Editor defends Duchess pictures: Compromising poolside photographs further tarnish Royal Family's battered image

A FLY on the wall during breakfast at Balmoral Castle yesterday, when the national newspapers were delivered, could have made a fortune selling the story.

Seven pages of photographs in the Daily Mirror, taken at a villa in in the south of France last week, showed the scantily-clad Duchess of York in a series of compromising positions with John Bryan, an oil tycoon described as her 'financial adviser'.

Even to a public sated by a daily diet of royal stories served up by the tabloid press, the 22 poolside pictures were sensational.

People queued to buy the Mirror, which had sold nearly 3.5 million copies by 9am yesterday, at newsagents around the country.

The Queen's holiday in the Highlands is turning sour, her humiliation compounded by publication of the pictures in Spanish, Swiss and German magazines as well as other British tabloids. The impression of the Royal Family as an international laughing stock is hard to resist.

Buckingham Palace's initial reaction to the photographs - which show the Duchess locked in an embrace with Mr Bryan on a sunlounger, sitting topless by his side, being kissed by him as her daughter, Princess Eugenie, looked on and having the sole of her foot kissed - was revealing.

A terse statement - 'people will be able to make up their own minds' - appeared to deflect criticism on to the Duchess. It was this sort of reaction that led to condemnation of the Palace when the Yorks' separation was announced in March.

But as it yesterday denied reports that the Duchess and her two daughters had moved into a gamekeeper's lodge on the edge of Balmoral estate, the Palace issued a more conventional statement, saying that it strongly disapproved of publication of the photographs.

Mr Bryan, a 37-year-old bachelor whose name was first linked to the Duchess when he was seen on holiday with her in Thailand in April, had taken all possible steps to prevent publication.

On Wednesday night, the High Court refused his application for an injunction to prevent the Mirror using the pictures. A telephone call to Lord McGregor, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, also proved fruitless.

Yesterday, Mr Bryan told Sky Television news that it was 'business as usual'. Speaking from his flat in Chelsea, west London, he said: 'I've got lots of meetings this morning. They have been scheduled and they are in my office. I have no intention of changing that.'

Richard Stott, editor of the Mirror, stood by his decision to publish the photographs. He told ITN that Mr Bryan had been quoted many times, and as recently as last weekend, as saying that the Yorks only needed time to reach a reconciliation. 'He frequently said . . . that his interest is professional only,' he said.

Further pictures from the set, said to have been taken by an Italian freelance photographer, are expected to be published over the next couple of days, fuelling criticism of an institution that costs the taxpayer nearly pounds 10m a year.

The long-term impact on the already-tarnished image of the Royal Family is hard to fathom. But in the words yesterday of Harold Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke's Peerage and a staunch royalist: 'How much shrapnel can this family take?'

The appearance of the photographs mark the low point of a year in which public celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the Queen's accession to the throne have been eclipsed by the disintegrating private lives of her children. The announcement that the Yorks were to separate was swiftly followed by the divorce of the Princess Royal from Captain Mark Phillips.

Then, in June, came the publication of a biography of the Princess of Wales which alleged that she had tried to commit suicide several times because of the state of her marriage.

Mr Brooks-Baker said: 'One does not like to see an admired institution dragged through the mud like this. This is not just a nail in the coffin, it's a whole handful of nails.'

For many monarchists, the problem lies not with the Royal Family but with the inappropriate behaviour of errant members.

There was an outcry in January when photographs of the Duchess holidaying with a Texan, Steve Wyatt, appeared.

But her popularity had waned dramatically long before that amid reports of her frequent holidays at public expense - she shared an annual income of pounds 249,000 with her husband - of profiteering from her authorship of children's books and of her generally boisterous behaviour.

Dame Jill Knight, Conservative MP for Edgbaston, said: 'I think Fergie, frankly, is an utter disaster from start to finish and was never going to make a member of the Royal Family. I think the British public has known this for some time.'

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