The release of the Palace letters was pure theatre. Every element was meticulously stage-managed: the set, the props, the narrative. (From the Palace Letters pp 168-172)
The director-general of the National Archives, David Fricker, who had spent four years and nearly $2 million arguing against their release, and had supplied a secret submission to the court in doing so, now proclaimed the Archives to be a ‘pro-disclosure organisation’ as he presented and interpreted the letters to the public for the first time. The sheer audacity of it turned a bizarre occasion into the surreal.
In a carefully curated selection, Fricker worked his way through just nine of the 212 letters, which told…
