WELL, it looks like the next series of The Crown has written itself. The latest episode of the Meghan and Harry show reached a blockbuster audience of 17 million in the US and 11 million in the UK thanks to the pulling power of the queen of empathetic interviews, Oprah, and a few bombshells on race, suicidal thoughts and strained paternal relations.
It is, of course, a soap opera. And I apologise now to those readers who aren’t interested and are appalled at the wall-to-wall coverage. For the rest of us, it’s become a compelling narrative that was always going to happen when an English prince from a dysfunctional family married a Californian actress with a strong sense of her own self-worth.
Now it’s not so much a whodunit as a who said it? When you don’t identify the person who wondered aloud about the shade of Archie’s skin, you slander all of them.
My money was on the Duke of Edinburgh, who has form in this area with his remarks about “slitty eyes”, and him asking an aboriginal man if he still threw spears. Everybody with an older relative knows this is not uncommon for a generation that thought the Black and White Minstrel Show was a high point in family entertainment.
Oprah later said Harry had made it clear it wasn’t him or the queen but I have my doubts. Might be better to blame it on Uncle Andy, who’s already a total pariah, thanks to his relationship with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. At least Harry and Meghan had the wit to give their interview to Oprah, and not Emily Maitlis.
Meghan did come across as articulate and intelligent, qualities not readily noted among the Windsors. But that made some of her revelations about her lack of knowledge about what she was getting into seem rather strange.
It is odd to normal people – not just Americans – that you have to curtsey to the queen in your own house, away from the public eye. But when she said she didn’t know the words to the British national anthem, you had to ask why she couldn’t have googled them and learned them off. She’s had to learn a few lines in her day, surely?
Some of the attacks on her in the tabloids were pretty unspeakable. Was it racist? People of colour are in a better place to judge but Kate, Fergie, Diana and Sophie Wessex were all attacked at one time. The palace should have corrected some of the inaccurate stories, especially about her making Kate cry, when it was actually the other way round.
When she talked about not seeing her passport, her driver’s licence or her keys after marriage, it sounded like she was being held hostage. But perhaps the most serious allegation was her description of her attempts to get help when she was feeling suicidal and getting no support.
It’s a one-sided account, of course; the queen’s response that “some recollections may vary” was a neat phrase for casting doubt. But it does suggest the royals turned the same deaf ear they displayed when they failed to help Diana through her mental troubles.
It seems the Windsors are like the Bourbons, “They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”
'The Firm' have undoubtedly been damaged by the interview and before long, Meghan might be featuring in murals on the Falls Road, as the wrecker of the British monarchy.
It’s easy to forget the once positive press they once enjoyed. When they teamed up with Kate and William, the headlines were all about the 'Fab Four' who were taking the stuffy Windsors into the 21st century.
Contrast those pictures with the quartet’s last public appearance together. The other three have faces like thunder, but Meghan, the actress, was smiling as if nothing was going on.
That she is running the show was evident in the sunlit photograph the pair released after the programme. Harry’s face was turned away from the camera and Archie’s wasn’t visible. But Meghan was there, centre stage, still smiling.
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WHAT larks! The government is actually spending money on a feasibility study of Boris’s wheeze to unite the United Kingdom via a bridge or tunnel between Northern Ireland and Scotland.
They haven’t enough dough to pay a decent wage to health workers who’ve risked their lives, but they can dig deep for this vanity project.
It’ll be as “world beating” as his Covid death toll and hopeless track-and-trace system.
I wonder if it’ll be ready in time for an independent Scotland linking up with a unified Ireland, back in the embrace of the European Union?
