Black and white

The Sun ‘newspaper’ likes to say that its views chime with its readers. Sun readers, for example, love Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and wanted him to become prime minister. Sun readers also hate foreigners and wanted to leave the EU. And now, in common with numerous red top newspapers, the Sun is going after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Do Sun readers hate Harry and Meghan, too?

First of all, full disclosure from me: I like Prince Harry and I like Meghan Markle. So far as I can tell, he is for real in as much as you can be for real in such a dysfunctional royal family. Obviously, not the sharpest tool in the box and doesn’t pretend to be either, he seems to be more like us than the rest of the royals. Meghan Markle definitely seems to be a real human being with – God forbid – opinions. She is also black.

Today’s Sun condemns the pair for flying to Ibiza for their holidays on A Private Jet. Nigel Farage, last week, attacked Harry and Meghan, when he was in Australia of all places, for concerning themselves with climate change by having just the two children. Rupert Murdoch’s odious organ seems to have seen a front page opportunity . “You hypocritical cunts”, they didn’t actually say, but might well have done. Oh, and did you notice Ms Markle is black?

Not so much about layabout playboy Prince Andrew who spends his entire life jetting from golf course to golf course, meeting up along the way with sexual deviants like Jeffrey Epstein and his unloveable ex-wife Sarah Ferguson who lives hand to mouth from the millions she acquires by meeting people or introducing people to other people, often at luxurious motor racing events. No, Andrew is okay. He abides by royal protocol. Apparently.

It’s the same with the sainted Prince William and his wife Kate Middleton. They, it seems, represent the true royals, by having as many children as possible and smiling a lot, all the while being white.

Prince Harry actually did fight in Afghanistan, he invented the wonderful Invictus Games, he actually does campaign for better mental health provision, he does lots of good stuff. From what I can tell, Meghan Markle is cut from the same cloth. But the hate is beginning to build.

The press hates the idea that some royals want to keep parts of their lives private. Because they are ‘ours’, we have the right to know all about them at all times. They must not have opinions, unless they want to leave the EU in which case the Sun makes up a story about the Queen being in favour of Brexit.

I would not be in the least bit surprised if Prince Harry and Meghan Markle opted out of royal affairs, rather like his mother Princess Diana did, before her fateful trip to Paris back in 1997. Harry knows more than anyone, along with his brother, where the frenzied attentions of the media can take us.

Perhaps we don’t deserve them in a country that is turning inward, where hate is becoming the norm and intolerance is in the ascendance. And perhaps the media campaign is reflective of many white consumers who see in someone like Meghan Markle someone who doesn’t look like them? After all, man of the people and right wing English nationalist Nigel Farage took great pride three years ago in the EU referendum campaign posing before a large poster entitled ‘Breaking Point’ that featured lots of dark skinned people who, it was suggested, were all bound for the UK.

The attacks on Ms Markle are calculated, cynical, insidious and deeply disturbing. And given that millions buy the newspapers that run the stories, we can surely conclude that what the Sun says is what the Sun readers believe.