Weekend at Queenie's...
Royal reporting around the Queen and Covid is even more ridiculous than usual.
Queen to help pay for £12m Prince Andrew settlement,
The Daily Telegraph (15 February 2022)
Queen’s Covid Example To Us All,
The Daily Mail (21 February 2022)
“As ever, the Queen sets an inspiring example to us all,” The Daily Mail’s leader column trilled yesterday. Unable to claim sick pay, she clambered onto her bike with a packed Uber Eats rucksack teetering over her and pedalled through the storm, in spite of her “mild’ Covid symptoms. A trouper. After all, she needs the tips to pay for that bill Prince Andrew has landed her with.
The Queen delivering takeaways is no more ridiculous a prospect than expecting people to consider a 95-year-old woman an avatar for us all to emulate. Had the Queen’s government treated her like other nonagenarians during the pandemic, she’d most likely be dead already. After all, the Prime Minister — who sent his best wishes to the monarch — was famously alleged to have said “we can’t kill the economy just because of people dying over 80”.
Royal reporting relies on accepting the ridiculous as normal and good. The idea of a 95-year-old woman doing “light duties” when she’s got Covid is normal in the world of the royal reporters because the idea of a 95-year-old woman being the head of state is normal to them, as normal as the concept of one historical mistake of a family being elevated above the rest of us.
It’s appropriate that the Mail’s leader referred to the Queen “demonstrating her typical ‘keep calm and carry on’ approach” because the Keep Calm & Carry On poster was never used during the Second World War but, since its rediscovery in 2000, has infected the minds of people who think they fought that conflict.
The real Queen can’t be written about by royal reporters. Even a week after she committed millions of pounds to protect the firm from the consequences of Prince Andrew’s (alleged) actions, she is presented not as a cold, calculating character but as a cartoonish example, the woman getting on with her ‘work’, the nation’s great-granny.
Statements from the Palace are taken at face value by reporters who want to maintain their access when the person on the throne changes. So today when a Buckingham Palace spokesman said the Queen “has decided not to undertake her planned virtual engagements but will continue with light duties,” that line was immediately incorporated into news stories that asked no further questions.
What are light duties really when you’re 95? What does the word ‘mild’ mean? And why should anyone believe a word the Palace says after it was caught out covering up the Queen’s overnight stay in hospital in October last year?
Speaking on the Today programme yesterday, The Sunday Times’ Royal Editor, Roya Nikkah, typified the way hacks present a cartoon Queen:
I think the signals that came out of Windsor Castle yesterday which I think were quite deliberate in terms of us being told she had mild symptoms, us being told she was working on that statement, that lovely message to the curling team yesterday morning, was all trying to sort of calm our fears I think.
And I think the mood music coming from the castle that she expects to carry on with her engagements this week, all but one in person which I think she'll cancel, is fingers crossed quite reassuring.
She knew she was being played but accepted the “mood music” all the same.
If we had a media that reported on the Royal Family with anything resembling rigour, it would ask why it’s necessary to pretend a 95-year-old woman is “working’ as usual when she has Covid and why, in fact, she continues to ‘work’ at all. The fact that she’s the one truly popular member of her misbegotten clan surely has a big part to play in that.
BBC Royal Correspondent, Sean Coughlan, also parroted the Palace line:
Emphasising this business-as-usual approach, the Queen was back at work on Sunday to sign off a message of congratulations to the Winter Olympics curling teams.
Like for the curlers, the royal brushers have smoothed a path for what might otherwise be a worrying message.
Like Nikkah, he noted the royal spin and went with it anyway.
The Times accompanied its story about the Queen’s Covid diagnosis with a boxout headlined Timeline: The days leading up to the Queen’s Covid announcement. The entry for February 2nd was a model of obsequious framing:
A radiant Queen smiled for a portrait photograph before an open red box in an armchair at Sandringham House to mark the start of her Platinum Jubilee year.
All of this is just a prelude to the avalanche of distortion and disinformation that will come when the Queen dies. The country will be obliged to mourn not the real woman — whoever she might be — but the symbol that has been so useful to tabloids and broadsheets alike.
Spot on Mic. My thoughts on the whole issue are just the same as yours.