Mea Culpa: too many words in a royal headline

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

‘Sorry I’m late, Your Majesty, but your secret palace never showed up on the satnav’ (Getty)

It was always a myth that The Independent refused to report royal stories. When we were founded in 1986, Andreas Whittam Smith, the editor, said the newspaper had a “tinge of republicanism” and that he wanted to avoid “fawning” coverage of the royal family.

So we continue to report on them when we think it is in the public interest. Last week, we reported the decision of an Australian court that correspondence between the Queen and the governor-general should be published. Our headline read: “Queen’s ‘secret palace’ letters should be public, court rules.”

The quotation marks in the headline are in the wrong place. It is the letters that are secret, not the palace. So it should be: “Queen’s ‘secret’ palace letters should be public, court rules.” But we are not finished yet. Why do we need quotation marks at all? There is no doubt that the letters are currently kept secret, so we don’t need the distancing punctuation to suggest that this is somebody else’s opinion. In any case, it is apparent that the letters are secret, because the court ordered them to be published, so we don’t strictly need “secret” at all, except that it makes it all sound more exciting.