The current narrative of “beloved king shocked by claim he said something nasty 30 years ago” is a perfect example of how, given a bit of time, the media can reinvent the very reality the media itself once created, readily flipping on its head a now inconvenient, earlier narrative.
Anyone who lived through the Princess Diana years should be able to recall that, according to the media of that time, Charles was the undoubted villain – a cold-hearted man who cheated from the start of his marriage on a young, beautiful, doting wife he never loved.
Charles wanted his old flame Camilla as his bride and future queen – and, with Diana’s untimely death in 1997 at the hands of the press pack as her car was chased through a Paris underpass late at night, he soon got his way.
Earl Spencer’s new claim in a book published this week that Charles told him, shortly after Diana’s death, that she would “soon be forgotten” fits all too snugly with that earlier narrative.
But not with the new narrative.
Now, with Charles a “kindly old king and family man battling to recover from cancer”, the sort of behaviour that made perfect sense in the earlier narrative is a nuisance. Which is why Earl Spencer is receiving a lot more pushback than he would have expected had he made such a claim back in the late 1990s.
Three decades ago, Charles was portrayed as an unpopular Prince of Wales, a man lacking the common touch of Diana, and a crank obsessed with irrelevant things like the environment and architecture. The Queen, so the story of that time went, was so unsure of his ability to rule effectively that she dared not abdicate.
Fast forward to the present day, with Queen Elizabeth II dead and Charles III head of state.
The King is now a wise elder statesman bearing lightly the heavy burden of high office, managing Britain’s tricky relations with a deranged Trump administration better than any politician, and doing it all through serious illness. Ever the good father, he is fulfilling his duties as king to provide his son, William, with the chance to raise and enjoy his young family before he himself is crowned.
We’re in permanent telenovela land. Who knows which bits of this, if any, are true. But the plot twists serve a purpose, like soap opera, to keep us entertained and distracted from the real problems we desperately need to be focusing on.
And most importantly, whichever way the plot switches, the media cash in on the drama of it all.
But there is a deeper point. The media, through sustained plot engineering, can have us believe anything – that black is white, that up is down. They can, through sheer force of a new narrative consensus, make us believe the very opposite of what we were encouraged to believe a few moments earlier.
That is why billionaires buy up newspapers. Because they can, through their ownership of everything, and most especially the media, shape our minds into believing it is a good thing that billionaires own everything.
They make us believe that any change to that order would be catastrophic.
They make us believe that our societies are in decline, not because the billionaires have siphoned off all the wealth to their off-shore accounts but because small boats are “invading” our shores.
For decades, they had us believing the planet was doing just fine despite what all the scientists said. It was simply down to each individual to be more responsible: to cycle more, to recycle more, and to switch to long-lasting lightbulbs. Now that climate chaos is upon us, they tell us we will just have to adapt to hotter summers and colder, stormier winters.
The only consistent element is that the billionaires never address their own role in engineering this ecological disaster. Their choice to prioritise rocketing profits over the health of the planet is never scrutinised by the media they own.
Last year the writer Omar El Akkad published the book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This on the West’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. One can already see how prophetic the book’s title is.
A British government led by Sir Keir Starmer that deeply colluded in the mass slaughter in Gaza is now recasting itself as an opponent, under the new leadership of Andy Burnham.
Similarly, the billionaire-owned media is slowly taking a less enthusiastic stance on Israel, doubtless hoping that Israeli voters evict prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the forthcoming general election so that the media have a freer hand to rewrite their script. Then they will gradually accept as a given that what Netanyahu did – though not Israel – was a genocide. And of course, they will have always been against it.
Any lie can be repackaged as a self-evident truth once you have absolute narrative control. The naked emperor can be magically clothed, if the media so decides.
Amid this pervasive unreliability, there is one North Star by which to navigate. Anything that benefits the billionaires cannot be trusted. As long as they are in charge, we will continue squabbling among ourselves, victims of their self-serving story-telling.
[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]
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Unless I can verify it through a trusted source (and even finding a trusted source can be extremely difficult) I assume anything I read in the media is wrong. Or at the very least, slanted in favour of a particular viewpoint. This is why I will not pay for media. The Guardian can fund its own fucking nonsense as far as I'm concerned: I worked there I know they're liars. Same with the BBC. Do I need to point out that the US media is probably worse? As to the Royal Family, people's fascination with these serial losers astonishes me. They are essentially just robber barons. I found it funny that Rupert Lowe of Restore found it hard to answer the question of whether Charles was British, in Lowe's eyes. I mean, really? Possibly time for Rupert to take a good thing about what being "British" means?
Charles was a shitlord then and he's a shitlord now. He's an appalling man, with no manners and a petulance that would go well on Donald Trump. He just looks a bit more like a ruler, and let's face it in comparison to Trump so do I and so does the drunk at the bus stop. It's a low bar. Our media overall are a bunch of out of control vultures with no interest in the concept of truth. Hence my general non-participation.
“Anything that benefits the billionaires cannot be trusted.”
Which means capitalism cannot be trusted. Ever. Which is why one cannot continually, as much of the liberal class does, support legislation which ‘benefits’ the poor and working class marginally, but also exacerbates wealth inequality by giving further wealth to corporations and monied interests, in the name of ‘pragmatic’ compromise.
There is nothing pragmatic about incremental solutions to catastrophic problems, especially when those solutions, much more often than not, make the situation worse in the long term.