Phone hacking led to princes’ dislike of the press
Brothers believed intrusion they suffered during their youth would die down, says former adviser
HAVING their phones hacked in their 20s caused Princes William and Harry to lose their trust in the media, according to their former press secretary.
Miguel Head, who worked for the royal brothers for a decade, revealed the impact of the scandal on an already complicated relationship with the press that had been “shaped by what happened to them in their childhood”.
In his first interview since stepping down last May, Mr Head, who was the Duke of Cambridge’s private secretary for six years, said falling victim to Clive Goodman, the royal editor of the defunct News of the World, “was a real blow”. The ensuing phone hacking inquiry heard that the journalist, who was jailed for four months in 2007, hacked him 35 times, his brother Harry nine times and his wife, the Duchess of Cambridge, 155 times. Among the revelations were that Prince William referred to Kate Middleton as “Babykins” in a voicemail message, and had called Prince Harry in a high-pitched voice, pretending to be Chelsy Davy, his brother’s then girlfriend.
The experience may in part explain the Royal family’s preferred method of communication: Whatsapp, the encrypted messaging service. Mike Tindall, husband of Zara, the Queen’s granddaughter, has disclosed that the Duke of Sussex announced the birth of his son Archie to his cousins via the text messaging app.
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mr Tindall said the Duke had messaged Mrs Tindall to tell her the news of the safe arrival before Buckingham Palace announced it publicly. “He’ll be a good dad,” said the former England rugby player.
Speaking to the Harvard Gazette, a newspaper for the US university, Mr Head said: “The phone-hacking scandal was a real blow to their trust in the mainstream media.”
He said: “The princes were very hurt by that because they had rather hoped that the excesses of intrusion into privacy that had ultimately led Diana, Princess of Wales, to be chased down a tunnel, which led to her death, would have calmed over the years and that they would be treated with a little bit more respect.”
He said that Prince William was more of a news junkie than his brother, who, Mr Head said, found his personal relationship with the press harder.
“Their relationship with the media has been shaped by what happened to them in their childhood,” he said. “Prince William is a great consumer of news and current affairs and therefore has a respect for news and the importance of good journalism.
“He felt that the competitive nature of the British press leads them to be excellent on a world stage, to produce some of the best journalism and journalists in the world, but it leads them to conduct some great excesses as well – the way in which his parents, particularly his mother, were treated. The way in which, of course, she died.”
Mr Head added: “Prince Harry was younger when his mother died and, by his own admission, that has taken him longer to process in a different way. He has a similar view of the media to Prince William in that he believes that freedom of the press is very important. But he has always found the personal relationship harder.” Insisting that Prince Harry “gets on very well with lots of journalists”, Mr Head said the prince “felt very early on that he must lay down a red line” about how his wife, the Duchess of Sussex, was treated by the press. In November 2016, Prince Harry issued a statement accusing the media of “crossing a line” in coverage of his then girlfriend, Meghan Markle.
Mr Head said the princes “had a very healthy attitude to a lot of what was written about them, which is that they largely just completely ignored it”.
“So, our rule of thumb was we only commented reactively on stories if the stories were judged, in our view, to have a detrimental reputational impact. And the bar for that was quite high.”
Mr Head gave the interview last month in his capacity as a spring fellow at the Shorenstein Centre at Harvard University.
Given that Mike Tindall captained the England rugby team and was a member of the World Cup-winning squad during his 17-year career, it’s a brave man who might claim to be able to best him. His father Phil likes to do just that, though. “Dad keeps telling me he was better than me at rugby; he just missed out due to injury,” Tindall laughs.
Phil, 72, sitting nearby with wife, Linda, agrees on both counts: “Absolutely I was better,” he smiles.
It’s touching evidence that the teasing that has always been a part of Tindall family life has not diminished – not with their elevation into the royal inner circle in the form of Mike’s 2011 marriage to Zara Phillips, the Queen’s granddaughter, or, more poignantly, Phil being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2003.
The condition has had a devastating effect on this once physically fit, rugby-playing former bank manager and, having witnessed it first-hand, Tindall, now 40, has made dedicated efforts both to fundraise for and highlight the issues of this most distressing and variable of illnesses.
“It’s way more important to me now than ever. Having seen what my dad’s had to go through – well, you don’t want any son to see his dad have to go through exactly the same thing.”
It’s the reason we’ve gathered today at the Tindall home on the 600-acre Gatcombe estate in Gloucestershire that Mike shares with Zara, 37, and their two daughters, Mia, five, and 11-month-old Lena.
There is another, rather special,
backdrop to our meeting: the previous day, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex announced the arrival of their as-thenunnamed baby son, Archie, although the Tindalls heard the news first, via the royal cousins’ Whatsapp group.
“He’ll be a great dad,” Tindall affirms of Harry. “Obviously, he’s godfather to Lena, but we’ve got a great group of young ones in the family now. Lena and Louis are similar ages and Mia’s sort of in between Charlotte and George, and then you’ve got Peter’s children, Savannah and Isla, who are just a bit older. James [Viscount Severn, Prince Edward’s son] is not exactly the ringleader, but he’s the oldest. And Harry, he’s busy, but he loves playing with them all.”
The thirtysomething royals are said to have an affectionately bantering relationship – note Prince William welcoming his brother to the “sleep deprivation society that is parenting” – but Tindall says they’ll hold off on baby jokes. “We’ll just let him ease into it himself, find out his own way. The thing is, we’re so lucky with ours; ours have always slept, so hopefully they’ll get that as well.”
Tindall wears his royal links lightly – no doubt a tribute to his loving, down-toearth parents. Alongside brother Ian, 44, he was raised in Wakefield by Phil and Linda, a former social worker, in a happy and active outdoorsy home. “There were only four TV channels and no ipads so you had to be outside, whether it be camping, just in the garden kicking a ball around or whatever,” he recalls. “The Tindalls are slightly competitive, so wherever you had to play you had to win.” Privately educated – his headmaster called him both “an absolute joy” and “a lovable rogue”, recalls Linda – Tindall eschewed university and joined Bath Rugby aged 18, making his national debut against Ireland at Twickenham in 2000. Poignantly, the Tindalls now realise this was the same year that Phil started to show the initial symptoms of Parkinson’s, but it would be another three years until it was diagnosed.
“I couldn’t pick things up, little things like that, and there was the
‘Harry will be a great dad. We’ll let him ease into parenting his own way’
occasional shake,” Phil recalls now. “I didn’t think there was anything to it.”
In 2003, just before the family were due to fly to Australia for the Rugby World Cup, he remembers “a family gathering at my brother’s and just lying on the grass in the sunshine and my little finger was shaking. I said to them, ‘there’s something not right, it’s been doing this for a while’.” A barrage of tests confirmed Parkinson’s. “I must admit I didn’t accept it in the beginning,” says Phil.
There was also little in the way of information. “Nobody told you anything,” says Linda. “There weren’t any Parkinson’s nurses like we’ve got now, we sort of had to work things out as we went along.”
Their son admits that he, too, initially failed to absorb the immensity of the diagnosis. “I was 24, just in the middle of the pomp of what England was doing and, without sounding blasé, I didn’t really worry about it,” he says. “It didn’t really sink in for a long time. Now, looking back, I would have done things differently if I’d known what I know now. I’d be on him more in terms of ensuring he was doing things like exercise, which can help.”
For some years, in fact, the disease proved manageable. But that changed in 2011, the year the Tindall brothers married within weeks of each other – Ian in May, followed by Mike and Zara in July at Edinburgh’s Canongate Kirk. By then, Phil had undergone back surgery that left him in a wheelchair for a time but also marked a period of notable decline.
“With Parkinson’s, you need to be staying relatively fit and healthy and strong if you want to slow the deterioration down,” says Tindall. “Obviously, having a big operation on your back, you lose mobility and a lot of your muscle strength, so it’s a circular thing that spirals down.”
“Princess Anne was fantastic at the wedding – she got it all organised,” recalls Linda. “Phil didn’t have to go in to sign the register. She said ‘you wait there; I’ll come and get you, go at your speed.’ She was very thoughtful.”
Another marked deterioration came 18 months ago when Phil had ulcerative colitis and lost more than 4st in weeks.
Today, while Phil has put 2st back on, he walks with a stick and the condition has dramatically affected his posture, compacting his neck. “I’m sick of looking at the floor,” he tells me.
There are good days and bad. Out of the maelstrom of symptoms that can affect Parkinson’s sufferers, his father is affected less by dyskinesia – the jerky muscle spasms commonly associated with the condition – but his body will often freeze out of nowhere. “He could be watching TV, then when he goes to move, he can’t,” says Tindall.
It saddens him that his father cannot be the hands-on grandfather he knows he would love to be. He’s aware, too, that his “typical northern lady” mother takes the brunt in terms of care. “It’s not just physically having to lift and shift him when he can’t move, but obviously Dad gets frustrated, too,” he says. “It makes it tough for everyone.”
It’s one reason he’s so determined to raise awareness – his annual celebrity golf day, now in its seventh year, has raised £600,000 so far, and next month he’s undertaking a 750km cycle ride across the Pyrenees in four days.
“It’s called Coast to Coast to Cure, so I’m going to kill myself doing that in Dad’s birthday week. It’s going to be tough, but again, it’s got to be tough, because Dad’s life hasn’t been easy,” he says. “And everyone else who suffers with it hasn’t got it easy.”