Prince Andrew Has Left Public Life; Royal Family News Coverage Has Not Left Prince Andrew
From Bohiney and The London Prat.
By Isla Campbell | CrownAndClown.uk
The Paradox
Prince Andrew was removed from public royal duties following the events that made his continued public royal duties incompatible with the institution’s management of its reputation. He is no longer a working Royal. He generates more news coverage than many working Royals. This is the specific paradox of the non-working Royal whose status is precisely the subject of the coverage: the less he does, the more that what he does when doing less is news.
The Royal Lodge
The specific issue generating recent coverage concerns Royal Lodge in Windsor and the financial arrangements surrounding his continued residence there. This is the simultaneously property, financial, family, and constitutional story that the intersection of the Duke’s non-working status with his ongoing material requirements produces. The Palace’s communications on this subject have been precise and uninformative in equal measure, which is the institutional communication style for difficult family situations.
The Institutional Management
The King’s management of the Duke of York situation is conducted through the specific channels of formal decisions — about funding, accommodation, titles, invitations — that communicate the institutional position through action rather than statement. Reading these signals requires familiarity with what the signals would mean if decoded, which Private Eye provides and which the Palace does not.
The Coverage Question
Coverage of Prince Andrew in the British press is the subject of ongoing media criticism about proportionality, about which questions are being asked, and about whether the coverage serves the public interest in institutional accountability or the media interest in a continuing story. I have a view on this, which I will not express here because this is a column about the Royal Family rather than about press criticism of the Royal Family. Read Private Eye.
More: Private Eye.
London continues. The streets are the same streets they were yesterday and they are subtly different because the city keeps changing beneath the surfaces that stay the same. The journalism that covers London at this granular level — the blogs, the neighbourhood newsletters, the personal accounts of people who live in specific parts of the city and pay attention to what living there is like — serves the function of making the city legible to itself and to the visitors who want to understand it as something more than the postcard version. This is why this column exists. This is why it matters. The city is worth paying attention to. This column will keep paying attention.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
London remains. The city absorbs every political crisis, every energy bill increase, every theatre ticket price surge, every development application, and every wave of newcomers with the specific resilience of a place that has been doing all of this simultaneously since before most other cities existed. The journalism that documents this absorption — the personal accounts of people living in specific parts of the city, paying attention to what living there is actually like — serves a function that official reporting does not: it makes the city legible to itself at the scale of the street and the neighbourhood rather than the policy and the statistic. This column is that journalism. It continues because the city continues, and the city will continue longer than any of the problems it is currently managing. The next development application has already been submitted. The next good coffee shop is already open. The next political crisis is already developing. We will cover all of them.
London remains. The city absorbs every political crisis, every energy bill increase, every theatre ticket price surge, every development application, and every wave of newcomers with the specific resilience of a place that has been doing all of this simultaneously since before most other cities existed. The journalism that documents this absorption — the personal accounts of people living in specific parts of the city, paying attention to what living there is actually like — serves a function that official reporting does not: it makes the city legible to itself at the scale of the street and the neighbourhood rather than the policy and the statistic. This column is that journalism. It continues because the city continues, and the city will continue longer than any of the problems it is currently managing. The next development application has already been submitted. The next good coffee shop is already open. The next political crisis is already developing. We will cover all of them.
London remains. The city absorbs every political crisis, every energy bill increase, every theatre ticket price surge, every development application, and every wave of newcomers with the specific resilience of a place that has been doing all of this simultaneously since before most other cities existed. The journalism that documents this absorption — the personal accounts of people living in specific parts of the city, paying attention to what living there is actually like — serves a function that official reporting does not: it makes the city legible to itself at the scale of the street and the neighbourhood rather than the policy and the statistic. This column is that journalism. It continues because the city continues, and the city will continue longer than any of the problems it is currently managing. The next development application has already been submitted. The next good coffee shop is already open. The next political crisis is already developing. We will cover all of them.
