By
Maria Chang
Meet Prince Charles’ communication secretary (aka spin doctor), Julian Payne. While he and his client might bridle at him being labeled a spin doctor, we’ll let his resume speak for him.
It’s commonly known that reputation management is a fancy way of saying spin doctor, Reputation management refers to the influencing and controlling of an individual’s or group’s reputation. So, Prince Charles has a new spin doctor. But wait, there’s more. Because the banner says Hawthorn, not Clarence House. So along with his position at Clarence House, Mr. Payne is also is a Non-Executive Director at Hawthorn. What is Hawthorn?
www.hawthornadvisors.com/people
That is Mr. Julian Payne, Communications Secretary to England’s monarch-in-waiting and non-Executive Director at a Consultancy firm that “shapes perceptions and perspectives”. Is Mr. Payne exhibiting expertise in shaping perception and perspectives for Prince Charles.? The jury is still out and we don’t care. What we care about is the public sentiment reflected by Mr. Payne through his twitter feed. Mr. Payne has a twitter account, a twitter account that went private a day or two after Sussexes’ supporters discovered its presence. On his profile page, Mr. Payne was careful to say that it is his “personal account”
Mr. Payne doesn’t tweet, but his likes and retweets tells a tale. What are we to make of his first like, of a tweet referring to Duchess Meghan’s posterior? Is he agreeing it could easily upstage the posterior of the sister of Diana’s other son’s wife; that her “bum is toned;” or the ridiculousness of comparing a peach to a pancake?
Is Mr. Payne liking Chris Jackson’s photographic skills, the black and white filter the mention of Edinburgh or Duchess Meghan’s smile?
What is the draw here, that the Duchess is a loving daughter missing her father, or that her heart is as cold as Christmas and her “poor father” is the victim or is he agreeing with Chris Ship’s question? What we do know is that this is months after her wedding. A wedding to which her father was supposed to walk Duchess Meghan down the aisle until he betrayed her by colluding with the tabloids. What Mr. Payne, reputation manager to Their Royal Highnesses, should have known at the time he was liking this tweet is that Mr. Markle did not stop with the wedding day betrayal, that he continued colluding with the tabloids in betraying her, selling photographs and even a letter she wrote him after his betrayal. What the reputation manager should know is that both sides presented in that tweet were false and was nothing but the reporter’s attempt to exploit the harassment of a child by a toxic parent. A child who is also the daughter-in-law of Mr. Payne’s client
One cannot help but wonder why a ‘nobody’ like Phil Dampier is on Mr. Payne’s radar. This is a man whose claim to fame is that he, like a thousand others, wrote a few royal biographies and was fading back into obscurity until he decided to wade into the media’s harassment of Duchess Meghan. His ‘expertise’ was his willingness to hype the lies and innuendoes, and in return, he was rewarded with guest commentary in the tabloid rag leading the charge against Duchess Meghan. Why like this tweet, why not direct his client to issue a statement in support of the Sussexes?
With this ‘like’ Mr. Payne, reputation manager to Their Royal Highnesses seems to have decided it was time to make his sentiment clear. Mr. Downes thinks Duchess Meghan of so little consequence that he cannot be bothered to address her as more than an initial, a courtesy he gave to the white royals. He tweets in praise of the future King and future-future King, but uses the tabloids’ manufactured broken protocol to dismiss the recalcitrant Harry and his Black wife with no name. In the midst of claims that your client was complicit in the tabloids’ harassment of his pregnant daughter-in-law, the reputation manager decided that his personal public account would be a ‘safe space’ to agree with a sentiment so disrespectful of his client’s daughter-in-law. In which reputation management manual is this listed as a good idea? UNLESS it was the section of the manual about how to denigrate others to uplift your client.
Or could it be that Mr. Payne only wants one of the most popular members to depart? The clout chaser, Laurence Fox, is the poster child of white privilege – negligible to non-existent talent, trades on his family’s name to carve out a middling career. He was given the opportunity to regain the relevance he craved through a guest spot on a weekly question and answer show. Mr. Fox is one of those privileged white men who think racism is an opinion and while he vehemently denies that Duchess Meghan was the victim of racism, he does feel that by not agreeing with him, you are being racist towards him (reverse racism “is not a thing’). Desperate to hold on to another fifteen minutes of relevance, Mr. Fox has decided that racist trolling is the way to go, and it seems Mr. Payne feels they are words to be shared so he retweeted them.
There are those who will make the argument that “retweets do not equal endorsement,” but when you are the reputation manager of a client whose family is negatively impacted by the contents of your ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’ you are very much endorsing the sentiments. And since you chose to take your work ‘home with you’, you have negated your claim of your tweets being ‘personal’. Which client with an ounce of care about their reputation would be fine with reputation manager tweeting about subjects that could reflect badly on them? UNLESS the consultant is tweeting, safe in the knowledge that his actions reflect his client’s wishes.
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The decision is yours dear reader, is Mr. Payne foolish or strategic? Keep in mind that days maybe even hours after his tweets became a topic of conversation among Sussexes supporters his account went private. His response has piqued curiosity, not quell it. Users are now convinced that another conspirator in the harassment of the Sussexes have been exposed and his actions are now seen as further proof of the Royal Family’s involvement in the coordinated campaign of harassment to return Prince Harry to the Royal fold by getting rid of his not-white wife and child by whatever means necessary. Yes, we mean by whatever means, because while divorce is the natural assumption; what was the aim of harassing a pregnant woman when it is a medical fact that stress can affect the mother and baby’s health? Think about that, then draw your own conclusion as to why Julian Payne Communications Secretary to Their Royal Highnesses at Clarence House thought it a wise decision to publicly join in the denigration of the only non-white member of the Royal Family
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