In order to find out who I should be hating this week, if ever I am in my local supermarket I usually make a cursory visit to the newspaper stand to view the front pages. I don’t know why I do it, really, because it just gets me tut-tutting, especially when old people – and it’s always old people – collect their hate sheet of choice, inevitably the Daily Mail. Today, with the exception of The Guardian which leads with yet another hit job on Keir Starmer, most of the gutter press leads on the news that Harry Windsor and his family are returning to live in the UK. Just who, exactly, gives a flying fuck about this ‘news’?
Well, as well as the gutter press, which means the entire press these days, the BBC does because it’s been leading news bulletins all morning, so someone, somewhere is interested.
I have no feelings either way on Harry, his wife Meghan Markle and their children. I have great sympathy with him and his brother for having lost their mother Princess Di in such traumatic circumstances and were then forced onto the streets of Britain a few days later to mourn in public. For all I know, the loss of his mother and a subsequent lifetime of media obsession and intrusion would be enough for anyone to say, “Fuck this for a game of soldiers. I’m off to live in the USA USA USA“. But frankly, beyond natural human sympathy, I honestly do not care where Harry lives or what he does with his life for so long as I am not paying for it. ( I know this raises other questions, but they are for another day.)
Harry and Meghan are described as “non-working royals“, which I find hilarious. Beyond being rushed from place-to-place to shake hands with people and wave, what work do the “working royals” actually do? Come on, now. They’re not working 9 till 5 in an Amazon warehouse, are they, locked away in a call centre or emptying our dustbins. This is not real work, is it? I am always reminded of Chevy Chase’s character Clark Griswold Jr in National Lampoon’s European Vacation who is asked by one of his children what the Queen does. “She queens … and vacuums,” he blusters. I think he was half right.
The gutter press, and I suspect as a direct result of the gutter press hatred a large section of the public, hates Markle because she looks a bit different to your usual royal. She’s black for one thing, which led to this astonishing piece in – where else? – the Mail a few years ago where the headline was “Harry’s girl is (almost) straight outta Compton.” It’s true that Crenshaw, where she comes from, is close to Compton, but let’s be honest: would such a headline exist if Markle was a white woman? Of course not. It’s casual racism. And is there anything worse for the right-wing gutter press than a black woman and a successful one at that?
Wherever they choose to live, the Sussexes as they are referred to, they will earn a decent wedge on the basis of who and what they are (and were?) rather than as a result of any specific talents they have. Harry can “write” a best-selling book and Meghan can appear on various media outlets by dint of who they are. This is not a meritocracy, you know. And just like the rest of the technically jobless, so called “working royals”, they can “support” their favourite charities and good causes. The difference between the Sussexes and the rest of the royals is very simple: much of the media loves the royals and most of it hates the Sussexes. The announcement of today’s non-news means only one thing: a free for all, a new media frenzy.
You can bet the house on the type of unpleasant, intrusive and probably vicious coverage they will attract. The hacks are probably sharpening their imaginary pencils to dish the “dirt” as I write. But is there something else going on?
Harry’s father King Charles is 78 in November. He is living with cancer and, as with everyone else, his time on Earth is not finite. I am not speculating on the King’s actual health but maybe there is something going on about this aspect of coming home? Perhaps, as with most of us, family really does come first and when we come to realise that nothing lasts forever, why would you not want to spend as much time with family as possible?
When it comes down to it, Harry Windsor and Meghan Markle are just two human beings, albeit two human beings living in a crazy, unreal existence, a million miles away from the real world occupied by ordinary folk, trying to get by. Can’t we just let them get on with their lives, no matter how strange those lives actually are, and pay more attention to our own? My reaction to the Telegraph’s “HARRY’S COMING HOME” front page is so what? I don’t know why everyone’s reaction is the same as mine. Now excuse me while I bow, doff my cap and get on with my own life.
