Bit late to this part of the discussion but I think this is an interesting question.
It’s all very well saying the work is valuable in itself, and I’m sure some of it is, but the RF need the press in order to survive. Unless they win people over with pomp and that is expensive and can potentially backfire.
I get where @TulipTiptoer is coming from too.
The DM is a tricky one. Hard to gauge it’s mood. I’ve definitely detected a shift recently too. It is interesting. Are they establishing a narrative or following one?
The on-line paper, if worthy of the name, is completely unreadable but I sometimes read stories on these threads.
I’m quite interested in the links between the Palace PR managers and how it all
spins.
Just from my own observation, in the recent past, I think there have been pretty clear tit for tat deals happening with certain friends of Camilla shall we say.
But perhaps the number crunchers have not found that as profitable as they had hoped? And from the DM’s perspective, KC and Camilla will probably become less and less valuable to them in terms of clicks as the years go on.
W & K have absented themselves owing to K’s illness. But William is pursuing a bit of a risky strategy I think by being quite aloof. One of the intentional or unintentional effects of this is that all of the focus has been on H&M.
It would be interesting to see what would happen hypothetically of H& M were to go silent. If I was their PR manager, that would be my advice now, other than a few non-controversial projects. And then where would the press attention go?
If KC and Camilla and W and K, from a DM readership perspective, are too staid and boring, there will be a bit of a vacuum for the next decade until William’s children come of age.
It’s a real problem for the RF too. How to stay relevant. They need the press to report on their activities but low brow reporting has been normalised now to the extent that quite respectable papers back podcasts discussing ´Kate’s fashion u-turns’ and ‘Beatrice’s baby’ and that’s mild in comparison to some of them! It’s hard to dial back to staid good deeds after a couple of decades of this nonsense.
The other problem for William is that if he takes a more strategic aloof approach and isn’t seen as much, even if he is doing good things behind the scenes, and he slims down both the numbers of RF members on active service, and their remit, it gets harder and harder to justify their many homes and almost obscene wealth and privilege.
I think these problems have been evident for a while now, but they are even more evident now that the furore over H & M is dying back a bit. Actually, I’d go as far to say that some Royal strategists have realised this and have driven the anti H&M rhetoric forward for this reason.
It’s very bad for the RF too that the main focus of interest at the moment is Andrew!