News for Thursday: June 29th, 2000

Right royal rumour(BBC News)

Did you hear the one about Prince William enjoying a series of dates with Emma Parker Bowles, the 24-year-old niece of his father's consort?
Shame the pair only ever met the once - but that did not stop The People from running an article about the prince's infatuation in February 1999.
Or the News of the World scoop last August that Holly Branson, daughter of the Virgin boss, Sir Richard Branson, was a close personal friend of the prince.
Far from it - the pair last met half a lifetime ago, when as 8-year-olds they built sandcastles on the beach at Necker, Sir Richard's Caribbean retreat.
Then there was the Sunday Express article about the budding romance between William and Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, 20.
The It-girl's father fired off a missive to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), pointing out that the supposed couple had never met.
The commission issued a rebuke to the over-zealous newspaper.
As the prince prepares to enter the adult world, PCC chairman Lord Wakeham has called on the media to respect his privacy and do their best to get their facts right.
Like father, like son

Prince Charles suffered a similar fate before he wed the late Diana, Princess of Wales.
By the time the future king was in his early 20s, the number of "suitable brides" topped the 60-mark. Some he had never met.
And Princess Diana was herself no stranger to media attention, from the day she became a prospective bride until her death almost two decades later.
The Mirror ran into trouble in 1997 when it ran a front-page photo of Diana and her companion, Dodi Fayed, apparently locked in an embrace.
Through the wonders of technology, the holidaying couple had been positioned closer together to simulate a kiss.
Not amused

A year earlier, the PCC upheld the first-ever complaint by the Queen after Business Age magazine named her as the richest person in the UK.
Her majesty was not amused that the paper's speculative report wrongly estimated her personal wealth at £2.25bn.
Yet inaccurate royal stories are hardly a modern development - it is just that the stories have become a little more prurient.
In the 1950s, Women's Own magazine ran a weekly column by Marion Crawford, the former nanny of the little princesses, written as if she had been in attendance at royal events.
She had, in fact, been ostracised by the Windsors for penning a book about life inside the palace walls.
The lengthy colour printing processes of the day meant the magazine's reporters took it in turns to write the column six weeks in advance.
So when Trooping the Colour and Royal Ascot were cancelled because of rail strikes in 1955, Crawfie's Column lovingly recounted two events that had never happened.
Like many a royal rumour, the column proved to be but a fairytale.
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Queen's Civil List money frozen for 10 years(Electronic Telegraph)
By Rachel Sylvester

THE Queen is to have the money she receives from the Government through the Civil List frozen for the next 10 years, under a deal struck between Buckingham Palace and the Treasury.
Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, and the Royal Household have agreed that the funding should be set at £7.9 million a year until 2011, the same amount it has been since 1991. The Queen will have to pay for increases in her out-goings from a reserve fund, worth almost £30 million which has built up through surplus payments over the past 10 years, Treasury sources said.
The Civil List payments, used to cover staff and other royal expenses, have been based on the assumption that inflation would be 7.5 per cent, more than double the current annual rate of three per cent. At the same time, the Palace's rise in expenditure has been less than inflation over the 10-year period because millions of pounds have been saved through cost-cutting exercises.
After negotiations over the past six months, Buckingham Palace has also agreed to take on some expenses which are funded separately by the Government. This could cover the pensions of royal staff, which are paid by the Treasury but not included in the Civil List.
Although the Royal Family cannot repay money received through the Civil List, the deal will effectively mean funds being transferred back to the taxpayer. The Royal Family is said to be happy with the arrangement and Palace sources said discussions with Mr Brown had been "amicable". The Chancellor is to announce the deal before Parliament rises for the summer.
Palace officials agree that the deal struck by John Major in 1991 was too generous. The Queen gets £7.9 million, the Queen Mother £643,000 and the Duke of Edinburgh £359,000 a year. Detailed accounts of royal expenditure over the past 10 years will be published when the new deal is announced.
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William consulted over rules for editors(UK Times)
BY ANDREW PIERCE

PRINCE WILLIAM played a key role in the complex negotiations that led to the new guidelines to protect him against media intrusion.
Lord Wakeham, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, had lunch with the Prince of Wales and his two young sons at Highgrove earlier this year.
Also present was Mark Dyer, a temporary equerry to the Prince of Wales, who has become an important adviser and friend to Prince William. Mr Dyer, known as Captain Charming at St James's Palace, has been entrusted by Prince Charles with finalising arrangements for Prince William's forthcoming gap year.
Buckingham Palace and St James's Palace issued a rare joint statement applauding the PCC guidelines. The statement said: "The Queen and the Prince of Wales welcome Lord Wakeham's speech.
"In setting out clear guidelines for the future the PCC is building on the restraint shown by newspapers and magazines to Prince William and Prince Harry while they have been at school.
"Lord Wakeham's speech underlines the importance of personal privacy but recognises Prince William's special position and the legitimate public interest in him."
Lord Wakeham also spoke by telephone to Prince William at Eton. A draft of the speech was sent to the school before yesterday's launch.
At the unveiling of the new guidelines, Lord Wakeham declined to say which passages in the nine-page speech had been influenced by Prince WIlliam. He said: "He is not without an opinion on these matters. I had a lively, friendly and warm discussion with him but I would rather not be drawn on the detail. Prince William knows perfectly well what is going on."
St James's Palace also declined to comment on whether Prince William had made any amendments to the text or had made any suggestions of his own.
However, the harsh warning to the newspapers which had wrongly linked Prince William to young girls he had either not met or barely knew was thought to have emanated from Eton.
The PCC chairman said in his speech: "Such fundamental inaccuracies are unacceptable."
He said that he welcomed the input from Prince William. "It has been part of his growing-up. I found his contribution very useful."
The PCC blueprint was welcomed by the editors of tabloid newspapers.
Piers Morgan, the Editor of The Mirror, said: "There needs to be a prudent balance struck between protecting the future King from the media and using the same media to promote the trump card in what appears to be an institution in dire need of some positive publicity."
David Yelland, editor of The Sun, said: "The old era of gross invasion of privacy has gone and I will play no part in bringing it back."
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Interest in Diana exhibition wanes(Electronic Telegraph)
By Maurice Weaver

FALLING public interest in Althorp House, the former home of Diana, Princess of Wales, means that tickets will be on sale at the gate for the first time from this weekend.
Only half of the 150,000 tickets have been sold so far for the season, between July 1 and Aug 30, compared with 147,000 visitors who all paid in advance last year.
Shelley Ann Claircourt, spokesman for Earl Spencer, who owns the Northamptonshire estate, said: "It is three years since the Princess's death and we did not expect the phenomenal interest to be sustained."
Workmen were yesterday putting the finishing touches to the house, grounds and museum in readiness for Saturday's opening. New rooms in the 16th century house are being opened for viewing.
These include the 115ft picture gallery which is dominated by Van Dyke's War and Peace and features The Windsor Beauties, a collection of portraits of Charles I's female liaisons. Two state bedrooms, the Queen Mary bedroom and the Oak bedroom will also be on show.
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Sorry, says Mowlam as MPs rush to her defence(Electronic Telegraph)
By Andy McSmith, Chief Political Correspondent

MO MOWLAM said sorry yesterday for the controversy caused when she called upon the Royal Family to vacate Buckingham Palace.
She made her brief apology on her way into a police conference about drugs in Blackpool, telling reporters: "I apologise for any hurt I have caused." Later, Tony Blair made his first, equally brief, public comment on Dr Mowlam's remarks that the Queen should move to "a palace of the new century". On Tuesday, he had swiftly distanced himself from them via his spokesman, who said the Prime Minister was an ardent supporter of the monarchy.
Yesterday, Mr Blair was replying to a sarcastic question in the Commons from the Liberal Democrat MP Paul Tyler, who asked whether he would be vacating 10 Downing Street and whether it was Government policy to ask Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother to leave her London residence, Clarence House. Mr Blair told him: "I think we should all stay put."
A Downing Street spokesman said that Mr Blair had not spoken directly to Dr Mowlam about her suggestion that the royals should move out of Buckingham Palace. The Government is anxious to avoid giving the impression that they have turned on Dr Mowlam, who is much admired for the way that she has coped with a brain tumour.
A poll in yesterday's Mirror confirmed that Dr Mowlam is still the most popular member of the Cabinet by a long way. While 11 per cent of voters said they were dissatisfied with the job she is doing as Minister for the Cabinet Office, an extraordinary 60 per cent were satisfied - an "approval" rating of plus 49.
Her rating has increased in the past month, though it is not as high as it was when she was at the Northern Ireland Office. By contrast, Tony Blair had a negative score, of minus four, while the second most popular Cabinet minister behind Dr Mowlam, the Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, scored plus 17.
Yesterday, a Labour MP warned of the political repercussions if Dr Mowlam were removed from the Cabinet. Paul Flynn said: "She is the best-loved of all British politicians of any party. She has enormous support for her great courage and many people in this country, especially women, identify very strongly with her.
"I believe that she is genuinely unassailable. She can't be moved. She is a lovely human being and we are all crazy about her. We must accept that Government ministers, by taking office, are not lobotomised and are still capable of intelligent thought and should be allowed to express it."
He added:"Downing Street would be well advised to allow an intelligent discussion on what is a very serious point. Why on earth shouldn't we discuss the future of royalty in a grown-up way? There isn't support for the Royal Family as people who have stepped out of a fairy tale and have to be kept in a billionaire lifestyle for ever.
"This was accepted in previous centuries, but people are being very critical now of one family occupying eight palaces when just one of these palaces has 600 rooms. This is housing over-provision on a vast scale."
The Labour MP Diane Abbott also rushed to Miss Mowlam's defence, saying: "The Queen's accommodation, just like that of my council tenant constituents, is funded by public money and it is a reasonable subject for public debate. I am not suggesting the removal vans should go up The Mall tomorrow, but I do think it is a perfectly reasonable thing for Mo to bring up."
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Prince 'loses readers' in circulation war(Electronic Telegraph)
By Matt Born

LISTENING to the warm gurgling noises emanating from Fleet Street yesterday, it would have been easy to forget that the Press Complaints Commission was imposed on reluctant newspapers to curb their worst excesses.
Colin Myler, editor of the Sunday Mirror, praised Lord Wakeham's call for restraint yesterday as realistic and sensible and promised to continue to "respect the Prince's right to privacy". He said: "Papers have been very restrained over the past five years. We won't now go into reverse and throw it all away."
David Yelland, the Sun editor, went further, hailing Lord Wakeham as a "great civilising force on the newspaper industry and therefore on the country", before declaring: "The old era of gross invasion of privacy has gone and I will play no part in bringing it back." But then Piers Morgan, the editor of the Mirror, went and spoiled it all.
Rather than principled self-sacrifice, newspapers were only acting out of base self-interest by promising to leave Prince William alone, he said. For pictures of Prince William were, he claimed, of far less value to newspaper sales than those of Anna Kournikova or Britney Spears. Morgan said: "Prince William has been afforded almost total protection from press attention in the last few years and I'm sure he will continue to do so throughout his time at university. But the biggest problem for the Royal Family is not going to be papers such as the Mirror paying them too much interest. It will be us paying them too little.
"Recent circulation figures for front-page stories and pictures of the Royals suggest to me that the British public, and William's peer group in particular, are increasingly uninterested in the Monarchy." Morgan cited evidence to support his thesis: on the Saturday the papers published the official pictures of Prince William to mark his 18th birthday, sales of the Mirror fell by about 50,000 copies.
But the Mirror could be the exception. Sales of two other tabloids, the Sun and the Daily Express, are understood to have held steady and the circulation of The Daily Telegraph made significant gains that day. Certainly, rival newspaper executives think Morgan is being premature in penning an obituary for royal stories.
A senior executive on a rival tabloid said: "I think Piers is being disingenuous. Everyone did quite well out of the William pictures. But it was a hot day, and people were gearing up for the England-Germany football match and we all had the same shots, so it was never likely to be a blockbuster."
Worryingly for St James's Palace, the implication is that exclusive pictures of the Prince - even ones which involved infringing his privacy - would be too commercially lucrative for an editor to resist. Again, the executive disagrees. He said: "A notable change in the past couple of years is that editors are reluctant to stick their head above the parapet by publishing pictures no one else is using."
Myler also believes that the public has lost little of its interest in the royals, and Prince William in particular. He said: "Prince William is the Royal Family's biggest asset. He's a good-looking young chap who appears to be growing into a terrific young lad. My fear is that the current restraint will disappear when he becomes linked romantically with a young girl."
A story in the Sunday Express, cited by Lord Wakeham, which claimed a romance between Prince William and Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, when in fact the pair had never met, was a case in point of "ridiculous and unwarranted" intrusion, Myler says, adding: "It is that constant attention which will make it unbearable for the Prince."
The consensus among editors is that, post-Diana, there has been a shift in the public tolerance of royal stories, and that Lord Wakeham's statement captured that zeitgeist. Another red top executive said: "There is a new generation of young editors who are in tune with that new mood. If you published pictures of Prince William kissing Britney Spears, you'd put on an extra half a million sales that day, but there would be a backlash and you'd lose two million the day after.
"Given what happened to his mother, William is a special case and the rest of Fleet Street would crucify you." This week, both the Sun and Daily Mail published pictures of Peter Phillips, Princess Anne's son, on holiday with friends. Would Prince William be considered fair game in similar circumstances? Most editors think he would.
Myler said: "In the unlikely event of Prince William going on holiday in Magaluf at the height of the season, I'm sure he'd understand if we published the pictures." Similarly, if a photographer finds the Prince drunk in an Edinburgh gutter during Freshers Week, he can expect to find plenty of buyers on Fleet Street.
Charles Moore, the editor of The Daily Telegraph, is concerned that Prince William's "need for privacy should not disappear just because he's 18". He said: "Everyone has a right to privacy. This is particularly true of young people pursuing their education." Overall the consensus is that Lord Wakeham's call for restraint will be heeded, if only because editors, unlike the royals, do not have jobs for life.
One red-top editor said: "In the end, the Royal Family have the nuclear option that could blow any newspaper which strays over the limit out of the water. If Prince William says, 'They are doing to me what they did to my mother, don't buy the Daily Planet newspaper', that editor is toast."

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