Sir Keir Starmer's landslide victory in the U.K. elections on Thursday may hold a key lesson for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in their fraught dealings with the media.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex effectively declared open warfare on the British press with a series of lawsuits in 2019 and accused the wider royal family of betrayal for not publicly supporting them.
However, since their more confrontational approach to the media began, their popularity in the U.K. has collapsed, raising questions about whether their decision to fight was a good one.
Over the same period, Britain's Labour Party leadership has transitioned from Jeremy Corbyn, a socialist who also battled the press but sunk to a crushing defeat, to Starmer, a center-left leader who won a landslide victory in Thursday's vote.
The new prime minister endured a major campaign against him from some of the very same newspapers that have targeted Harry and Meghan but—like the monarchy—never fought back.
Furthermore, polling indicates Starmer maintained significant support among the readerships of those very newspapers, confounding a key plank of Harry's argument about the media.
Prince Harry and the British Press
Harry has set out his views on the media in a detailed witness statement filed as part of his lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch's media empire.
"Whoever you are," Harry wrote, "if you are of interest to the press at that time, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, whoever you're with—if you're in private or if you're in public—you are a target. There is nowhere to hide.
"You become a victim of their business model. They claim to hold public figures to account, but they pick and choose depending on what they can get in return, (e.g. access/favours/influence) while refusing to hold themselves accountable," the prince added.
"If they're supposedly policing society, who on earth is policing them, when even successive governments are scared of alienating the press because position is power, and the closeness of relationship and lack of accountability between the two, means democracy as we know it fails? It is incredibly worrying for the entire U.K.
"Our country is judged globally by the state of our press and our government," Harry continued, "both of whose reputations I believe are currently at rock bottom due to this apparent co-dependency.
"Democracy fails when your press fails to scrutinize and hold the government accountable, and instead choose to get into bed with them so they can ensure the status quo."
Harry also gave insight into his view of the relationship between press and public in his March 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview: "If the source of the information is inherently corrupt or racist or biased, then that filters out to the rest of society."
In other words, Harry views the media as forming a corrupt pact with politicians they believe they can benefit from in a way that then suffocates democracy by poisoning the well of information.
From that perspective, it is easy to see why Harry would want to fight to defeat this malign force. However, there is an alternate view that the bond between readers and media brands is more informal, with the former perfectly capable of ignoring the latter.
How Readers Supported Starmer Despite Newspaper Preference
Polling by Redfield & Wilton in the U.K. showed as recently as June that readers of the very newspapers that vehemently criticized the Labour leader were preparing to go out and vote for him.
Its analysis read: "Labour also leads among those who read more conservative newspapers, including The Daily Express (41% to 27%), The Daily Mail (37% to 24%), and The Telegraph (34% to 21%)."
And among readers of The Sun, Murdoch's U.K. newspaper, which Harry is suing, 43 percent said they planned to vote Labour, compared to 22 percent for the Conservatives.
The data is striking not only because Starmer survived a tidal wave of negativity from right-wing newspapers but also because he did so without particularly fighting back.
And that speaks to the core fissure between Harry and his family. The prince was asking the royals to enter open conflict with the press in defense of Meghan, but King Charles III held to their famous "never complain, never explain" mantra.
Harry, though, said that silence was "betrayal." None of this necessarily means the prince was wrong to accuse the media of bias, but it does challenge his own cure for the malaise.
How the Rise of Keir Starmer Tells a Different Story
No two life stories are entirely the same, and the barrage Starmer received from the British press has both similarities and differences to Harry and Meghan's experience.
The prince's determination to take on the media has its roots in his mother Princess Diana's death, Meghan's experiences of racism, and his own defense of his privacy, all of which is unique to him.
Starmer, though, was also subjected to a prolonged campaign to undermine him, including by the Daily Mail; in 2022, the U.K. newspaper ran days of coverage of what it termed the "beergate" scandal.
The Daily Mail, whose publisher was sued four times by Harry and Meghan, tried to get Starmer a criminal conviction during the coronavirus pandemic after he was photographed having a beer with his curry during a meeting with colleagues.
Starmer was cleared by the police after he said it was a work event during local election campaigning and therefore within lockdown rules. The scandal was mocked by many on social media for the way editors chronicled the number of days of coverage they had provided. For example, one Mail front page recorded that it was "Beergate: Day 13."
More recently, the buildup to the election itself has been no less dramatic, with The Daily Telegraph accusing him of being too old at age 61. The newspaper said Starmer was preparing "to suck the last remaining joy out Britain" with "a paternalist's paradise, where egalitarianism and bureaucracy reign supreme."
Another headline read: "Labour is about to give Middle England a simple choice: emigrate or give up."
Meanwhile, The Sun was supportive of the now-defeated Conservative leader Rishi Sunak throughout the campaign before a last-gasp switch to Starmer, only once it was already clear the Labour leader was going to win. This was some change from January when the newspaper announced a list of "baby killers and axe murderers saved by Starmer."
And The Sun followed up his victory with a column by controversial broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson—who once wrote that Meghan should be paraded through the streets naked.
Clarkson's take on Starmer's landslide victory read: "I have a terrible feeling, though, that with Starmer it'll be worse than ever, because I fear that underneath his Playmobil hair, he's a card-carrying socialist who's supported by a vegan, Britain-hating BLT+ army with a rainbow flag that features seven colors. Red, red, red, red, red, red and red.
"I'm sure many of you feel the same way this morning so I'm going to try to cheer you up by publishing a picture of the Voyager One space probe, which is four billion miles away from Earth," Clarkson added.
However, polling suggests Sun readers in fact do not feel the same way as 43 percent indicated they were planning to vote for Starmer.
David Yelland, a former editor of The Sun, wrote on X, formerly Twitter: "Rupert Murdoch's editors are in total chaos, they cannot afford to be on the wrong side of the biggest landslide in Labour history, a total eclipse of The Sun 'influence' cannot be contemplated so they have endorsed halfheartedly, there is now utter confusion at [sister newspaper] The Times...."
Even having won, Starmer appears to have made no effort toward retribution regarding the media. In doing so, the new prime minister has avoided what is known in PR circles as the Streisand effect, where complaining only serves to draw more attention to the criticism a public figure receives. The phrase derives from when an attorney for the American singer and actress Barbra Streisand tried to stop the publication of a photo of her cliff-top residence in Malibu, California, but it made even more people aware of the image.
It all appears to point toward the possibility that voters may be perfectly capable of ignoring the views of the newspapers they read and forming their own conclusions based on what they see and hear for themselves.
Interestingly, this also tallies with the past Newsweek analysis of how Meghan and Harry's U.K. public support held firm during a campaign of media hostility in late 2018 and throughout 2019. However, this crumbled after their own major interventions, such as quitting the palace in 2020 or the Oprah Winfrey television interview the year after.
Polling for Newsweek has shown a similar trend in America where the Sussexes' own Netflix show and a backlash over Harry's book Spare appeared to drive a temporary collapse in their support.
Jack Royston is chief royal correspondent for Newsweek, based in London. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter) at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek's The Royals Facebook page.
Do you have a question about Charles and Queen Camilla, William and Kate, Meghan and Harry, or their family that you would like our experienced royal correspondents to answer? Email royals@newsweek.com. We'd love to hear from you.
Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.
