Aging & Wisdom Quote by Anthony Holden

Holden’s line is a neat refusal of a very British alibi: when an institution starts wobbling, blame the tabloids for noticing. As a journalist, he’s not performing innocence about the press’s appetites; he’s drawing a boundary between exposure and causation. The move is rhetorically clean: he takes a “popular argument,” names it as fashion rather than fact, then snaps it back onto its source. If the monarchy is in trouble, it’s because the monarchy did the troubling.

The subtext is a warning about power and accountability. Monarchies, like any old brand with new competitors, survive on managed images: deference, mystique, a carefully curated sense of inevitability. When that image cracks, the temptation is to treat coverage as the crack itself, as though ink can manufacture marital breakdowns, financial secrecy, or tone-deaf entitlement. Holden’s “messenger” framing isn’t just a cliché; it’s a strategy that exposes a childish logic in elite self-defense. It’s also an implicit critique of a public that enjoys scandal while condemning the people paid to report it.

Context matters here: post-Diana Britain and the late-20th-century media ecosystem where royal privacy shrank and the royal PR machine expanded. Holden is arguing for a simple, unfashionable standard: if you want reverence, behave reverently. If you want scrutiny to stop, stop supplying the reasons. The press may sensationalize, but it can’t invent a legitimacy crisis out of thin air.