one of the show’s most direct and honest assessments when he said:
[The royals] are safe as long as they’re dull. And as long as we feel they’re having quite a boring life, involving dogs and horses and Scotland and other things we’re not terribly jealous about.
He also said out loud one of the truths of the coverage of Meghan vs. Kate after the Duke and Duchess of Sussex took legal action against the Mail on Sunday and Harry joined the phone hacking actions against The Sun and The Mirror: Of course they’re going to say nice things about the Duchess of Cambridge and attack the Duchess of Sussex — one is boring and compliant, the other is not.
And of course Amol Rajan — who at one point in the documentary gets himself into the Being John Malkovich-esque scenario of being Amol Rajan, presenter, discussing the reporting of Amol Rajan, BBC Media Editor — was going to be in the firing line of his chums in the papers for breaking omerta.
Ahead of the second episode of The Princes and the Press airing, The Sunday Times’ newly-promoted Media Editor, Rosamund Urwin, published a profile of cricket-obsessive Rajan headlined The republican hitting the royal family for six. It opens with a paragraph to which the only rational response is “citation very much needed”…
Everyone who knows Amol Rajan calls him “a phenomenon”. In 15 years, he has risen from being a “mike boy” on Channel 5’s mid-morning chat show The Wright Stuff — telling the audience when to clap — to become a presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
… and that prompted several people to suggest to me that descriptions used for him by plenty of BBC insiders share the same first syllable but are rather less complimentary. Urwin goes on to talk about rumours that Rajan — who presents the Today programme, is the corporation’s Media Editor, fronts documentaries and acts as stupour-sub on The One Show as well as for Jeremy Vine and Zoe Ball on Radio 2 — could succeed Laura Kuenssberg as Political Editor, take over Andrew Marr’s Sunday politics slot and/or be a Strictly contestant.
There’s absolutely no truth to the rumour that all of these rumours were started by Amol Rajan sporting a series of increasingly absurd disguises… that really is just the way he chooses to dress (later in her piece Urwin notes his proclivity for wearing “a chunky watch that doesn’t work”).
The profile contains plenty of compliments from previous bosses — the sign of a top-level arse kisser — but there’s a segment that shows in particular that Urwin has been assigned to deliver an elegant hatchet job. She writes of his early days at The Independent — having got a job there through inveigling himself with the then-editor Simon Kelner while working on Channel 5’s The Wright Stuff — that
Rajan was sent to write a “colour piece” (a feature setting the scene) about Madeleine McCann’s disappearance in Portugal, and not knowing what that meant, filed a piece with references to a “magenta sky, lilac walls and terracotta brickwork”.
Through an act of calculated ommission, Urwin manages to imply that this is a piece of snarky gossip about Rajan. But, in fact, it was first revealed by Rajan himself in an interview with Campaign in 2013 just after he had been appointed editor of The Independent (a result of some more world class sucking up during his time as an “advisor” to the paper’s proprietor Evgeny Lebedev):
After one month on the news desk [Rajan] was sent to Portugal when Madeline McCann’s parents had been arrested. He was tasked with filing a 600 word descriptive feature, a "colour piece", from Praia da Luz.
"[News editor] Pete Victor phoned back," he recalls. "He said ‘about this colour piece? I like the intro, I like the payoff, it’s all very nice, but what the fuck is with all these references to the magenta sky, the lilac walls and the terracotta brickwork?’... I thought I had written a colour piece – I didn’t know what one was."
That Rajan decided to deploy this as a self-deprecating anecdote says a lot about his (over-)confidence as the 30-year-old editor of The Independent, a job he was absolutely not qualified to take on and which ended when the paper ceased publication in print, going online-only. But failing to mention that Rajan was the one who told the anecdote is a calculated move by The Sunday Times and inevitably led to Guido Fawkes head troll and drink driving enthusiast Paul Staines publishing the 8-year-old story as a ‘hilarious’ new gotcha.
Two of the hacks featured in The Princes and the Press inevitably got their own pieces out of it. Amanda Platell — the long-time Daily Mail columnist who cost the paper £25,000 in damages (with legal costs on top) last year after she falsely claimed that Cambridge academic Professor Priyamvad Gopal was “attempting to incite an aggressive and potentially violent race war” — spun her appearance with a piece headlined How the BBC's golden boy Amol Rajan conned me into royal hatchet job.
In the piece, Platell — despite having previously been press secretary to baseball cap model, former Conservative Party conference chil star, and Tory Party leader, William Hague, and working in journalism for 35 years — complains:
When I saw the programme, my two hours had been reduced to less than two minutes of selective quotes. I felt utterly conned… However badly treated I feel, Heaven knows what the royals feel about being trashed by the BBC.
Had — in some alternate reality — the Daily Mail’s position on Rajan’s documentary been a positive one, Platell would have trumpeted her involvement as an “expert”. She is pretending she doesn’t understand how editing works because it’s the company line.
Meanwhile, over at The Daily Telegraph, Camilla Tominey plays semantics over the word “briefing”:
I can honestly say that in my 16 years covering the Royal family, I don’t think I have ever been called by the Palace press office and actively briefed a story. Funnily enough, they don’t call us up saying: “You’ll never believe what Meghan did today.”
That’s not how it works. What happens is a journalist finds something out (which could be from anyone or anywhere), does some digging to stand it up and then calls the Palace for a response ahead of publication. (Or not, if the intel is reliable enough.)
You see people (“could be anyone!”) tell her things that they want to appear in the newspaper but that’s not briefing. It just waddles, swims, and quacks like a briefing. This ‘serious’ act continues in her conclusion, when she writes, I assume with a straight face, that:
It is the job of a journalist to see through [the monarchy’s] spin and report what is really going on in a fair, accurate and contemporaneous manner - whether the Royal family like it or not.
Apropos of nothing, pictures of Tominey and Prince Andrew chuckling are still on her website.
Seemingly completely comfortable with the contradiction, the papers’ reviews6 of the second episode of the documentary have largely been yawns and grumbles that there’s “nothing new in it”, while their news pages have hysterical fun shouting about the Royal Family’s anger and determination to take revenge on the BBC for ‘republican’ Rajan’s disrespect.
A delay to the accompanying podcast series — also presented by Rajan or one of the clones of him produced in a basement at Broadcasting House — has been presented as a sign that the BBC is running scared (“BBC blinks first!”, The Daily Express). But the broadcaster says it will be released as a “box set when it’s ready”. A more likely explanation is that as with the documentary, the second part of which had to be significantly re-edited after Meghan apologised to the court for misleading it, the podcasts have required more work.
The clearest sign that Rajan will be in the firing line for the press for some time is that The Mail and Mail on Sunday exhumed an old story to create an attack line. On Sunday, Glen Owen and Jonathan Bucks got a double page spread out of the shock news that… The Independent endorsed the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition for another term on the eve of the 2015 general election, under the headline:
The answer — known to anyone who has paid attention to the press in the past six years/read a copy of Private Eye — is “obviously, yes".
In a classic Monday Mail follow up, the weekday paper asked:
Riddle of BBC host's swing behind Tories won't hold him back from promotion, insiders say
Again, the answer is obvious: “No. Not even slightly.” Rajan is such a consumate ass7 kisser that he’s lucky not to have been banned from every donkey sanctuary south of the M25.
The papers’ bandwagon will move on from Rajan to the next ‘scandal’ they can use to batter the BBC and he — a Swiss Army knife entirely made up of that odd tool for getting stones out of horses’ hooves — will continue to be drafted in to fill every presenting gap.
Look out for Rajan on Rajan on Rajan, premiering in December 2030, in which Amol Rajan reacts to his series of interviews with himself.
Which is, in fact, the collective noun for royal correspondents.
The oleaginous Witchell is so supine that he’s said that Charles was right.
This usually means waiting uninvited outside someone’s home in order to obtain an interview or photograph, but it’s applied a little more loosely here.
Pun intended.
In The Me You Can’t See, Harry said of that experience: “It was like I was outside of my body, just walking along, doing what was expected of me, showing one tenth of the emotion that everyone was showing.”
Reviews: The Times | The Daily Telegraph | The Guardian
Yes, I used this blatant Americanism purely to make the joke work. I’m not even remotely above it.