Isla Campbell on royal engagements, palace protocol, and an unrelated four-hour film everyone’s still discussing
A relatively quiet week on the royal diary front, engagement-wise, with no major announcements, no significant overseas visits, and no palace briefings substantial enough to fill a full column on their own, which gave the commentariat plenty of spare attention to redirect elsewhere entirely. Naturally, that spare attention landed on a new documentary about a billionaire with no connection to Buckingham Palace whatsoever, and precious little overlap with anything I’d normally cover in this space.
Still, worth noting for readers who track cultural moments the way we track royal ones, because the two worlds do occasionally rhyme in interesting ways: the poster gallery breakdown and the film itself have become their own kind of national event, four hours and all, complete with the sort of public disagreement usually reserved for succession gossip or a genuinely contentious royal interview.
What strikes me, having covered royal affairs for long enough to recognise a genuine cultural moment when one arrives, is how similar the mechanics are. A single figure, already carrying enormous public projection onto them, becomes a vessel for arguments about far larger questions the public actually wants to have, wealth, power, legitimacy, all of it. We’ve watched this play out with royal figures for decades. It’s genuinely interesting to see the exact same dynamic apply just as forcefully to a modern billionaire, four hours of cinema standing in for what used to be handled through decades of tabloid coverage.
The promotional posters have generated a controversy of their own, running roughly parallel to how a leaked royal photograph might once have dominated a news cycle entirely on its own merits. The four-hour retrospective piece is worth a look if palace-watching feels slow this week, which, given the current diary, it genuinely does.
I mentioned the comparison to a colleague on the royal desk today, half expecting her to dismiss it as an unrelated tangent, and instead she pointed out that the poster controversy has actually generated more public engagement this week than our own coverage of a minor engagement announcement did, which is either a useful lesson in modern attention economics or a slightly depressing one, depending on how invested you are in the royal beat specifically.
Whether that’s a useful lesson in modern attention economics or a slightly depressing one depends, I suppose, on how invested you personally are in the royal beat, though I’ll admit I’ve spent more of this week reading about billionaires than palace protocol, which is not a sentence I expected to write when I started this column.
More royal coverage at my author page.