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| A liberal deep inside the Palace? Yes, that’s Prince Harry | A liberal deep inside the Palace? Yes, that’s Prince Harry |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Sexism? Racism? And what are “social-media trolls” doing in a royal press release? As some of its critics noted, there was a quite new and, you gathered, highly unwelcome millennial tone to the official statement from Prince Harry, one that was simultaneously released, further to pique the press, on Facebook. “It is not right,” it read, “that a few months into a relationship with him that Ms Markle should be subjected to such a storm.” | |
| “Relationship”? What were the media, still at the “alleged dalliance” stage, Markle-wise, meant to do with that death blow to speculation? The correct expression, in this context was, at most, “close friendship”. | “Relationship”? What were the media, still at the “alleged dalliance” stage, Markle-wise, meant to do with that death blow to speculation? The correct expression, in this context was, at most, “close friendship”. |
| Whoever had authored this attempt at press-shaming – a couple of bumptious, thirtysomething royal aides were mentioned – had even attempted to anticipate the red-top response. “He knows commentators will say this is ‘the price she has to pay’”. More venerable royal watchers were obliged to point out that, excuse them, this is indeed the price Markle has to pay for the affections of Prince Harry, even in his new guise of Kensington Palace’s equalities officer. | Whoever had authored this attempt at press-shaming – a couple of bumptious, thirtysomething royal aides were mentioned – had even attempted to anticipate the red-top response. “He knows commentators will say this is ‘the price she has to pay’”. More venerable royal watchers were obliged to point out that, excuse them, this is indeed the price Markle has to pay for the affections of Prince Harry, even in his new guise of Kensington Palace’s equalities officer. |
| “Even if Harry thinks this isn’t our business, it is,” the royal writer Robert Lacey told the Sun. “We understand Harry’s worries,” the Sun agreed, with that special insight a newspaper gains into a person’s interior life after its colleagues have repeatedly – between 2005 and 2006 – hacked his phone. “But he needs to get real.” As for the Mail, it noted “a worrying tendency, particularly among young royals, to expect all the advantages that go with their birth, while at the same time wanting to enjoy the privacy of the Queen’s subjects who have to work nine-to-five for a living”. What if the tendency were to spread to, say, judges? Remain-minded TV presenters? | “Even if Harry thinks this isn’t our business, it is,” the royal writer Robert Lacey told the Sun. “We understand Harry’s worries,” the Sun agreed, with that special insight a newspaper gains into a person’s interior life after its colleagues have repeatedly – between 2005 and 2006 – hacked his phone. “But he needs to get real.” As for the Mail, it noted “a worrying tendency, particularly among young royals, to expect all the advantages that go with their birth, while at the same time wanting to enjoy the privacy of the Queen’s subjects who have to work nine-to-five for a living”. What if the tendency were to spread to, say, judges? Remain-minded TV presenters? |
| But even young William and Kate, for all their pretensions to fully funded privacy in exchange for approximately one baby snap every quarter, have never imputed to media persecutors, in the manner of a safe-space enforcer, the further flaws of racism and sexism. Nor have their reproaches ever been phrased in a provoking, contemporary manner, which could almost have been designed to make the Sun’s response – “He is an heir to the throne, living a privileged life at public expense” – and similar rebukes, look more elderly and pompous than a Buckingham Palace press release. | But even young William and Kate, for all their pretensions to fully funded privacy in exchange for approximately one baby snap every quarter, have never imputed to media persecutors, in the manner of a safe-space enforcer, the further flaws of racism and sexism. Nor have their reproaches ever been phrased in a provoking, contemporary manner, which could almost have been designed to make the Sun’s response – “He is an heir to the throne, living a privileged life at public expense” – and similar rebukes, look more elderly and pompous than a Buckingham Palace press release. |
| As it was, the whole exercise put the prince’s opponents in an unusually annoying position. Unmediated by hostile editorial, the statement’s direct appeal for decency, by one of the royal family’s most popular members, probably disarmed many of those who saw it first, or only, online. | As it was, the whole exercise put the prince’s opponents in an unusually annoying position. Unmediated by hostile editorial, the statement’s direct appeal for decency, by one of the royal family’s most popular members, probably disarmed many of those who saw it first, or only, online. |
| Moreover, by identifying the offending commentary as sexist and racist, its authors invited those responsible to explain why, say, it was not racist to describe a (biracial) American as “exotic” or sexist instantly to convict a successful female actor of perv-pleasing and – yet more compromising – deliberate ambition. It was almost as if the ruthless liberal elite had targeted Harry, officially the most adorable member of the royal family after Prince George, then turned him. | Moreover, by identifying the offending commentary as sexist and racist, its authors invited those responsible to explain why, say, it was not racist to describe a (biracial) American as “exotic” or sexist instantly to convict a successful female actor of perv-pleasing and – yet more compromising – deliberate ambition. It was almost as if the ruthless liberal elite had targeted Harry, officially the most adorable member of the royal family after Prince George, then turned him. |
| On the surface, it sounds impossible. Devious as they are, to the extent of infiltrating our judiciary with openly gay former Olympic fencing champions, how would smug liberals have abandoned their complacency for long enough to penetrate heavily guarded Kensington Palace? | On the surface, it sounds impossible. Devious as they are, to the extent of infiltrating our judiciary with openly gay former Olympic fencing champions, how would smug liberals have abandoned their complacency for long enough to penetrate heavily guarded Kensington Palace? |
| True, its inhabitants are in regular contact with the liberal elite’s no less sinister allies, interfering luvvies. Moreover, the Obamas visited earlier this year when they were said to have “built up a relationship” with the younger royals. | True, its inhabitants are in regular contact with the liberal elite’s no less sinister allies, interfering luvvies. Moreover, the Obamas visited earlier this year when they were said to have “built up a relationship” with the younger royals. |
| But would even that level of exposure – bearing in mind that glamorous progressives can make, as Charles has proved with Emma Thompson, the most uncritically doting of courtiers – have been enough to raise awareness of sexist and racist stereotyping in anyone steeped, like Charles’s sons, in the teachings of Laurens van der Post, of “little Bushman” fame? It was Harry, caller-out of media racism, who once picked a Nazi costume for his friend’s “Native and Colonial” fancy dress party. | But would even that level of exposure – bearing in mind that glamorous progressives can make, as Charles has proved with Emma Thompson, the most uncritically doting of courtiers – have been enough to raise awareness of sexist and racist stereotyping in anyone steeped, like Charles’s sons, in the teachings of Laurens van der Post, of “little Bushman” fame? It was Harry, caller-out of media racism, who once picked a Nazi costume for his friend’s “Native and Colonial” fancy dress party. |
| Then again, look at Harry’s statement. With its accusations of racism and sexism, it declares itself, no less than the “bien pensant politicians and the massed ranks of luvvies”, ridiculed by the Mail last week, to be fully as remote from “ordinary people” as understood by that paper. “They simply fail to understand voters’ rejection of all the ‘isms’ beloved of the left (multiculturalism, militant feminism, internationalism and social liberalism),” the Mail wrote, “or Trump’s appeal to the most enduring ‘ism’ of them all – old-fashioned patriotism”. | Then again, look at Harry’s statement. With its accusations of racism and sexism, it declares itself, no less than the “bien pensant politicians and the massed ranks of luvvies”, ridiculed by the Mail last week, to be fully as remote from “ordinary people” as understood by that paper. “They simply fail to understand voters’ rejection of all the ‘isms’ beloved of the left (multiculturalism, militant feminism, internationalism and social liberalism),” the Mail wrote, “or Trump’s appeal to the most enduring ‘ism’ of them all – old-fashioned patriotism”. |
| Nor is the former army officer, Harry’s, ism-ridden offering the only evidence of recent contamination by treacherous liberals, experts and graduates of a family whose philistinism, weakness for tyrants and nonexistent emotional intelligence once looked as dependable as Boris Johnson’s egomania. The fancy-dress generation now campaigns against bullying and for better mental health. It is barely a week since Prince Andrew, who heads the family’s idiot branch, was condemned, by anti-luvvie newspapers, for disrespecting Donald Trump and suggesting that, with Brexit, the combination “could tear things apart”. Who does Andrew think he is – Philip Pullman? Doesn’t he understand that such opinions, as expressed by the liberal deplorables now cowering in their ancestral heartlands, from London’s South Bank to universities and staffrooms across the country, are increasingly understood to have made Trump and Brexit happen? | Nor is the former army officer, Harry’s, ism-ridden offering the only evidence of recent contamination by treacherous liberals, experts and graduates of a family whose philistinism, weakness for tyrants and nonexistent emotional intelligence once looked as dependable as Boris Johnson’s egomania. The fancy-dress generation now campaigns against bullying and for better mental health. It is barely a week since Prince Andrew, who heads the family’s idiot branch, was condemned, by anti-luvvie newspapers, for disrespecting Donald Trump and suggesting that, with Brexit, the combination “could tear things apart”. Who does Andrew think he is – Philip Pullman? Doesn’t he understand that such opinions, as expressed by the liberal deplorables now cowering in their ancestral heartlands, from London’s South Bank to universities and staffrooms across the country, are increasingly understood to have made Trump and Brexit happen? |
| A little more sensitivity around racism, sexism and parochialism on the intellectuals’, experts’ and luvvies’ part and we might have been spared, according to this analysis, the triumph of Farage, Johnson, Trump. Want a more liberal elite-friendly, less sexist, racist and homophobic world? The answer’s obvious: let men such as Peter Bone do the talking. Keen on Nato? Tell sneering elitists to stop generalising about the working classes. Listen to the Sun’s experts, lefties: the electorate is sick of being stereotyped and insulted by an army of contemptuous, sauvignon-swilling, metro-liberals who hate their own country. | A little more sensitivity around racism, sexism and parochialism on the intellectuals’, experts’ and luvvies’ part and we might have been spared, according to this analysis, the triumph of Farage, Johnson, Trump. Want a more liberal elite-friendly, less sexist, racist and homophobic world? The answer’s obvious: let men such as Peter Bone do the talking. Keen on Nato? Tell sneering elitists to stop generalising about the working classes. Listen to the Sun’s experts, lefties: the electorate is sick of being stereotyped and insulted by an army of contemptuous, sauvignon-swilling, metro-liberals who hate their own country. |
| Admittedly, Harry may not, even in his enterprising, avenging incarnation, be quite the messiah that humbled elite liberals – or, even, the gloomy 48% – are longing for. In any case, like the Prince Harry in Charles III, Mike Bartlett’s brilliant play of 2014, he may, if the stalkers can see off Markle, revert to being “a singleton, amusing mostly, clownish and unthreatening”. | Admittedly, Harry may not, even in his enterprising, avenging incarnation, be quite the messiah that humbled elite liberals – or, even, the gloomy 48% – are longing for. In any case, like the Prince Harry in Charles III, Mike Bartlett’s brilliant play of 2014, he may, if the stalkers can see off Markle, revert to being “a singleton, amusing mostly, clownish and unthreatening”. |
| But his intervention surely supports, along with the slowly decreasing freakishness of his own family, the dystopia-dispelling theory, popular around London’s traditional smug belt last week, that generations of younger voters, both metro-liberal and non, will ultimately shun ageing champions of insularity, misogyny and heterosexuals-only high courts. | But his intervention surely supports, along with the slowly decreasing freakishness of his own family, the dystopia-dispelling theory, popular around London’s traditional smug belt last week, that generations of younger voters, both metro-liberal and non, will ultimately shun ageing champions of insularity, misogyny and heterosexuals-only high courts. |
| As for the prince, any entitled liberal who is smug enough to have seen Charles III, in which Harry falls in love with a woman who is duly sex-shamed by the press, will hope that he soon departs from Mike Bartlett’s script and lives happily ever after. | As for the prince, any entitled liberal who is smug enough to have seen Charles III, in which Harry falls in love with a woman who is duly sex-shamed by the press, will hope that he soon departs from Mike Bartlett’s script and lives happily ever after. |