For the second day in a row, the newspapers are leading with the news that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are stepping back from the family business. As I write, BBC Radio Five Live’s daily phone-in, Your Call, is having pretty well the same debate as it did yesterday. People are angry and the Fleet Street hate machine is in full flow. It’s getting ugly. I read on one website: ‘The Queen is deeply upset. The Prince of Wales and Duke of Cambridge are incandescent with rage.’ And there’s more: the royals have been ‘shocked, saddened and downright furious’ at the couple. With everything that’s happening in our world, is this really the one thing to get angry about?
Forgive me, but I am about to enter the fascinating world of Whataboutery. You know, the world where people deflect from one issue by referring to another. In this instance, I feel there is some justification.
I ventured into town on Wednesday evening to join my youngest son for a pint and chat at a well-known hostelry in the Watershed complex. Given Bristol’s nautical history, the regeneration of the entire area is wondrous to behold. But as I walked along past the trendy bars and restaurants, I saw something that made me far more angry and upset than a couple of young people stepping back from the firm.
I am used to seeing homeless people and rough sleepers in Bristol over the years, but I don’t remember things being as bad as they are right now. As soon as I got off the bus on a filthy wet evening, there they were; the people with nothing, huddled in doorways, sheltering from the elements. Within a distance of maybe two hundred yards, I must have seen upwards of a dozen people, including one woman, who were destined that night, and perhaps every night for the foreseeable future, to sleep under a damp blanket in the open air.
I was asked for money by several people. I always decline to give money because people who work in the field tell me that in a large number of cases, these poor desperate people use money for drugs and alcohol. As I was near Sainsburys, I asked the first one if he would like something to eat, or perhaps a hot drink. I was not surprised when he declined. It’s happened to me before. (For the record, this man told me he needed money to find somewhere to stay that night. I had no idea whether this was true but I wasn’t going to take a chance and, perhaps, feed a habit.)
Being me, the thought of those poor, desperate people stayed with me throughout the evening and even now I am still thinking about it. And I am a little big angrier, with myself – I don’t know why – and the society in which I live. These mad priorities we have, where people are losing their shit over members of a rich and privileged dysfunctional family going through another public contretemps make no sense to me.
I do get that the royal spat and homelessness are two entirely separate issues and yet to my mind I can’t get over how we fret about the first and simply accept the second. If Prince Charles is ‘incandescent with rage’, then just imagine the feelings of Princess Diana when the heir to the throne was having his bit on the side, Camilla Parker Bowles. and just imagine how Harry feels when he looks back on the death of his mother, when both he and his brother were forced to walk behind the hearse in which his mother lay, in order to satisfy public grief? Charles made him do that. Don’t give me that ‘incandescent with rage’ tosh, Chuck.
Calm down, people. A family business, with more money than God, is having a public spat. Meanwhile, the country is going to hell in a handcart. Radio phone-ins are packed with callers who appear to be, like Prince Charles, ‘incandescent with rage’. Get angry about something that matters. Get angry about children going hungry, get angry about how the most vulnerable in society have been trampled on and then ignored by government, get angry with queues at A&E and, yes, get angry about the homelessness and rough sleeping crisis as a result of which people are literally dying. But get angry about a young couple who want to stand back from the madness of the fairytale world of royalty? Please.
