Jennie Bond - Royal Correspondent

Royal Correspondent

In 1985 Bond became a radio news reporter and in 1988 she began to report for television, both for the BBC. She became a royal correspondent, which was to bring her to public attention, in 1989. During the 1990s she combined her reporting with several presentational roles - regularly fronting BBC Breakfast News, the BBC One O'Clock News and the BBC Six O'Clock News, including presenting the Six O'Clock News on the day of the death of her close friend and fellow news reader Jill Dando.

Bond held the position as royal correspondent until the summer of 2003. During that time she reported on many dramatic and notable events to do with the British Royal Family, including the 1992 Windsor Castle fire, two royal weddings, the break-up of The Duke of York's marriage to Sarah Ferguson, the divorce of The Prince and Princess of Wales, the deaths of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother and The Princess Margaret and has reported on The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh's celebrations of her Golden Jubilee . She has also travelled extensively with the Royal Family. She was in Australia, in January 1994, when an attempt was made to shoot the Prince of Wales.

She travelled with Diana, Princess of Wales on her trip to Angola, with the Queen on her first official visits to Russia in 1994 and when she met Nelson Mandela in South Africa a year later. However, her hardest and most challenging assignments were when she had to report on the death and funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997.

Bond's reporting style suggested that she was very close personally to members of the Royal Family. She commented that she had become close to Diana and that her death came as a great shock. She actually instigated her first meeting with Diana. She sent a note, suggesting that if she was to report on Diana properly then she should at least know what her character was actually like, not basing her thoughts on stories that had appeared in newspapers. She commented on that meeting at Kensington Palace, stating: "Princess Diana was charming, articulate, fresh, interesting, but manipulative. She knew I was a journalist. This was no girlie-girlie meeting."

She wrote a book in 2001 called Reporting Royalty, which tells how she covered the Royal Family in the 1990s. Impressionists such as Ronni Ancona on Alistair McGowan's Big Impression took to satirising Bond's royal reports by posing as Bond and pretending to be the Queen herself, crown and all; in one sketch it was announced that Bond was to imminently accede to the throne.