Abstract
My experience of reporting royal matters began on my first day as Daily Mail medical correspondent. I had the splash “BMA probe royal way to health”. The so-called royal way was alternative or complementary medicine of the kind advocated by Prince Charles.
The next day I wrote a follow-up Page Six feature - the paper's most coveted slot. I couldn't have wished for a more spectacular start in national newspaper journalism. Yet I felt somewhat uncomfortable.
I still feel uncomfortable about the malign influence older royals have had on media coverage of health and medicine. I feel even more uncomfortable because the media did not do more to challenge Charles and his fellow royals.
Why? There is a dangerous perception that complementary medicine presents softer, gentler alternatives. This may be true, but it can result in people abandoning effective treatment for useless mumbo-jumbo. Out of all my thousands of media interviews, one stands out above all the others. Professor Michael Baum, then professor of surgery at King's College London and the Royal Marsden Hospital, was a world authority on breast cancer. He showed me a series of horrific pictures of the breasts of women who had sought alternative therapy in preference to orthodox treatment. No national newspaper would have published them. Baum insisted that their lives might have been saved by standard treatment.
Is it really fair to link their deaths to Charles' relentless campaigning? This is debatable, but his pronouncements have had a critical drip-drip effect. He and other royals are critical opinion-formers - and we in the media have been all too often their unquestioning mouthpiece.
In 1990, for example, it was reported that the health-conscious prince had awarded a royal warrant to Weetabix. This must have added a lucrative new dimension to its healthy image, but the royal seal of approval can be a death warrant. The royals did a great deal to popularise smoking. There was an unwritten rule that royalty did not smoke in public, but this did not stop them giving Benson and Hedges a royal warrant as “purveyors of cigars and cigarettes”, firstly to His Majesty King George VI and secondly to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
The company boasted about its royal warrant, even though smoking is said to have killed the last four kings of England: Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII and George VI. Its centenary catalogue noted: “Whereas the Queen's (Victoria's) attitude held back smoking in polite society, another royal figure did more than anyone else to make smoking respectable.
“Edward, Prince of Wales, was an enthusiastic smoker, and it was his emergence as the stylish leading light in London life which greatly advanced sales and had a profound effect on the future of Benson and Hedges.”
The dangers of smoking were only just becoming apparent when George VI died in 1952, so no one can be blamed for causing the smoking-related deaths of our last four kings. But the Queen Mother awarded a royal warrant to the cigarette company John Player and Son of Nottingham in 1974 – 12 years after the Royal College of Physicians highlighted the perils of smoking.
It was later reported, again in an unquestioning kind of way, that the Queen, a patron of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, took a bag of alternative remedies wherever she went, including a homeopathic remedy to combat sneezing induced by sinus trouble.
Shortly after this, Charles became president of the BMA – to its initial delight but subsequent embarrassment when he asked it to carry out an alternative medicine inquiry. This resulted in a scathing report about practices such as homeopathy, but alternative medicine remained as popular as ever. The Queen and Prince Charles, thanks to an uncritical media, seemed to hold more sway with the public in the medical arena than the BMA.
Charles' stance would have been more acceptable if he had had science on his side, but a mass of studies found no evidence that homeopathy works for anything, beyond a placebo effect. In A Scientist in Wonderland (2015), Professor Edzard Ernst, one of the world's leading complementary medicine researchers, wrote that “Prince Charles has continued to promote alternative medicine indefatigably, often showing himself unwilling or unable to distinguish between real healthcare and snake oil, or between the truth and some half-baked obsessions of his own”.
Fast forward to the present and the Heads Together campaign led by Princes William and Harry to tackle mental health stigma. This highly commendable campaign evolved out of the tragic death of their mother. But what are the chances that, like alternative medicine before it, it would have received positive media coverage even if it had been scientifically unsound?
I would like to think that journalistic life has moved on since my heady young days at the Mail.
But have they? The royals have a powerful seductive effect, not just on Joe Public, but on journalists who perceive themselves (and let's not beat about the bush here) as being more discerning, perceptive, analytical, socially aware, intellectual et al. (Alas, I must count myself among this number). Two years ago, I was among senior members of the Guild of Health Writers invited to meet William and Kate before a Guild mental health meeting (half of us met him, half her).
Did I turn down this opportunity to shake a royal hand despite my ambivalent feelings about “the Firm”? I did not. What amazed me was the turn-out. The royals have box office appeal second to none, even for seasoned hacks. A typical Guild meeting attracts 30-40 people. William and Kate generated a full house, perhaps 200 attendees, with a waiting list. Let's suppose that instead of William, who, by his own admission, is not an expert in the field, the opening speaker had been the world's top mental health specialist. Would there have been a full house? I doubt it. Royal gold-dust seems to have more pull than scientific credibility - which may explain why Charles got away with peddling so much nonsense.