Photo finish

Spectator, The, Jan 10, 1998 by Cash, William

Post-Diana, reports William Cash, the paparazzi have fallen on hard times

Klosters

THE last time I was in Klosters, back in January 1992, when I was sent out by the Daily Express to report on a skiing accident involving the Duke of Kent's daughter and a German, I probably contravened almost every section of the new Code of Practice ratified by the British Press Complaints Commission, in particular section 9, titled 'Hospitals', which states: `Journalists or photographers making enquiries at hospitals or similar institutions must identify themselves to a responsible executive and obtain permission before entering nonpublic areas.'

Quite why a broken royal leg was so newsworthy, I forget, but I do know that getting the first exclusive pictures of Princes William and Harry's 11-year-old royal cousin lying in bed with her leg suspended from the hospital ceiling was of much importance to the Express, who spared no expense in sending out their seasoned royal snapper, Steve Wood, to accompany me.

En route to Heathrow, I picked Wood up in a taxi from his imposing three- or four-storey Georgian terraced house in Kensington. It was probably worth at least half a million and was decorated like the pictures from a Colefax & Fowler catalogue. If you'd been walking past as Wood loaded his designer skis into the cab, with his pretty wife and children waving goodbye outside the front door, the last profession you would have imagined he belonged to was tabloid snapping.

Ditto as we sat back sipping champagne in our British Airways Club seats to Zurich - I remember Wood talked a lot about which public schools he had been visiting as a prospective parent. On arrival, we hired a four-wheel-drive Jeep and sped off towards Davos hospital. Passing ourselves off as members of the royal skiing party, we roamed unchallenged around the wards, camera discreetly hidden, until we were directed by a helpful nurse to the young Kent's private room, where she lay asleep, surrounded by get-well cards and fluffy teddy bears.

In today's post-Diana tabloid world, any such photo would not be worth the paper it was developed on. The once superwealthy breed of 'stalkerazzi' - many of whom would regularly earn between $300,000 and $500,000, considerably more than most Fleet Street editors - have now fallen on painfully hard times. A quick call around paparazzi working in LA revealed stories of a well-known former British royal paparazzo reduced to working as a hair stylist's photographer, and a former White House staff photographerturned-paparazzo now working as a `nude stylist' for a hard-core porn magazine.

`As far as buying paparazzi-type pictures, we've totally stopped,' Stuart Higgins, editor of the Sun, told me. `It's an area that has just dried up in the last six months. I don't think the public are ready to see newspapers using those pictures, and I think we would suffer if we did.' The Sun's quest for respectability may have gone too far; late on New Year's Eve I walked into the Scotch Bar at the Verinna Hotel to find that the Sun's two reporters were the only men in Klosters decked out in black tie.

With the tabloid photo market having crashed on Fleet Street, formerly the best payer, photo prices around the world have dropped by up to 75 per cent. A photo worth 20,000 two years ago is worth less than 5,000 now. As a result, many paparazzi are having to change their lifestyles radically, if not their jobs altogether. As Piers Morgan, editor of the Mirror, who always used to keep a hidden camera in his pocket when at a party for the Sun's showbiz column, told me, `The worst paparazzi, the hounding types who stalked Diana, are getting out of the business and the agencies are concentrating on less aggressive stuff.'

The royal skiing trip to Klosters has been closely watched as a test of post-Diana paparazzo behaviour. Despite two French photographers being 'named' at Klosters for disobeying the royal request to be left alone, the ban seems to be working. I was in Klosters for a week - on holiday this time, I should add - and didn't see any paparazzi skulking around at the bottom of the Gotchna ski lift in the afternoon, waiting for the royal party to finish the day's skiing. Back in 1992, packs of `Nikon guerrillas' were practically hanging off the lifts. Apart from the official photo-opportunity, when 50 or so photographers dutifully clicked away, the royals have been left alone.

Were, say, a photo to exist of Prince William snogging a wannabe 'It' girl in the Casa nightclub - the local snog market where a bottle of Absolut costs over 100, where public schoolboys throw up on the dancefloor, and where ex-army officers and bankers fight to buy a 20 franc Sea Breeze cocktail for Tara Palmer-Tomkinson - such a photo (worth possibly hundreds of thousands before the Princess of Wales's death) would be almost worthless, at least in Britain.

In Aspen, meanwhile, where the death of Michael Kennedy on the slopes has pushed the royals off the front page, the paparazzi ratpack are also enduring a humiliating change of fortune. Take my British paparazzo friend Kip Rano, expelled from his London comprehensive at the age of 14, whom I used to be mildly surprised to see having dinner at the exclusive Caribou Club, the Annabel's of Aspen. He used to boast that his daily expenses for his annual New Year's Aspen trip were around $900 a day, with a $450 suite at the Ritz-Carlton. This year he is staying for free at someone's house, admitting that the days of the $5,000 trip are over.