I suppose we might all be quite wrong about what it’s like to be Pippa Middleton. I suppose that’s perfectly possible. When Hugh Laurie wrote his novel The Gun Seller, I remember being told he submitted it under a pseudonym, so terrified was he that a grasping publisher might be willing to publish any old crap provided it had the name of Stephen Fry’s mate on it. With Pippa, for all we know, the situation might be similar.
‘Great news!’ one soulless publishing automaton may have said to another. ‘Some complete nobody has sent in a manuscript about how to host godawful jamborees for men in blazers and women in Alice bands, of the exact sort that our doomed, benighted industry has been desperate to spunk up to half a million quid on, simply because we reckon it’s a curiously untapped market!’ And perhaps only then, once a lunch was fixed up, and once this mysterious author had stood up between courses, and perhaps turned around to go to the loo, did this lucky publisher say, ‘Hang on. But she looks a bit familiar. Pippa Middleton, you say? The sister-in-law of our future king? Why, I had no idea, for this was not part of the original appeal at all!’
Look, you never know. Oh, OK, you do. Really, I suppose Britain should be grateful. Britain, which has been asking itself lately, in a rather pained, are-we-being-snobbish, look-I-don’t-want-to-be-cruel sort of way, whether the Middletons might be inclined to, you know, milk their new connections a touch, well, Britain doesn’t need to ask that any more. They are.
But this is not a gripe. I know it sounds like one, but I can’t help that. To be honest, I was planning a gripe, but the more I thought about this the more my gripishness dissolved. Which was vexing, frankly. But there’s nothing tortured about this; nothing coy, sadly. No tentative plan to launch a vaguely regal-sounding line of biscuits. No plaintive wails about how money needs to come from somewhere, and that there’s really no option but to suck up to dodgy central Asian dictators. This is the real deal — a shameless cashing in on unearned celebrity status, before that status ebbs away.
This might be a great book, but I doubt it. Parties organised by the young and posh are the very worst parties in the world — full of surprisingly flighty young men who are about to get driving bans, and young girls who dress like middle-aged women to go on the prowl for boyfriends five years younger than their fathers. But that doesn’t matter at all. Post-wedding, the remaining Miss Middleton had three career options. She could have done something on which her family’s new-found fame had no bearing at all, she could have done something in which it was a help, but a more subtle one (society journalism, say), or she could have treated it like the lottery win it was.
The first would have been nice, but I cannot see any logical way to fault her for doing the third, rather than the second. Unearned privilege? Cashing in on one’s relatives? Suddenly we mind this in relation to the monarchy? Since when? A republican could find Middleton’s behaviour entirely unacceptable, but I’m not one. Thus, I can’t find a way of objecting to it. I didn’t expect that at all.
•••
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the incongruity of worrying about how to curb the press at a time when it is becoming ever more obvious that the internet, in the midst of which it increasingly sits, cannot be curbed at all. Events since then have conspired to show how right I was. I’m not sure I’ve ever been right about anything before, so please allow me to gloat.
I’m not talking about the decision of the blogger Paul Staines to leak testimony from the Leveson inquiry at a time when all papers are treading on terrified egg shells, although I could be. And I’m not talking about the mob Twitter hounding of Carine Patry Hoskins, one of the inquiry’s barristers, although I could be talking about that, too.
No, I’m talking about Fenton, a dog who chased some deer in Richmond Park and was in turn chased by his owner. Somebody shot a clip of this happening on a mobile phone, and stuck it on YouTube, and it went, as they say, viral. You must have seen it. It was on Have I Got News For You?
A few days later, anyway, the Sun tracked down dog and owner, and named the latter only as an architect called Max, who didn’t want to talk about it. The paper reported this cautiously, perhaps worried about giving the impression of invading Max the Architect’s privacy at this sensitive time.
But whoever shot the video and stuck it on YouTube didn’t worry about Max or Fenton’s privacy, did they? Nor the thousands who emailed it and posted it in places, or the 2,159,032 people who, at the time of writing, have watched the clip. You could make the same point with any real-life internet viral, and it would always be right. Increasingly, everybody has the power which was once the power of the press, and everybody has no ethics at all.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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