Isla Campbell on the institutional instincts that surface under pressure, what ‘never complain, never explain’ means in a social media age, and the specific genius of saying nothing very well
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
The principle of “never complain, never explain” is attributed to Benjamin Disraeli and was adopted by the British royal family as a governing communications philosophy somewhere in the mid-twentieth century. It means: do not respond to criticism, do not justify your decisions, do not give the press the engagement that amplifies the story. It is a strategy whose logic is sound — royal responses to media criticism historically created as many problems as they solved — and whose application has been tested severely over the past decade by a media environment that interpretes silence as confirmation, by family members who chose to explain extensively, and by an institution that has had to navigate crises ranging from Prince Andrew’s interview to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s departure to the Princess of Wales’s cancer diagnosis in ways that “never complain, never explain” was not designed to handle.
The Andrew Disaster
The Prince Andrew Newsnight interview of November 2019 is the clearest recent case study in what happens when “never complain, never explain” is abandoned in favour of an explanation that makes things significantly worse. The interview, which Andrew and his advisers apparently believed would be an opportunity to clear his name regarding his association with Jeffrey Epstein, produced instead a masterclass in how not to conduct a television interview, with answers about sweating that became a cultural shorthand for evasion, an expression of regret for a friendship with a convicted sex offender that focused on its inconvenience to Andrew rather than its harm to victims, and the general impression of a man who did not understand the seriousness of what he was being asked about.
The aftermath — Andrew’s removal from public duties, his legal settlement with Virginia Giuffre, his exclusion from the Coronation balcony — demonstrated the Palace’s ability to contain damage after it occurs, which is different from preventing it. The institutional response to the Andrew situation has been, from a communications standpoint, effective: clear distance from the individual, maintenance of the institution’s separation from his conduct, and a silence about the details that prevents the story from being further amplified. This is “never complain, never explain” applied to a family member rather than to the institution, which is the harder version of the strategy and which appears to have worked as well as anything could in the circumstances.
The Sussex Complication
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s decision to explain — extensively, on Netflix, in a memoir, in interviews — created a different kind of crisis management challenge: not a scandal to contain but a narrative to respond to without engaging with it in ways that amplified it. The Palace’s response of pointed silence and the occasional dignified non-engagement has been more effective than active rebuttal would have been, partly because the British media’s relationship with the Sussexes has been such that Palace rebuttal would have been less credible than the alternative of simply appearing to continue normally. The institution has not won the narrative battle — there are genuine and serious questions about how Meghan was treated by elements of the British press that are not answered by institutional silence — but it has declined to lose it publicly, which is the best available outcome given the circumstances.
The Catherine Moment
The Princess of Wales’s cancer announcement in March 2024 was a case where the Palace’s communications instincts — privacy, discretion, the minimum necessary disclosure — collided with a social media environment that had spent several months speculating wildly about her absence from public life. The speculation, some of it genuinely irresponsible, was partly a consequence of the Palace’s initial communications decisions about her surgery and recovery. The announcement itself — a video, the Princess speaking directly, a personal statement of considerable emotional honesty — was, once made, extremely effective. The delay in making it created unnecessary harm and unnecessary speculation that better communications planning might have reduced.
The lesson of all three cases is the same: the “never complain, never explain” principle is a tool rather than an absolute rule, and its application requires judgment about which silences serve the institution and which silences create vacuums that are filled by worse things than what a prompt and honest disclosure would have produced. The royal family is getting better at this judgment, slowly and with some costly lessons along the way. In a communications environment that is moving faster than any institutional adaptation can fully match, “getting better slowly” is probably the best available description of progress. It is not a ringing endorsement. It is the honest one.
The Palace’s communications apparatus has evolved substantially in the past decade, moving from a model centred on press secretaries managing a small pool of royal correspondents to a multi-channel communications operation managing digital content, social media, documentary access, and traditional media simultaneously. The change reflects both the transformation of the media landscape and the explicit decision, made under William and Kate’s influence and accelerated by the Sussex departure, to move toward a more proactive rather than reactive communications posture. The “never complain, never explain” principle has not been abandoned but has been supplemented by a more active management of what the royals choose to show: the curated spontaneous photograph, the choreographed informal visit, the carefully timed interview with a friendly journalist. This is not dishonesty — the photographs are real, the visits happen — but it is deliberate image management of a sophistication that the old principle did not anticipate and does not fully govern. The result is a monarchy that is better understood by the public in some ways and less genuinely transparent than the openness implies in others. This tension is probably irresolvable for an institution that requires both public legitimacy and private dignity, and the Palace’s current approach — leaning toward managed openness rather than either full disclosure or Victorian opacity — seems like a reasonable navigation of an impossible position. It is working, for now. Whether it continues to work depends on whether the events that require navigation in the next decade are ones that managed openness can handle, which depends on events that nobody can predict and on people whose decisions are not fully within the institution’s control. The monarchy has survived worse by adapting. The adaptation has not always been elegant. It has been sufficient.
Isla Campbell writes from Central London for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/isla-campbell.
Never explaining at NewsThump | Private Eye | The Daily Mash
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/royal-family-crisis-management-never-complain-never-explain-isla-campbell/
