Baby News Keeps Royals in the Headlines

LONDON - When Andreas Whittam Smith, the founder and first editor of The Independent, started the new British daily in 1986, he made a gallant but ultimately doomed attempt to keep the royals out of his upmarket newspaper.

“I decided . . . that the paper would give no coverage whatever to the Royal Family unless the story had solid news value,” he wrote earlier this year, recalling his diktat that his journalists should avoid the royal gossip and trivia that dominated the rest of the press at the time.

Some of us on the founding team at The Independent always suspected an element of typically shrewd marketing strategy on the part of The Independent's founder. It set off a debate that helped to get the newspaper noticed.

When the paper subsequently marked the birth of a ne w royal by publishing a single, restrained paragraph, that itself became a talking point.

So, how do Tuesday's banner headlines announcing that the Duchess of Cambridge is expecting her first child measure up to the Whittam Smith test?

True, her husband Prince William is second in line to the throne, and the unborn child is destined one day to be the King or Queen of England. So the much anticipated announcement might be regarded as having solid news value.

That said, the British press, The Independent included, probably told us more than we needed to know about the hyperemesis gravidarum, or acute morning sickness, from which the former Kate Middleton is suffering.

As my colleague Sarah Lyall reports, no one is more delighted about the news of the pregnancy than the country's tabloid press. It now has something positive to write about after the Leveson inquiry into media ethics revealed the murkier side of media intrusion.

The newspapers have been behaving themselves lately in anticipation of the publication last week of the voluminous report from Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson.

They shunned the opportunity to publish topless photographs of the Duchess that were widely available on the Internet in September. And only one title, Rupert Murdoch's Sun, broke a self-imposed media ban on shots of a naked Prince Harry partying in Las Vegas the previous month.

Now an impending royal birth has come to the rescue.

“Extinguish all rational thought,” wrote John Walsh in The Independent. “Abandon all hope that the Chancellor's Autumn Statement will make the front pages this week. Stand aside, Leveson Inquiry and its fretful consequences. There's a royal fetus out there and it's instantly eclipsed all other news.”

Mr. Whittam Smith's attempts to limit royal coverage were probably always a lost cause. “I cannot say that my colleagues firmly supported me in this policy,” he wrote in March. “They longed to do just a little bit of royal gossip.”

Press tittle-tattle about the private lives of the Royals ceased to be mere gossip when the marriages of the two elder sons of Queen Elizabeth broke down in 1992. Even the monarch herself described it in a formal speech as her annus horribilis, a horrible year.

With the death Princess Diana, her divorced daughter-in-law, in a Paris car crash in 1997, things only got worse. Public and press complained that the monarch failed to join in the displays of public grief surrounding the event and some republicans were even predicting the end of the monarchy.

A decade and a half on, the 86-year-old monarch has never been more popular. Her reputation has been enhanced by this year's celebrations marking her 60 years on the throne and by her good-humored role in this year's London Olympic Games, ostensibly jumping out of a helicopter alo ngside Daniel Craig's James Bond.

Now there is a royal baby coming for the British to gush over. “We're expecting,” proclaimed The Times in its domestic newspaper edition, borrowing the royal “we” to make it sound as if the whole nation was involved.

So where does it all leave republicans?

Amol Rajan, blogging at The Independent, conceded that “even those of us who think your public role a total fraud shall raise a glass to you this evening.”

But he suggested that, among other things, the royal couple might consider sending the little prince or princess to a normal school and get a decent suburban townhouse in which to raise their family.

“We'll have a royal family that actually bears some re semblance to the people of this country,” he suggested.

Judging by the outpourings from press and public on Tuesday, Mr. Rajan should not hold his breath.