King Charles III maintained the monarchy’s “never complain, never explain” stance throughout Princess Kate’s PR crisis—just as he and Queen Elizabeth II did during Meghan Markle‘s.
Kate’s recent attendance at Trooping the Colour, her first public appearance of 2024, likely marks the final chapter in a six-month absence from public life that saw the biggest scandal of her royal career.
At its height, a princess whom many commentators have said over the years never puts a foot wrong was forced to apologize for editing a Mother’s Day picture in multiple places at a point when many on social media were looking not for aesthetic perfection but for incontrovertible proof that Kate was not “missing.”
Kate and Meghan’s PR Crisis Moments
The heat of the crisis was so intense that it bounced her into a March 22 emotional video message in which she announced she had been receiving chemotherapy for cancer, a statement she delivered while sitting alone on a bench in Windsor.
A statement announcing her return to the limelight on June 14 said her health was not out of the woods, but she and Kensington Palace will be hoping that in PR terms she has indeed emerged from the shadows and returned to the light, putting hostile social media trolling behind her in the process.
And if so, she has navigated the entire six-month storm without the monarchy engaging in open public warfare with the trolls or the media, in the way Harry sought from the royal family when Meghan Markle had her own PR crisis in late 2018 and much of 2019.
Some may want to draw differences between the two experiences, and just as no two princesses are the same, no two experiences will be identical.
Meghan was subject to racist abuse and went through a major PR crisis while pregnant. Kate’s came in the aftermath of major abdominal surgery, followed by a cancer diagnosis and then chemotherapy.
Also, Kate’s health crisis was self-contained, whereas the villain status attributed to Meghan by the media was caught up in a real-life disintegration of relations with Prince William, Kate and the staff at Kensington Palace. Harry also accuses the palace of briefing against them.
However, whatever differences may exist, in both cases the strategy of the wider monarchy was the same—hunker down, say as little as possible publicly, and hope the storm blows over.
Prince Harry Says ‘Silence is Betrayal’
The observation is particularly relevant because a major component of Harry and Meghan’s argument about how things went wrong between them and the royals in recent years has been built around Harry’s contention that the family let them down.
As he put it to Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes in January 2023: “When we’re being told for the last six years, ‘We can’t put a statement out to protect you.’ But you do it for other members of the family. It becomes…there becomes a point when silence is betrayal.”
There have been other times when Harry has acknowledged that other royals experienced similar treatment by the media as Meghan and were also expected to suck it up. In fact, he even suggested in Spare that Charles and Prince William were concerned that Harry was publicly defending his wife in a way they had not done with theirs.
However, the idea that Meghan was treated differently than Kate has been a key part of the wider discussion, too. Supporters sometimes hold up as an example a denial issued by Kensington Palace in July 2019 after a plastic surgeon sought to claim that Kate received “baby Botox.”
Prince Harry’s ‘Control by Fear’ Narrative
There is, though, another key way in which Kate’s more recent PR crisis creates a new lens for viewing Harry’s past claims about his family, and that is in regard to whether his father’s stance was motivated by fear of the media.
The prince told Oprah Winfrey in their March 2021 tell-all: “I guess one of the most telling parts—and the saddest parts, I guess—was over 70 Members of Parliament, female Members of Parliament, both Conservative and Labour, came out and called out the colonial undertones of articles and headlines written about Meghan.
“Yet no one from my family ever said anything over those three years. And that hurts. But I also am acutely aware of where my family stand and how scared they are of the tabloids turning on them.
“There is what’s termed or referred to as the ‘invisible contract’ behind closed doors between the institution and the tabloids, the UK tabloids.
“If you as a family member are willing to wine, dine, and give full access to these reporters, then you will get better press.
“I think everyone needs to have some compassion for them in that situation, right? There is a level of control by fear that has existed for generations. I mean, generations.”
This account from Harry is particularly interesting in light of Kate’s experience in 2024, when the more extreme rumors were confined to social media.
The mainstream media in Britain largely took Kate’s side, though in March there were some rumblings from U.K. commentators who appeared to feel there was something the palace was hiding.
Either way, Charles coming out and denouncing the conspiracy theorists would not have required an attack on the mainstream media and therefore he need not have feared the wrath of the tabloids had he done so.
Yet, the king, as with Meghan five years earlier, remained silent, leaving Kensington Palace to deal with the storm. Some may feel this was the right decision, choosing not to add weight to unfounded gossip. Others may feel he left Kate fending for herself. Either way, he stuck to never explain, never complain.
Many of the conspiracy theories were too grotesque and defamatory to be fit for publication in Newsweek.
Some may be tempted to argue that Kate was simply fed to the wolves, just as Meghan has said was done to her, because she is not a blood royal. However, that does not quite stack up because much of the gossip targeted the reputation of Prince William, Britain’s next king, just as much as—if not more than—Kate.
It all raises questions about whether the royals were too scared of the media to back Meghan, betraying her with their silence, or whether they were simply implementing a decades-old PR strategy that has been shown to work.
Prince Harry and Meghan Do It Their Own Way
It may not be possible to ever know for sure, but one means of testing the principle that speaking out would not have helped is to look at how Harry and Meghan’s changing PR strategy has impacted their reputations and relationship with the media over time.
Harry and Meghan began a more aggressive approach to the media in late September when they began filing lawsuits against the British press.
They then quit in January 2020 before taking their first big swing at the royals through their Oprah interview in March 2021, followed by their Netflix documentary in December 2022 and Harry’s book Spare in January 2023.
However, during that period, in which they had control over their own publicity, their reputations disintegrated in Britain and took a major knock in America.
At the same time, Meghan’s lawsuit against the Mail on Sunday was so traumatizing that Harry blames the newspaper’s conduct in the case for a miscarriage she experienced in July 2020. Medical experts suggest there is no proven link between stress in pregnancy and miscarriage.
By contrast, during 2018 and 2019, when they were subject to an avalanche of hostile media coverage and online trolling, they maintained their popularity in Britain.
As Newsweek has previously tracked, regular polling by YouGov shows Meghan had a bigger fan base at the end of 2019 when she was liked by 55 percent of Brits than when they got engaged in November 2017, when she was liked by 49 percent.
Over the year of hostility, negative sentiment toward her did tick up, from 14 percent to 35 percent, but her net approval rating remained comfortably in positive numbers at plus 20. She dropped into negative territory only after they quit in January 2020.
In reality, the moments at which their popularity took hits in Britain appear to closely mirror their own attacks on the monarchy.
And that picture is repeated in the U.S., where they crashed in opinion polling commissioned by Newsweek in aftermath of Spare, though Americans have been quicker to forgive and forget. They have since returned to positive territory in the states.
Jack Royston is chief royal correspondent for Newsweek, based in London. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter) at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek‘s The Royals Facebook page.
Do you have a question about Charles and Queen Camilla, William and Kate, Meghan and Harry, or their family that you would like our experienced royal correspondents to answer? Email [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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