What do the Financial Times and the Daily Star have in common? They both can boast year-on-year increased circulation figures, have predominantly male readerships and very little interest in a rather spoilt ginger-haired teenager from a broken home who was caught doing what most teenagers appear to do these days - getting drunk and smoking dope. Neither newspaper chose to mention "Prince Harry's drug and drink shame" on their front pages. The FT recorded the event in four paragraphs on page two, under the headline "Blair support for Prince Charles". The Star gave it a slightly more colourful treatment on pages four and five, describing the prince as "Boozy Harry, the Royal Bad Boy" and then, rather sick-makingly, anointing Prince Charles the "Prince of Parents" in its leading article.

The Star's assessment of Charles's handling of his younger son's law-breaking antics was shared by most commentators. Overnight, this most awkward and unsympathetic of single parents became a beacon of modern parenting - caring, concerned, contemporary (all he needed was a pair of sandals and he'd have passed as a paid-up subscriber to the Guardian).

In the course of the next 48 hours, a hitherto inconceivable transformation took place - Prince Charles became one of us. He had suffered "every parent's nightmare", "like families with teenagers up and down the country".

But the real star of this show was the prince's spin-doctor, Mark Bolland. He understands the simple truth that, whether it is the monarchy or our other first family, people need to feel connected to those who run us. That's why Tony Blair is so sensitive to charges of being arrogant and out of touch.

Harry's escapades, so beautifully played out by Bolland through St James's Palace (including the master stroke of the visit to the rehabilitation centre), made the British people identify with Prince Charles, the single parent doing his best to raise his teenage sons in a troublesome world.

The royal feeding frenzy began at around 8pm on Saturday night, after the other Sunday papers learnt of the News of the World exclusive, and continued unabated through the week. Claims made by a "family friend" that the palace's co-operation did not mean it was "open season on Harry's privacy" seemed naive in the extreme. Only time, and Prince Harry's own behaviour, will determine how badly he has damaged his right to privacy. It is not inalienable.

What is certainly true is that it has meant open season on the two boys (incautiously and unfairly named by the same family friend) who were supposedly responsible for leading the prince astray. Harry appears to have inherited a rather unattractive trait from both his parents - an inability to accept responsibility for his own actions and a tendency to blame others.

I still find it difficult to muster much sympathy for this poor little rich kid. I spent Christmas with a teenage boy who also lost a parent when he was about the same age as Harry. This boy's mother had to go back to work to pay the bills; his grandparents fill in the gaps where her pride will allow. He studies hard because he knows his mother can't afford to pay his school fees without the scholarships he wins, and he works on weekends and holidays stacking shelves at the local supermarket. He still lashes out, railing against the unfairness of it all, most of all the unfairness of not having his dad around. He doesn't have the time, the luxury or the self-pity to go off the rails.

---

The Prime Minister's appearance on Breakfast with Frost last Sunday was vintage Blair - all sympathy and no solutions. As the public services crumble beneath him, he took the opportunity to express his feelings, again, over Gordon and Sarah Brown's loss, and also over Prince Charles's situation.

It was completely inappropriate of him to comment on the Wales's family problems. He has become a headline-hogging prime minister, pathologically incapable of resisting the chance to wallow in other people's misfortunes. As Gordon Brown has so tragically proved, there is greater dignity to be had in silence.

---

There was little surprise at Associated Newspapers when the announcement was finally made that Max Hastings's replacement as editor of the Evening Standard was to be the Daily Mail's features editor, Veronica Wadley. The spring in the latter's step has been marked since before Christmas. Hastings and Wadley have been close friends for years. The 49-year-old former Telegraph executive, who lives with her husband and two children in a £1.5m-plus, four-storey house in one of the better parts of Hampstead, is expected to inject a more cosmopolitan feel to the London daily, which has been losing sales. Roger Alton, editor of the Observer, had been hotly tipped as a successor to Hastings: he'd increased sales of his newspaper by 8.2 per cent, and is a man-about-London. In the end, however, Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers, followed the pattern he has set in previous senior appointments, and promoted from within.

The other big winner in Dacre's reshuffle is another former Telegraph executive, Eric Bailey, who is promoted to the Daily Mail as joint deputy editor. The much-liked Bailey, a former joint associated editor of the Mail on Sunday, is celebrated for transforming the Telegraph's leisure sections, in particular its market-leading motoring section. He is an excellent writer, with a flair for getting the most out of his staff. Many believe he is part of a small stable from which Dacre's eventual successor will be chosen.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website