This is the final post in a long read on the rise and fall of private life told through royal privacy scandals. Read the first, Harry and Meghan’s Privacy Paradox, here; the second, Prince Albert’s Private Etchings, here; and the third, Princess Margaret’s not so Private Affair, here.
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The British Parliament debated a right to privacy no fewer than thirteen times before, on 13 May 1970, the Labour home secretary, the Rt. Hon. James Callaghan M.P, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Gardiner, and the Scottish Secretary, the Rt. Hon. William Ross M.P. appointed the first official inquiry in Britain into privacy.
Under the chairman, Sir Kenneth Younger, a former Labour cabinet minister, and a campaigner for homosexual law reform, the Younger Commission on Privacy, made up of nineteen politicians and public figures, convened just shy of forty lengthy hearings, to consider whether legislation was required to protect the privacy of the citizen. Britain, a country known for reserve and understatement, was finally considering legal remedies.
Up until the 1960s, few voices in Britain talked about privacy rights. While property rights were staunchly upheld, the British populace primarily relied on personal character and cultural norms to delineate the border between the public and private spheres. As Erwin Schrodinger, an Austrian physicist living in Britain in the 1950s, opined on the BBC:
“I consider the British spirit to be distinguished by a deep reluctance to intrude unnecessarily into a man’s privacy, by a great respect towards a single personality, and by a complete understanding that it may be a valuable one in spite of—or even because of—its being an individual phenomenon, deviating strongly or even quaintly from all the others.”
By the late 1960s, that quintessential British spirit was fading away.
The Younger Commission was brought together after numerous clashes over what should remain private and what warranted public scrutiny. A prominent example of such discord was the newspapers' coverage and the ensuing public fascination with the love affair between Princess Margaret and Captain Peter Townsend. But others ruptures too followed soon after. As did calls for privacy law.
In 1967, during a session in the House of Commons, Labour MP Alexander Lyon forcefully argued for a Right to Privacy, emphasising the need for individuals to be able to withdraw from public view and enjoy solitude: “There ought to be in the law a right to be left alone if one wishes to be left alone,” he said:
Lyon sought protection for “a person from any unreasonable and serious interference with his seclusion of himself, his family or his property from the public.”
Lyon's concerns had in part been triggered by the infamous Profumo affair. This was a political scandal that rocked the nation in 1963, and saw the downfall of British Secretary of State for War John Profumo, after he lied to Parliament about his affair with Christine Keeler, a model who was also involved with a Soviet naval attaché. The revelation of his deception exposed the fragility of trust in government and sparked a public outcry over national security implications. The case ignited one central question that lingered: was Profumo's clandestine transgressions relevant to his public position?
Lyon disputed its relevance. He railed against the publication of Christine Keeler's memoirs in the News of the World, in the summer of 1969, for the ‘offensive industries into the privacy of a man who is not now in public life.’ And he made a formal complaint to the Press Council.
A government watchdog banned a TV commercial advertising the serialisation, because: ‘the memories offended public feeling’. However, as with the Mirror’s poll on the love affair between Princess Margaret and Captain Peter Townsend, there was little public outcry. Indeed, the News of the World claimed that publishing ‘Confessions of Christine’ increased its readers by 150,000. Its editorial was unrepentant:
‘in the belief that the public is entitled to know what is going on, and to know authentically, we have discharged our prime duty of giving the news. A prodigious and mounting readership tacitly acknowledges the rightness of the course we have followed.’
The Daily Sketch, which had condemned the public poll on Princess Margaret’s and Peter Townsend, a decade earlier, strongly supported the publishing of Keeler’s memoirs:
‘No good will come of pretending that how a Cabinet Minister behaves in private can be separated from his job as one of the country’s leaders. For man’s character does not change when he does out of one door and goes into another.’
Slowly, a man’s private doings was becoming relevant to his public position.
Significantly, Alex Lyon’s privacy bill was concerned not only with the individual’s ‘right to keep to himself’, but with what was then new technology. Not the internet, but electronic bugging and surveillance. He worried that huge roomed-sized computers and databanks, which held vast dossiers of personal information, were being constructed.
He wasn’t the only one. There was a full blown privacy panic in play with many commentators prophesying the end of privacy.
Privacy, the Times trembled:
‘is threatened by new techniques of mass communication and concealed observation, such as bugging devices, electronic surveillance, and subliminal persuasion.’
A disconcerting report published in the London Illustrated News amplified the fears, highlighting the alarming prospect of bugging devices that might be found in a sugar cube, cuff links and even a matchbox. ‘BUGGING’S GOT TO STOP’ was the Daily Mirror — the paper that proudly published the poll about Prince Margaret’s relationship — take away. It seemed worried only about the threat to individual privacy presented by technology.
Lyon's proposed privacy bill brought a new perspective to the ongoing discussions. Although he called for a ‘right to be let alone’ the focus of concern was pivoting away from the Victorian idea of privacy, and the protection of the sacred private sphere, and onto the challenges posed to the individual by electronic bugging and computer databanks. It was in this context, as privacy was bifurcating in definition, that the Younger Commission was assembled.
The Younger Report, published in July 1972, achieved little in terms of legislation to combat threats to privacy. As is the way with such reports, which are often a way to deal with a problem without doing anything about it, that was no small surprise. But it did amount to an evolution in the concept of privacy.
‘We have conceived of the right of privacy as having two main aspects,’ it began:
‘The first of these is freedom from intrusion upon oneself, one’s home, family, and relationships. The second is privacy of information, that is the right to determine for oneself how and to what extent information about oneself is communicated to others.’
The Younger Report made a distinction between, the right to be let alone, the older idea, the way the Victorians: Albert and Victoria, Thomas Carlyle, or Warren and Brandeis, as well as Lord Mancroft or Alex Lyon talked about privacy, and a newer sense of it as a right to informational privacy and controlling the publication of information about oneself.
One reason for this demarcation is because of public attitudes. The Younger Commission had invited comments from the public, but to its ‘surprise’ only received 214 letters, which was deemed ‘a very small response’. As the Commission required further evidence, it commissioned a survey of public attitudes towards privacy, during the time frame of 1972 and 1973.
The research discovered a generational divide over the definition of privacy.
The research discovered a generational divide over the definition of privacy. Those aged 45 and over described privacy as ‘keeping your own private affairs to yourself’; ‘other people minding their own business’; and ‘freedom from nosy parkers’. The home for them was still a castle. They were still concerned with a right to be let alone and strongly defended the private sphere.
However, the generation that came of age in the Sixties and Seventies were much more likely to define privacy as: ‘leading your life as you want to lead it’; ‘doing what you like at home’; and ‘living as you want to’. There was no mention of a right to be let alone for this cohort. For them, privacy was about self-actualisation rather than a defence against unwelcome intrusion or interference and scrutiny.
All this was happening at a time when people were pursuing diverse lifestyles more openly. What had once been closely guarded information: sexual, emotional and autobiographical, was moving into the public realm. Activities that had once been forbidden and considered shameful, like sex outside of marriage and homosexuality, no longer had to be hidden quite so carefully, though there was still some way to go before people could be out and proud.
Malcolm Bradbury’s best-selling novel The History Man (1971) satirised this new era. Its hero, Howard Kirk, a sociology lecturer, sits with his lover Myra and his wife Barbara, with whom he has an open marriage, and describes his new book:
‘It is called The Defeat of Privacy… It’s about the fact that there are no more private selves, no more private corners in society, no more private properties, no more private acts…
There are no concealments any longer, no mysterious dark places of the soul. We’re all right there in front of the entire audience of the universe, in a state of exposure. We’re all nude available.’
Most of the Younger Commission’s recommendations concerned the second definition of privacy: ‘information privacy’. Proposals were confined to legislation on credit rating agencies, the licensing of private detectives, and restrictions on the use of electronic surveillance devices. As for limiting the press, the Younger Report said they found the balance between the protection of the individual and freedom of the press ‘difficult’, and recommended that non-members of the press be appointed to the Press Council.
In the end, the 207 pages of The Younger Report barely addressed the first part of its definition of privacy:—‘freedom from intrusion upon oneself, one’s home, family and relationships’. The private sphere and the family is hardly mentioned. One of the few references came from the submitted testimony of the British Council of Churches, but this was not to defend it. Instead, the British Council of Churches criticised the ‘undue obsession with the personal or family privacy’ in the earlier part of the century, because of the harm and abuse that it might be concealing.
The old kind of privacy was increasingly seen as problematic. The Younger Committee, which had been set up to investigate the possibly of a legal right to privacy, concluded that excessive privacy was undesirable:
‘The result is likely to be loneliness, estrangement from society and the growth of secretiveness and introversion,’ it underlined.
Keeping one’s business to oneself, once seen as a British virtue, once part of the national character, had become suspect.
Keeping one’s business to oneself, once seen as a British virtue, once part of the national character, had become suspect.
Only five years earlier, in 1967, the anthropologist Edmund Leach, then Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, gave the prestigious Reith lectures on BBC Radio 4, on the hot button issue of teenage rebellion. (The LSE had recently experienced a student sit-in in protest at fees for overseas students and there was soul searching about the cause.) Leach rejected the conventional explanations: that either the economic problems were at root, or that it was the young themselves who were to blame. Instead, he, pointed his finger at the home:
“Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.”
What went on behind closed doors and was protected by, in Leach's words, ‘narrow privacy’ was being seen as highly problematic.
The family was no longer regarded by as a refuge from insecurity and loneliness, as it had been, or a countervailing authority to the state and a haven in a heartless world, but as an institution harmful to those growing up in it.
In the influential The Death of the Family (1972), David Cooper, the eminent psychiatrist who was prominent in the anti-psychiatry movement, delivered a searing assault on the ‘bourgeois nuclear family unit’, which he argued, is a ‘fur‐lined bear trap. Far from maintaining the sanity of its members, he said, the family drove them mad.
The late Sixties and early Seventies saw fears about threats to privacy go into overdrive. Privacy was the subject of a national debate in the corridors of power. Yet the paradox is that the period in which the alarm was sounded about threats to privacy, was also the one in which it was challenged and even enthusiastically relinquished.
Hithero, privacy had been discussed in broader terms as being about dignity, decorum and solitude. It meant the freedom to retreat from authority, public view, and the right to be let alone. Whole areas of life, including one’s personal and lifestyle decisions, and the family unit, were to be respected as separate from others and protected, free from interference and scrutiny. By the end of 1970s, that idea of a private life —forged over centuries—was evaporating and concepts of privacy transformed.
Privacy was being detached from the private sphere and tied to the individual. This was less the ‘ defeat of privacy’, as Howard Kirk put it in Bradbury’s History Man, than the death of private life. The preoccupation with ‘informational privacy’ (what would later be called ‘data privacy’), replaced discussions of the virtues of the private sphere more broadly. It also co-existed more comfortably with the more personally expressive and authentic culture of the times, one which was also increasingly suspicious of what went on behind closed doors.
In a future post, I will delve into the intriguing tale of the fly-on-the-wall documentary centred around the royal family— that Queen Elizabeth II demanded be withdrawn from public view. And I explore how the seemingly more candid and self-expressive nature of certain royals—be it the emotional openness of Meghan and Harry or the discussions on mental health and child-rearing by William and Kate—veils a stark truth: the underlying secrecy and lack of accountability within this revered institution.