Royalty vs. the Pursuing Press: In Stalking Diana, Fleet Street Strains the Rules

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Lowry continues with a distinctly unsettling truth: "What [Diana] clearly didn't understand when she took that fateful step, with all the boldness of an upper-class Alice, through the royal looking glass, was that she could never get back into that nice cozy private nursery again . . . As James Whitaker [the Mirror's royal-watcher], her self-confessed slave and hack-in-chief, might say with a nudge, 'You didn't know you were marrying us too, did you?' "

This has some fairly horrifying implications—till death do us part, for one—but it is so close to character that it is too bad that Whitaker, at 42 an acknowledged star among royal-watchers, did not really say it. The dapper Whitaker has concentrated on the royal family for 14 years—in the process, he says contentedly, traveling around the world several times and moving at increasingly fatter salaries from the Daily Mail to the Express to the Sun to the Star, and finally to the Mirror. He likes the royals. "They all mean a great deal to me," he says. He looks to the Queen for comfort, he says, "because she's jolly solid. We'll miss a story if it's going to upset the Queen." No evidence is offered that anyone has done so. As for the other royals, reverence has its limits. "I feel the public has a right to know anything we can tell them. My job is to report every facet of the royal beings in as much detail as possible. They are fair game."

When game is afoot, royal-watchers routinely engage in round-the-clock stakeouts, read lips with binoculars, suborn servants, hire little girls to give flowers to the royals and big girls (in the case of Prince Charles in his bachelor years) to give them kisses, chase their prey at crazy speeds in high-powered cars. There has been so much of this mad motoring that the wonder is that no member of the royal family or the public has been killed. One reporter has even been known to steal a colleague's photos. Others lay out misleading clues to send teams from rival papers in the wrong direction. Some of this is cheerful lunacy, and Photographer Steve Wood, a legendary Daily Express stalker, says he heard from a footman that "Prince Philip used to make jokes every morning at breakfast about us. The royals spend hours talking about the pranks we pull and the ways they elude us." Indeed, the Queen is said to enjoy the popular paper and latest speculations about her family.

"Some of the things I do, I am not keen on myself for doing," Whitaker admits. He has a clear conscience, however, about the anorexia story, which ran under the banner IS IT ALL GETTING TOO MUCH FOR DIANA? RUBBISH! countered the rubbishy News of the World. Thunderous denunciations of one another's outrages are standard among Fleet Street papers, and no one takes offense, because it is all part of the game that readers follow with relish. Whitaker came out of the anorexia episode thinking well of himself. As the weeks went by and Diana did not appear to have the disease, he was able to take credit, and did, for preserving her health by a timely warning.