Monday 18 March 2024

Silence and Secrets: Charles Spencer’s Very Private School / ‘I don’t think I developed emotionally’: Earl Spencer on the pain of boarding-school abuse


Interview

‘I don’t think I developed emotionally’: Earl Spencer on the pain of boarding-school abuse

Tim Adams

The brother of Diana, princess of Wales, talks about his difficult decision to write about being physically and sexually abused and the resistance he faced from members of his own class

 




Tim Adams

Sun 17 Mar 2024 14.00 CET

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/mar/17/earl-charles-spencer-a-very-private-school-interview

 

It was one thing writing about the abuses of his childhood, Charles Spencer tells me, with half an ironic laugh; it’s quite another talking about them with strangers. When we meet in an office at his publisher, he is reeling a bit from this new fact of his life. The more sensational chapters of his memoir of a deeply traumatic five years at the Northamptonshire prep school Maidwell Hall had been splashed all over the previous week’s Mail on Sunday. The following morning, he had been a guest on Lorraine Kelly’s mid-morning TV sofa, raking over the painful detail of that long-buried past for the viewers. As a result, he says, apologising if he seems a bit strung out, he’s had two days of thumping headaches followed by vivid nightmares.

 

The early responses to his book about being sent away from home to be brutalised at school at eight years old have been instructive. On the one hand he’s had a mailbox of emails from fellow survivors, praising his courage in speaking up for the generations of “privileged” schoolboys and girls who, like him, suffered serial beatings and sexual assault in the closed world of boarding schools well before puberty.

 

On the other he’s experienced the default prurience of the tabloid press, which picked over his book for clickbait (ever since Spencer stood up in the pulpit at Westminster Abbey and blamed redtop journalists for hounding his sister, Diana, to death, he seems to have been considered fair game). The Sun, for example, thought the most appropriate headline for a book about the lasting harm of childhood trauma to be “Di Bro’s sex at 12 with hooker”. The food writer William Sitwell, a near contemporary of Spencer’s at Maidwell and Eton, meanwhile, blithely dismissed the substance of the memoir in two columns in the Telegraph. In the first, Sitwell branded Spencer a traitor to his class: “One of their own – an earl, uncle to princes, seriously landed, stately housed, replete with a deer park, fine furniture and fabulous paintings – is dishing the dirt from within…” he wrote. In the second, he argued, bizarrely, that “Spencer has not suggested that, beyond corporal punishment, he or anyone else was a victim of abuse”.

 

While professing to have long avoided any column bearing Sitwell’s byline, Spencer shakes his head when I mention that sentiment. His book was written precisely to challenge that stubborn, unhinged belief among his peers that school regimes featuring daily beatings and endemic paedophilia “never did me any harm”. (Reading Sitwell’s piece I was reminded of an observation by Alex Renton, the journalist who has done much in recent years to shed light on the history of abuse at many of Britain’s most exclusive private schools. Soon after Renton revealed the worst of what had happened to him as a child, he ran into an old school friend at a party: “Don’t stand near Alex,” the friend warned others present, “he’ll put his hand down your trousers.”)

 

The affecting power of Spencer’s account lies in its description of the way predatory violence was entirely normalised in his school years. Maidwell Hall was presented to wealthy parents as a kind of term-time paradise for young boys; once the family had departed down the gravel drive, Spencer writes, it became a hellish place. The awful wound of homesickness was preyed upon by fearful teachers who bullied and thumped and caned vulnerable boys, or insisted on “special” naked swimming lessons; that was exacerbated by a senior matron obsessed with humiliating bedwetters, and a junior matron who molested 10-year-olds and had sex with 12-year-olds after lights out. “I realised very early on that this was a horribly ugly subject,” Spencer says. “And I made a conscious effort to make the book as smooth a read as possible. As a result every now and then the reader might tread on a landmine and think: what the hell was that?”

 

The idea that such a thoroughly sweet boy has had to live with that for the last 50 years is appalling to me

 

Ritual beatings were a timetabled part of the day. Every evening after tea, a senior boy would read out the names of small boys who had committed some minor transgression of opaque rules. They would be sent to line up outside the headmasters’ office, inside which he would require boys to drop their trousers and then choose the implement with which to inflict punishment, slipper or cane or switch. Some of the contemporaries who have shared their stories with Spencer still have the physical scars on their backsides to this day, 50 years on.

 

In the book, he says he first started to properly reflect on the psychological damage of those years in his 40s, after his second marriage had broken down, and he was questioning, in therapy, the roots of his destructive behaviour. In talking about his parents’ broken marriage and his abandonment issues, he mentioned in passing his time at Maidwell Hall. The therapist asked Spencer to expand and he found he couldn’t stop. He’s now approaching 60 and has just become a grandfather for the first time. I had a sense, reading the book, I say, that the impetus for telling this story was that it was now or never.

 

“I suppose it was,” he says. “I started considering writing it when I was 54. I’d been accumulating memories from the school as my own therapy, but then I started to hear from other people who had gone through much worse than me [fellow pupils he met by chance, or contacted specifically] and that activated a form of survivor’s guilt. I had been quite mainstream in the school, academically OK and decent at sports. But it was a ruthless place, very Lord of the Flies. And these people who were truly brutalised were the quiet blokes who weren’t in the sports team and were sitting at the back of the class. It sounds ridiculous – I was a very small child – but I felt guilty that I hadn’t defended them more.”

 

The identities of his fellow pupils are protected in the book (the historian in him has given each of them the name of one of King Charles I’s regicides). He names the teachers he knows to have died, including Jack Porch, the headteacher who “retired early” at 51 for unspecified reasons.

 

“He was a fascinating case of a very intelligent paedophile sadist,” he says, “because he’d constructed a system that fed him little boys’ buttocks every night. He had this ability to present to parents a sort of charm and humour. But he was deeply deviant. A chilling presence. I received the audiobook [of A Very Private School] today and I listened to the first bit again. The preface is about this incredibly sweet kid being systematically made to feel like nothing every day. I started crying, actually. The idea that such a thoroughly sweet boy has had to live with that for the last 50 years is appalling to me.”

 

In among the pictures in the book, there is one of the moment his life shifted, as he waits to be driven to Maidwell for the first time. He stands in the stiffest possible jacket, a mini-me of his father, the eighth earl, behind a large trunk with his name written on it. His big sister Diana sits on the trunk smiling – she is not to return to boarding school until tomorrow. Their nanny stands by looking anxious. Before he went away Charles acquired the nickname Buzz, from his estranged mother, because he had “all the happy effervescence of a bee”. His book is dedicated “to Buzz”, the boy he believed to have died at the moment he was handed over to the care of Porch.

 

One question the book raises is: what can the parents who sent their seven- and eight-year-old sons to these institutions have been thinking? One answer is that they bought into in that curiously British notion that young boys, particularly the children of privilege, must get used to pain and suffering, must break their attachment to their mothers and homes in order to mature – to embark on their destiny as leaders of men. Another is that the parents wanted them out of the way to pursue their social lives (the priorities of some are described here as “horses, dogs, children”, in that order). Spencer’s book dwells on the choices of his own parents, without condemning them. Why is that?

 

“Well,” he says, again with that half-smile, “among the plethora of psychotherapies that I’ve undergone, one of them has been understanding your parents and letting go of any blame. So that probably comes across. My mother had a very tricky mother herself. No doubt these things can get passed down generationally. And she was so young. She went straight from being head girl of a private school to marrying this very eligible chap, and a mother at 19. And she couldn’t navigate the demands of that.”

 

Frances Spencer’s response was to divorce her husband to marry Peter Shand-Kydd and – having lost custody of her four children – including two-year-old Charles, to divide her time between the Scottish island of Seil and a sheep station in New South Wales. He recalls visits to Scotland to stay with her in the holidays, where he’d help out in the newsagents she owned in Oban. “She wasn’t at all a mollycoddling mother, but she was fun at parties,” he says. “Her life ended with intense Catholicism; she spent her time helping children visit Lourdes every year. And at the same time, I think, there was massive guilt, which manifested itself through alcoholism. She died young, at 68, and the last decade of her life was one of sadness. So, no, I’m not angry with her.”

 

People who went to these schools at that time simply had to become desensitised in order to survive

 

There is a sad moment in the book when the young Spencer escapes from some of the attentions of his schoolmasters to be alone in a favourite place in a wooded part of the school grounds; he sees his father drive past in his Rolls-Royce, returning from some lunch or other. The ludicrously large family seat at Althorp was only a few miles from Maidwell, but he felt like it could have been on another planet. Once he seriously considered shooting himself in the foot at the end of a holiday, to avoid returning to school. Could he not have told his father how desperately unhappy he was?

 

“It never occurred to me,” he says. “And I have to say, it never occurred to any of the people I spoke to.” He supposes they didn’t want to disappoint their fathers. “At the end of the term, I’d come home with a report, and he read it with me. And that was our 15 minutes talking about school. He was very much a product of his class.”

 

With his own seven children, Spencer has tried to be far more present in their education. They all went to day schools, though his two sons boarded at their own choice in their late teens. He does the school run when he can with his youngest daughter, Charlotte, who is 11, chatting with her in the car, “trying to keep tabs on what’s happening,” the stuff he feels he missed out on.

 

For all these efforts at normality, there are, inevitably, several moments in the book when you recognise him still to be imprisoned by his class, as much as his memories of school. He is at pains throughout to say he is well aware of his privilege, and that children in other circumstances clearly suffered far worse than anything he experienced or can imagine. Still, for example, he includes without much of a caveat the comment by one of his teachers to the idea that he would be better off in a “normal” school: “You are too precious a flower” for that (the implication being that you may live in daily terror of being assaulted by various members of staff here, but that clearly pales beside the horrors of being educated by the state).

 

The ground rules of our interview are that Spencer will not answer any questions about the royal family – knowing of old that any quote he gives will be immediately stripped of the context and beamed around the world. I don’t therefore get to find out, for example, whether he sees this book as a companion volume to his nephew Prince Harry’s Spare – a cry for help from within the walls of inherited privilege, a demand that things are done differently. In his book’s preface he includes this: “It’s a fact that many of the leading figures in British public life today – from prime ministers to royalty – have received just such a private, boarding school education. While some thrived under benevolent headteachers, others have been wounded by wretched treatment during formative years. Some of that poisonous legacy they have unwittingly passed on to society.”

 

He was a contemporary, among others, of Boris Johnson, whose schooling followed a similar path. Does he see these traits, for example, in him? “I can’t actually drill down on specific individuals,” he says. “But I think it has to be a logical fact that people who went to these schools at that time, of which Maidwell was one, simply had to become desensitised in order to survive.”

 

He casts his comments in the book mostly in the past tense – things have undoubtedly improved since the 1970s, but of course 70,000 families still make the choice to send their kids away at a young age.

 

“I do know a few people who have been through this more recently,” he says. “One who is only now 25 or so. He’s a wreck and he told me his life was destroyed by having to go to one of these schools at seven. He writes to his father saying just please apologise, but the father cannot apologise because that choice was part of his entire code. A lot of families ‘with an old name’ might be on their financial uppers these days, but still for them to say, my son goes to a very smart school, gives them social validation; they are prepared to put up with whatever their child is putting up with, to be able to drop that at a dinner party.”

 

I wonder, when he was writing his book, whether any part of him felt like a “class traitor”, as some have suggested?

 

“One thing,” he says, “is that school was very, very clever at inculcating thoughts. One was that telling tales was a capital offence. And there were times when my schoolboy conscience felt that strongly when I was writing. Of course, logically, that’s ridiculous. But it goes deep. Quite a lot of people, most of whom didn’t go to Maidwell, have sidled up and said: ‘You should drop this book, because you’re feeding the enemy, giving ammunition to people who are against what we do.’”

 

He welcomes the fact that the current Maidwell Hall – where boarding fees can exceed £30,000 a year – has in light of his book opened an investigation of its past and invited former pupils to come forward. It is not alone. Renton has compiled a database of abuse allegations against 490 independent schools and more than 300 named teachers.

 

I wonder if Spencer had qualms about naming the teachers who had died. Did he expect to hear from their families?

 

“I thought long and hard about that,” he says. “And in the end I thought, actually, they deserve to be named. Nobody’s going to pin the crimes of the father on the children or the grandchildren. The point is, very sadly, their fathers did terrible things.”

 

One of the teachers who singled him out at nine years old for particular violence – a man he used to fantasise about meeting up with later in life in order to return a beating – is still alive. He calls him Goffie in the book (another of Charles I’s regicides). He has sent him a copy: “He’s very old now. But I just want him to know.”

 

At one point he thought of bringing a legal case against the assistant matron who molested him and other boys in her care. Why did he decide not to do that?

 

“I thought about it when all the cases against Catholic priests happened in America,” he says. “But I think what she did was so troubling to me that it’s sort of beyond me to cope with it.” Those disturbing assaults on his innocence, interactions he found impossible to process or understand, led to him using saved pocket money to visit a prostitute while on holiday in Italy with his family when he was 12. He believes those experiences damaged for ever his subsequent capacity to form mature relationships.

 

“I got a private detective involved at one point, to find her,” he says. “She’s been quite careful to stay off the internet, married a couple of times, had a kid. There is nothing that the law could do that would make it OK for me. Having said that, if others now come forward, I would certainly validate what they say.”

 

He has been married to his third wife, Canadian-born Karen Villeneuve, the chief executive of a charity that protects vulnerable children, for 13 years. Does he now look back and see the damage of his childhood as a factor in his catalogue of earlier failed marriages and relationships?

 

“Put it this way,” he says, “I don’t think I developed emotionally in those early years as would have been the case in a loving home with actively loving adults.” Many of those contemporaries, who like him “have demons sewn into the seams of our souls” as a result of their experiences at schools like Maidwell, bear out that belief, he says. “There is a lot of addiction and depression. The wife of a great friend of mine at Eton – who surprisingly emigrated to Australia – got in touch with me when news of the book came out to say: ‘I just want you to know, he went to a place like Maidwell and had the most appalling time. He’s had terrible depression over the years but I’ve never seen him so happy as when he heard you were bringing a book out about all this stuff.’ Someone else I know,” he says, “was a guy who was terribly bullied, three years older than me. And he wrote to me a while ago and said: ‘You writing this book has let me tell my wife for the first time what I went through at Maidwell. We’ve been married for 30 years – and we just spent the last hour crying together.’”

 

For himself he suggests that the catharsis has probably been delayed. He has found the experience of revisiting all this history for publication “quite nightmarish”, but is proud that it is done.

 

“Like many of my contemporaries, I used to drink way too much,” he says. “Not on a dangerous level, but certainly to anaesthetise things. I haven’t had a drink since January.”

 

I mention to him something that Billy Connolly once told me in an interview about coming to terms with the memory of sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his father: “It’s not called emotional baggage for nothing – it means you can put it down if you want to.”

 

“I totally agree with that,” he says. “I do feel I might put it down now.” You sense he believes he owes it to long-lost Buzz, to at least do that for him.

 

A Very Private School by Charles Spencer is published by William Collins (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply


Sunday 17 March 2024

Kate's photoshop mishap is 'naivety bordering on foolishness' |


Where is Catherine, Princess of Wales? The internet is rife with ‘Katespiracies’

 

The royal’s absence has led to a proliferation of conspiracy theories after announcement of a mysterious abdominal surgery

 

Erum Salam

Fri 15 Mar 2024 15.00 CET

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/15/where-is-princess-catherine-conspiracy-theories

 

It seems that everyone has recently become fixated on one question: where in the world is the Princess of Wales?

 

We’ve long known the world is watching the royal family, but the visible absence of Catherine has sent social media and US news outlets into a tailspin – driving even those ordinarily not interested in the royals to pay attention.

 

The latest saga surrounding the royal family began when Kensington Palace announced on 17 January that the future queen consort was due for a mysterious abdominal surgery at the London Clinic. The world was told that she would be in the hospital and out of commission for “10 to 14 days” – therefore out of the public eye until Easter. Prince William postponed some engagements that same day.

 

Then a series of coincidences made internet sleuths suspicious.

 

Victoria Howard, a royal commentator and founder of a website devoted to the royal family called The Crown Chronicles, offered some clarity on the princess’s recent accidental entrance into the global spotlight.

 

“The length of Kate’s absence is unusual which suggests a significant procedure, but the lack of details is what is driving the rumor mill,” Howard said. “For those abroad, who don’t have a royal family and liken them more to celebrities, they can’t quite understand why the details aren’t being shared.”

 

Shortly after, on 5 February, it was announced that King Charles was diagnosed with cancer. Now, two leading figures in the royal family have health issues around the exact same time but only one of them has been seen.

 

“There is a bit of a vacuum in the royal family right now, because of both ongoing health issues, so this lack of news and public visibility of royals is driving some of this narrative,” Howard said. “The timing is unusual being so close together but for me it’s an example of how the offices do not communicate that well, and equally their different approaches with the level of detail provided.”

 

But Howard cautioned coincidences can happen and that “health often doesn’t align with your schedule”.

 

“As Kate is not monarch there is no cause for concern. Charles has counsellors of state who can be appointed and step in should he be incapacitated,” she said.

 

Still, rumors are swirling and many outside the UK, particularly in the US, have become obsessed with this Middleton mystery.

 

Theories, or “Katespiracies”, about the princess’s whereabouts range from Kate being revealed as the newest contestant on the TV gameshow The Masked Singer to getting a Brazilian butt lift (or some other cosmetic work).

 

Howard called some of these conspiracies “quite frankly ludicrous”.

 

“To not be away for so long due to real health issues would be highly risky and take advantage of public goodwill,” she said. “No sensible communications team would allow them to do that.”

 

Middleton was reportedly seen on 4 March in a car with her mother, but the poor quality of the photo has not convinced some of her fans.

 

On 10 March, things reached a bit of an apex when it was revealed that a family photo of Catherine and her three children posted by the princess on her Instagram account was Photoshopped. Various discrepancies in the image led to even more speculation, prompting major news agencies such as the Associated Press to pull the photo from distribution “because at closer inspection, it appears that the source had manipulated the image in a way that did not meet AP’s photo standards”.

 

This proved cataclysmic for gossip, which seemingly pushed the princess to issue a rare statement explaining the situation: “Like many amateur photographers, I occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day. C”

 

The metadata of the file shows that the image was processed in Photoshop first on 8 March at 9.54pm local time and again on 9 March at9.39am local time, per an ABC News report.

 

The very next day on 11 March, William and someone who appeared to be Catherine were seen leaving Windsor Castle together in a car. But faces were obstructed so it’s not clear if it was actually the princess.

 

Still, the princess’s spokesperson doubled down on Catherine’s perfectly normal condition: “We were very clear from the outset that the Princess of Wales was out until after Easter and Kensington Palace would only be providing updates when something was significant.”

 

The spokesperson underscored the princess was “doing well”.

 

The US, which has no royal family, is giving the princess the “celebrity-in-crisis” treatment previously seen with the likes of Britney Spears or Amanda Bynes. If not by those on social media like TikTok, the media coverage of Catherine’s every move has shown no signs of letting up.

 

US news outlets like the Washington Post, ABC News and NPR have even weighed in on the altered photo debacle. The Los Angeles Times likened Kate and sister-in-law Duchess of Sussex’s drama to that surrounding Diana, Princess of Wales, who dominated international news headlines in the late 80s and 90s.

 

The royals expert and former BuzzFeed News reporter Ellie Hall told Nieman Lab last week that she believed the obsession with Catherine stems from “distrust” people have of the royals – in no small part to Diana’s legacy.

 

“People have started to really distrust not just the royal family – as an institution/bureaucracy, not necessarily the individual members – but the reporters and outlets that cover the royal family,” Hall said, adding: “A lot of people still hold a grudge against the royals because of Princess Diana and wonder about the circumstances of her death. I also feel like a lot of this distrust stems from what Harry and Meghan have said since leaving working royal life. Their descriptions of a back-stabbing, machiavellian organization in interviews and Harry’s memoir Spare have definitely made an impact on the public’s perception of the monarchy and the royal reporting beat.”

 

So, what’s really going on and who has the answers?

 

Howard noted that “Kensington Palace has been very reactive”, which is unusual because they mostly don’t “comment or respond in other cases”. She says it’s “the wrong approach if they wanted to ease people’s worries” and “doing so shows real concern about the conversation and indicates their level of panic essentially”.

 

Perhaps the former Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger said it best in 2020, pointing out: “It is unusually difficult to judge the reliability of most royal reporting because it is a world almost devoid of open or named sources.

 

“So, in order to believe what we’re being told, we have to take it on trust that there are currently legions of ‘aides’, ‘palace insiders’, ‘friends’ and ‘senior courtiers’ constantly WhatsApping their favourite reporters with the latest gossip. It has been known to happen. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. We just don’t know.”


Conspiracies and kill notices: how Kate’s edited photo whirled the rumour mill

 

With Princess of Wales out of sight for health reasons, impact of altered family photo has been magnified

 

Esther Addley

Fri 15 Mar 2024 15.13 CET

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/15/conspiracies-and-kill-notices-how-kate-edited-photo-whirled-the-rumour-mill-princess-of-wales

 

On Tuesday, as the crisis in Gaza continued, turmoil built in Haiti and Joe Biden and Donald Trump were confirmed as their parties’ presidential candidates, the White House press secretary was asked a question by a journalist that caused her, briefly, to laugh.

 

“Does the White House ever digitally alter photos of the president?”, Karine Jean-Pierre was asked by a reporter.

 

“Why would we digitally alter photos? Are you comparing us to what is going on in the UK?” she replied. “No – that is not something that we do here.”

 

When Kensington Palace released an apparently candid photograph last weekend of the Princess of Wales and her children, timed to coincide with Mother’s Day, it no doubt expected the usual warm reception, perhaps with a few approving front pages.

 

One week on, it is fair to say things have not gone to plan. After multiple clumsy edits to the photo were identified, five leading photo agencies issued an almost unprecedented “kill notice” of the “manipulated” image.

 

Since then, not only the White House press corps but large sections of the world’s media have been fascinated by the photograph – and what it may say about the princess, who has been recovering from surgery – putting the royals at the centre of a dangerous crisis of credibility.

 

If you’re caught being untruthful once, after all, why should anyone ever believe you? In Spain, some outlets have repeated claims, rubbished by the palace last month, that the princess is in a coma. On US talkshows, longstanding if highly libellous rumours about the royal marriage, similarly denied, are being openly aired and mocked.

 

And on social media, needless to say, the unfounded conspiracies are wilder still. Kate has had a facelift, or she is in hiding, or has been replaced by a body double. Most are easy to dismiss, but when even the ITV royal editor, Chris Ship, one of the select handful of “royal rota” journalists who are briefed by the palace, posts a tweet that begins: “I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist but …”, the Firm undeniably has a problem.

 

Who would be a royal? According to the palace, lest we forget, the 42-year-old mother of three has undergone major abdominal surgery and is not well enough to appear publicly. When the operation was first revealed on 17 January, Kensington Palace said she was not expected to make any appearances until at least Easter. That, they insist, has not changed. So why the frenzied conspiracies?

 

Perhaps because Catherine remains media catnip, and is incredibly important to the royal public image; three months without her was always going to be a challenge. Things would arguably have been more manageable were it not for the unhappy coincidence of King Charles’s announcements of his prostate treatment and cancer .

 

While Catherine had requested privacy over her diagnosis, the king and his Buckingham Palace press team opted to be more open, though the type of cancer has not been revealed. Most were happy to accept this as the princess’s right, yet the fact the king has remained somewhat visible, even while undergoing cancer treatment, made the absolute silence from Catherine all the more evident.

 

What tipped online mutterings into febrile speculation was when the Prince of Wales pulled out of the funeral of his godfather on 27 February, citing only a “personal matter”. The Mother’s Day photo was evidently an attempt to settle the mood; instead, its inept handling turned an uncomfortable drama into a full-blown crisis. Even a brief apology, signed in Catherine’s name, did not help. Either palace advisers had not grasped the gravity of their mistake, or – just possibly – the royal couple, so protective of their children’s privacy, were resisting their guidance.

 

Can they recover from it? Only if they change tack, says Emma Streets, an associate director at the communications agency Tigerbond who specialises in crisis PR. There remains a lot of empathy towards the princess, she says, adding: “I think [the episode] proves that she’s only human. But it’s crucial that the palace do not repeat a [mistake] on this scale.”

 

They will have to provide some form of update on the princess’s health by Easter, says Streets, whether or not Catherine is well enough to resume normal public appearances. “I think they really need to maintain that timeline to avoid any further controversy. So the pressure is on for the comms team to handle that without putting a foot wrong, and really, meticulously, plan.”

 

Streets says the royal family’s long-practised strategy of “never complain, never explain” is outdated. “That doesn’t work today, given the speed that this story will spread online, and I think that massively needs addressing from a strategic point of view.”

 

That view is echoed by Lynn Carratt, the head of talent at digital specialists Press Box PR, who says she has been “racking my brains” trying to understand why Kensington Palace did not simply release the undoctored image. “They could have put this to bed straight away,” she says.

 

“There needs to be an overhaul of their comms strategy and a bit of honesty and trust with the press. I kind of understand why there isn’t – but they need a whole new approach to PR, to bring it into the modern world of the media.

 

“We’re not just talking about print press and broadcast, when it’s now social media and the digital space where people are consuming the news. It’s very different, and you need to do PR differently for that space.”


Pranksters dupe Tucker Carlson into believing they edited Princess of Wales photo

 

Josh Pieters and Archie Manners posed as ‘George’, a Kensington Palace employee, in interview with former Fox News host

 

Richard Luscombe

Sat 16 Mar 2024 16.58 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/16/pranksters-dupe-tucker-carlson-kate-middleton

 

Pranksters claiming to be a Kensington Palace employee fired over the Kate Middleton edited photograph fiasco say they duped former Fox News host Tucker Carlson into interviewing them for his streaming show.

 

In a video posted on X that has already received more than a million views, Josh Pieters and Archie Manners explained how they concocted a story about being released by the Prince and Princess of Wales for “not doing a good enough job” in manipulating a photograph of Middleton and her children that has stoked an international furore and endless conspiracy theories.

 

The “disgruntled former employee” act was apparently convincing enough to fool production staff at the Tucker Carlson Network (TCN), who invited Manners, posing as the royal couple’s former digital content creator, to a London studio and an interview with the rightwing personality.

 

“That was great, and really interesting too. I didn’t expect to be as interested in it as I was because you told a really great story,” Carlson tells Manners after listening to a made-up tale about how the infamous photograph was actually taken by Middleton’s uncle in December, and that a Christmas tree in the background had to be edited out.

 

The pranksters, whose YouTube channel Josh & Archie showcases a series of celebrity hoaxes, told Deadline they “stroked Carlson’s ego” by offering their story as an exclusive because “mainstream media in the UK wouldn’t touch it”.

 

They convinced TCN researchers of their authenticity by creating a fake contract of employment that featured the words Every Little Helps, the motto of the British supermarket chain Tesco, in Latin on a Kensington Palace crest, and a clause in which the royals reserved the right to “amputate one limb of their choosing” if Manners failed a probationary period.

 

“If Tucker Carlson’s people read this, why on earth would they let you on the show?” Pieters says in the video.

 

Manners told Deadline that following the interview, TCN told him it would be aired early the next week, but that he and Pieters decided to break cover now to avoid misinformation being broadcast to the network’s 530,000 followers on X.

 

“We didn’t want to cause any more rumors, that are not true, to go out to lots and lots of people,” he said. “We just didn’t want to be too worthy about that in our video.”

 

In the interview, Carlson questions Manners about the photograph, which was recalled by several photo agencies when numerous anomalies were discovered. A subsequent palace statement explaining Middleton was experimenting with editing “like many amateur photographers do” failed to offer reassurance, and set in motion a chain of headline-dominating events that even prompted questions at the White House.

 

“When William and Kate put that photo out, they knew that photo was taken at Christmas, and they put it out alongside a statement wishing everyone a happy Mother’s Day, and told the world that William took it,” Manners tells Carlson.

 

“He didn’t take it. Gary Goldsmith [Middleton’s uncle] took it.”

 

In their initial emailed approach to TCN, the pair posed as a palace employee named George, who said he was “about to be scapegoated” for the furore and “in the process of being let go”.

 

“I am all too aware of the Royal Family’s ability to throw people like me under the bus in order to protect their reputation,” the email states.

 

The Guardian has contacted TCN for comment.


Friday 15 March 2024

Fast fashion: The dumping ground for unwanted clothes - BBC News

France’s lower house votes to limit ‘excesses’ of fast fashion with environmental surcharge

 


France’s lower house votes to limit ‘excesses’ of fast fashion with environmental surcharge

 

Measure is part of package aimed at limiting pollution associated with cheap, imported clothes

 

Agence France-Presse

Fri 15 Mar 2024 02.41 CET

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/15/france-fast-fashion-law-environmental-surcharge-lower-house-votes

 

France’s lower house of parliament has backed a string of measures to make low-cost fast fashion, especially items from Chinese mass producers, less attractive to buyers.

 

Thursday’s vote makes France the first country in the world “legislating to limit the excesses of ultra fast fashion”, said Christophe Bechu, minister for the ecological transition. The measures still require a vote in the Senate.

 

Key measures include a ban on advertising for the cheapest textiles, and an environmental charge on low-cost items.

 

The French clothes market has been flooded with cheap imported clothes, while several homegrown brands have declared bankruptcy.

 

But the main arguments put forward by Horizons – the party allied to President Emmanuel Macron submitting the draft law – were environmental.

 

 

“Textile is the most polluting industry,” said Horizons deputy Anne-Cecile Violland, adding that the sector accounted for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions and was a major polluter of water.

 

France will apply criteria such as volumes of clothes produced and turnover speed of new collections in determining what constitutes fast fashion, according to the law.

 

Violland noted Chinese company Shein and its “7,200 new clothing items a day” was a prime example of intensive fashion production.

 

Once the law comes into force precise criteria will be published in a decree.

 

Fast fashion producers will be forced to inform consumers about the environmental impact of their output.

 

A surcharge linked to fast fashion’s ecological footprint of €5 (£4.20) an item is planned from next year, rising to €10 by 2030. The charge cannot, however, exceed 50% of an item’s price tag.

 

Violland said the proceeds from the charge would be used to subsidise producers of sustainable clothes, allowing them to compete more easily.

 

A measure to limit advertising for fast fashion was also approved, although conservative lawmaker Antoine Vermorel-Marques said “a ban on advertising for textiles, especially fashion, spells the end of fashion”.

 

An initiative brought by leftwing and Green party deputies to include minimum penalties for producers breaking the rules as well as import quotas and stricter workplace criteria in the industry into the new law was struck down.

 

High-end fashion is a cornerstone of the French economy thanks to leading global luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Hermes, Dior and Cartier.

 

But the French lower-end fashion segment has lost ground to European rivals Zara, H&M and, more recently, to Chinese behemoths Shein and Temu.

Thursday 14 March 2024

Stumper and Fielding, Portobello Road. A quintessential Gentlemen's and ...





107 Portobello Road
W11 2QB London, United Kingdom
020 7229 5577


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Wednesday 13 March 2024

MERCHANT IVORY (2023) trailer | BFI Flare 2024 / The secret shocking truth about Merchant Ivory


‘I got you an Oscar. Why do I need to pay you?’ The secret shocking truth about Merchant Ivory

 

They were the box-office titans behind sumptuous period masterpieces. Yet underneath, reveals a new warts-and-all film, they were skint, stressed, prone to blood-curdling bust-ups – and ping-ponging between lovers

 

Ryan Gilbey

Tue 12 Mar 2024 16.21 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/mar/12/merchant-ivory-oscar-shocking-truth-emma-thompson-anthony-hopkins-howards-end

 

If you were asked to guess which prestigious film-making duo had spent their career scratching around desperately for cash, trying to wriggle out of paying their cast and crew, ping-ponging between lovers, and having such blood-curdling bust-ups that their neighbours called the police, it might be some time before “Merchant Ivory” sprang to mind. But a new warts-and-all documentary about the Indian producer Ismail Merchant and the US director James Ivory makes it clear that the simmering passions in their films, such as the EM Forster trilogy of A Room With a View, Maurice and Howards End, were nothing compared to the scalding, volatile ones behind the camera.

 

From their initial meeting in New York in 1961 to Merchant’s death during surgery in 2005, the pair were as inseparable as their brand name, with its absence of any hyphen or ampersand, might suggest. Their output was always more eclectic than they got credit for. They began with a clutch of insightful Indian-set dramas including Shakespeare-Wallah, their 1965 study of a troupe of travelling actors, featuring a young, pixieish Felicity Kendal. From there, they moved on to Savages, a satire on civilisation and primitivism, and The Wild Party, a skewering of 1920s Hollywood excess that pipped Damien Chazelle’s Babylon to the post by nearly half a century.

 

Merchant rose at dawn and stole telegrams that agents had sent to their actors, urging them to down tools

 

It was in the 1980s and early 1990s, though, that Merchant Ivory became box-office titans, cornering the market in plush dramas about repressed Brits in period dress. Those literary adaptations launched the careers of Hugh Grant, Helena Bonham Carter, Rupert Graves and Julian Sands, and helped make stars of Emma Thompson and Daniel Day-Lewis. Most were scripted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who had been with them, on and off, since their 1963 debut The Householder; she even lived in the same apartment building in midtown New York. Many were scored by Richard Robbins, who was romantically involved with Merchant while also holding a candle for Bonham Carter. These films restored the costume drama to the position it had occupied during David Lean’s heyday. The roaring trade in Jane Austen adaptations might never have happened without them. You could even blame Merchant Ivory for Bridgerton.

 

Though the pictures were uniformly pretty, making them was often ugly. Money was always scarce. Asked where he would find the cash for the next movie, Merchant replied: “Wherever it is now.” After Jenny Beavan and John Bright won an Academy Award for the costumes in A Room With a View, he said: “I got you your Oscar. Why do I need to pay you?” As Ivory was painstakingly composing each shot, Merchant’s familiar, booming battle cry would ring out: “Shoot, Jim, shoot!”

 

‘You never went to bed without dreaming of ways to kill Ismail’ … Ismail Merchant, left, and James Ivory in Trinidad and Tobago, while making The Mystic Masseur. Photograph: Mikki Ansin/Getty Images

 

Heat and Dust, starring Julie Christie, was especially fraught. Only 30 or 40% of the budget was in place by the time the cameras started rolling in India in 1982; Merchant would rise at dawn to steal the telegrams from the actors’ hotels so they didn’t know their agents were urging them to down tools. Interviewees in the documentary concede that the producer was a “conman” with a “bazaar mentality”. But he was also an incorrigible charmer who dispensed flattery by the bucketload, threw lavish picnics, and wangled entrées to magnificent temples and palaces. “You never went to bed without dreaming of ways to kill him,” says one friend, the journalist Anna Kythreotis. “But you couldn’t not love him.”

 

Stephen Soucy, who directed the documentary, doesn’t soft-pedal how wretched those sets could be. “Every film was a struggle,” he tells me. “People were not having a good time. Thompson had a huge fight with Ismail on Howards End because she’d been working for 13 days in a row, and he tried to cancel her weekend off. Gwyneth Paltrow hated every minute of making Jefferson in Paris. Hated it! Laura Linney was miserable on The City of Your Final Destination because the whole thing was a shitshow. But you watch the films and you see no sense of that.”

 

Soucy’s movie features archive TV clips of the duo bickering even in the midst of promoting a film. “Oh, they were authentic all right,” he says. “They clashed a lot.” The authenticity extended to their sexuality. The subject was not discussed publicly until after Ivory won an Oscar for writing Call Me By Your Name: “You have to remember that Ismail was an Indian citizen living in Bombay, with a deeply conservative Muslim family,” Ivory told me in 2018. But the pair were open to those who knew them. “I never had a sense of guilt,” Ivory says, pointing out that the crew on The Householder referred to him and Merchant as “Jack and Jill”.

 

Soucy had already begun filming his documentary when Ivory published a frank, fragmentary memoir, Solid Ivory, which dwells in phallocentric detail on his lovers before and during his relationship with Merchant, including the novelist Bruce Chatwin. It was that book which emboldened Soucy to ask questions on screen – including about “the crazy, complicated triangle of Jim, Ismail and Dick [Robbins]” – that he might not otherwise have broached.

 

 

The documentary is most valuable, though, in making a case for Ivory as an underrated advocate for gay representation. The Remains of the Day, adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-winning novel about a repressed butler, may be the duo’s masterpiece, but it was their gay love story Maurice that was their riskiest undertaking. Set in the early 20th century, its release in 1987 could scarcely have been timelier: it was the height of the Aids crisis, and only a few months before the Conservative government’s homophobic Section 28 became law.

 

“Ismail wasn’t as driven as Jim to make Maurice,” explains Soucy. “And Ruth was too busy to write it. But Jim’s dogged determination won the day. They’d had this global blockbuster with A Room With a View, and he knew it could be now or never. People would pull aside Paul Bradley, the associate producer, and say: ‘Why are they doing Maurice when they could be making anything?’ I give Jim so much credit for having the vision and tenacity to make sure the film got made.”

 

Their films were dismissed by the director Alan Parker as 'the Laura Ashley school' of cinema

 

Merchant Ivory don’t usually figure in surveys of queer cinema, though they are part of its ecosystem, and not only because of Maurice. Ron Peck, who made the gay classic Nighthawks, was a crew member on The Bostonians. Andrew Haigh, director of All of Us Strangers, landed his first industry job as a poorly paid assistant in Merchant’s Soho office in the late 1990s; in Haigh’s 2011 breakthrough film Weekend, one character admits to freeze-framing the naked swimming scene in A Room With a View to enjoy “Rupert Graves’s juddering cock”. Merchant even offered a role in Savages to Holly Woodlawn, the transgender star of Andy Warhol’s Trash, only for her to decline because the fee was so low.

 

The position of Merchant Ivory at the pinnacle of British cinema couldn’t last for ever. Following the success of The Remains of the Day, which was nominated for eight Oscars, the brand faltered and fizzled. Their films had already been dismissed by the director Alan Parker as representing “the Laura Ashley school” of cinema. Gary Sinyor spoofed their oeuvre in the splendid pastiche Stiff Upper Lips (originally titled Period!), while Eric Idle was plotting his own send-up called The Remains of the Piano. The culture had moved on.

 

There was still an appetite for upper-middle-class British repression, but only if it was funny: Richard Curtis drew on some of Merchant Ivory’s repertory company of actors (Grant, Thompson, Simon Callow) for a run of hits beginning with Four Weddings and a Funeral, which took the poshos out of period dress and plonked them into romcoms.

 

The team itself was splintering. Merchant had begun directing his own projects. When he and Ivory did collaborate, the results were often unwieldy, lacking the stabilising literary foundation of their best work. “Films like Jefferson in Paris and Surviving Picasso didn’t come from these character-driven novels like Forster, James or Ishiguro,” notes Soucy. “Jefferson and Picasso were not figures that audiences warmed to.” Four years after Merchant’s death, Ivory’s solo project The City of Your Final Destination became mired in lawsuits, including one from Anthony Hopkins for unpaid earnings.

 

Soucy’s film, though, is a reminder of their glory days. It may also stoke interest in the movies among young queer audiences whose only connection to Ivory, now 95, is through Call Me By Your Name. “People walk up to Jim in the street to shake his hand and thank him for Maurice,” says Soucy. “But I also wanted to include the more dysfunctional side of how they were made. Hopefully it will be inspiring to young film-makers to see that great work can come out of chaos.”

 

Merchant Ivory is showing in the BFI Flare festival at BFI Southbank, London, on 16 and 18 March


Tuesday 12 March 2024

How Kate manipulated the royal Mother's Day family picture / Even Photoshop Can’t Erase Royals’ Latest P.R. Blemish


NEWS ANALYSIS

Even Photoshop Can’t Erase Royals’ Latest P.R. Blemish

 

A Mother’s Day photo was meant to douse speculation about the Princess of Wales’ health. It did the opposite — and threatened to undermine trust in the royal family.

 



Mark Landler

By Mark Landler

Reporting from London

March 11, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/world/europe/kate-middleton-photo-princess-wales.html?searchResultPosition=4

 

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a digitally altered picture of an absent British princess is apparently worth a million.

 

That seemed to be the lesson after another day of internet-breaking rumors and conspiracy theories swirling around Catherine, Princess of Wales, who apologized on Monday for having doctored a photograph of herself with her three children that circulated on news sites and social media on Sunday.

 

It was the first official photo of Catherine since before she underwent abdominal surgery two months ago — a cheerful Mother’s Day snapshot, taken by her husband, Prince William, at home. But if it was meant to douse weeks of speculation about Catherine’s well-being, it had precisely the opposite effect.

 

Now the British royal family faces a storm of questions about how it communicates with the press and public, whether Catherine manipulated other family photos she released in previous years, and whether she felt driven to retouch this photo to disguise the impact of her illness.

 

It adds up to a fresh tempest for a royal family that has lurched from one self-created crisis to another. Unlike previous episodes, this involves one of the family’s most popular members, a commoner-turned-future queen. It also reflects a social media celebrity culture driven in part by the family itself, one that is worlds away from the intrusive paparazzi pictures that used to cause royals, including a younger Kate Middleton, chagrin.

 

“Like so many millennial celebrities, the Princess of Wales has built a successful public image by sharing with her audience a carefully curated version of her personal life,” said Ed Owens, a royal historian who has studied the relationship between the monarchy and the media. The manipulated photograph, he said, is damaging because, for the public, it “brings into question the authenticity” of Catherine’s home life.

 

Authenticity is the least of it: the mystery surrounding Catherine’s illness and prolonged recovery, out of the public eye, has spawned wild rumors about her physical and mental health, her whereabouts, and her relationship with William.

 

The discovery that the photo was altered prompted several international news agencies to issue advisories — including one from The Associated Press that was ominously called a “kill notification” — urging news organizations to remove the image from their websites and scrub it from any social media.

 

Mr. Owens called the incident a “debacle.”

 

“At a time when there is much speculation about Catherine’s health, as well as rumors swelling online about her and Prince William’s private lives,” he said, “the events of the last two days have done nothing to dispel questions and concerns.”

 

Kensington Palace, where Catherine and William have their offices, declined to release an unedited copy of the photograph on Monday, which left amateur visual detectives to continue scouring the image for signs of alteration in the poses of the princess and her three children, George, Charlotte, and Louis.

 

The A.P. said its examination yielded evidence that there was “an inconsistency in the alignment of Princess Charlotte’s left hand.” The image has a range of clear visual inconsistencies that suggest it was doctored. A part of a sleeve on Charlotte’s cardigan is missing, a zipper on Catherine’s jacket and her hair is misaligned, and a pattern in her hair seems clearly artificial.

 

Samora Bennett-Gager, an expert in photo retouching, identified multiple signs of image manipulation. The edges of Charlotte’s legs, he said, were unnaturally soft, suggesting that the background around them had been shifted. Catherine’s hand on the waist of her youngest son, Louis, is blurry, which he said could indicate that the image was taken from a separate frame of the shoot.

 

Taken together, Mr. Bennett-Gager said, the changes suggested that the photo was a composite drawn from multiple images rather than a single image smoothed out with a Photoshop program. A spokesman for Catherine declined to comment on her proficiency in photo editing.

 

Even before Catherine’s apology, the web exploded with memes of “undoctored” photos. One showed a bored-looking Catherine smoking with a group of children. Another, which the creator said was meant to “confirm she is absolutely fine and recovering well,” showed the princess splashing down a water slide.

 

Beyond the mockery, the royal family faces a lingering credibility gap. Catherine has been an avid photographer for years, capturing members of the royal family in candid situations: Queen Camilla with a basket of flowers; Prince George with his great-grandfather, Prince Philip, on a horse-drawn buggy.

 

The palace has released many of these photos, and they are routinely published on the front pages of British papers (The Times of London splashed the Mother’s Day picture over three columns). A former palace official predicted that the news media would now examine the earlier photographs to see if they, too, had been altered.

 

That would put Kensington Palace in the tricky position of having to defend one of its most effective communicators against a potentially wide-ranging problem, and one over which the communications staff has little control. After a deluge of inquires about the photograph, the palace left it to Catherine to explain what happened. She was contrite, but presented herself as just another frustrated shutterbug with access to Photoshop.

 

“Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” she wrote on social media. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.”

 

Catherine’s use of social media sets her apart from older members of the royal family, who rely on the traditional news media to present themselves. When King Charles III taped a video message to mark Commonwealth Day, for example, Buckingham Palace hired a professional camera crew that was paid for by British broadcasters, a standard arrangement for royal addresses.

 

When Charles left the hospital after being treated for an enlarged prostate, he and Queen Camilla walked in front of a phalanx of cameras, smiling and waving as they made their way to their limousine.

 

Catherine was not seen entering or leaving the hospital for her surgery, nor were her children photographed visiting her. That may reflect the gravity of her health problems, royal watchers said, but it also reflects the determination of William and Catherine to erect a zone of privacy around their personal lives.

 

William, royal experts said, is also driven by a desire not to repeat the experience of his mother, Diana, who was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997 after a high-speed pursuit by photographers. Catherine, too, has been victimized by paparazzi, winning damages from a French court in 2017 after a celebrity magazine published revealing shots of her on vacation in France.

 

Last week, grainy photos of Catherine riding in a car with her mother surfaced on the American celebrity gossip site TMZ. British newspapers reported the existence of the photos but did not publish them out of deference to the palace’s appeal that she be allowed to recuperate in privacy.

 

Catherine and William are not the only members of their royal generation who have sought to exercise control over their image. Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, posted photos of themselves on Instagram, even using their account to announce their withdrawal from royal duties in 2020.

 

Catherine’s embrace of social media to circulate her pictures is a way of reclaiming her life from the long lenses of the paparazzi. But the uproar over the Mother’s Day photo shows that this strategy comes with its own risks, not least that a family portrait has added to the very misinformation about her that it was calculated to counteract.

 

On Monday afternoon, Catherine found herself back in traditional royal mode. She was photographed, fleetingly, in the back of a car with William as he left Windsor Castle for a Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey. Kensington Palace said she was on her way to a private appointment.

 

Gaia Tripoli and Lauren Leatherby contributed reporting.

 

Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades. More about Mark Landler