Why is the British royal family so bad at PR?

Its not a new question. But it has been particularly top of mind since Kategate the cauldron of conspiracy theories that began to boil over in recent weeks, after Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, had not been seen in public since December.

As wed later learn, when Kate announced on March 22 that she has cancer , it was an extraordinarily fraught situation. But at every turn, Kensington Palaces antiquated public relations apparatus made it even worse, allowing unhinged rumors to fill the information void (including when palace officials threw the princess herself under the bus with her botched photo-editing job ). The royals longstanding PR policy is to say as little as possible and try to ride out the storm. Sometimes, though, they dont appear to realize its a Category 5 hurricane. Its an approach that feels stuck in the pre-internet and pre-social media age.

In the four years since they effectively left the family, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, have criticized the firm and raised some serious allegations against the royals PR apparatus. (In a bombshell 2021 interview, Oprah Winfrey infamously asked Meghan if she was silent or silenced. ) On screen, the behind-the-times nature of the palace was a recurring theme in the later seasons of Netflixs The Crown.

Now, these questions also underpin Scoop, a coincidentally timely Netflix film that premieres Friday. Though it deals with a vastly different royal-related news firestorm, it resurfaces a lot of the same confounding impressions about the palaces PR operation and its disconnect from the modern world.