One of the things that can give me endless hours – oh, all right then; endless seconds – of pleasure and amusement are pointless opinion polls. Let’s be honest: even the ‘how would you vote if there was a general election tomorrow?’ question is barking mad because there isn’t going to be an election until 2024. But this one is utterly priceless. Should Prince Harry and Meghan Markle go on a chat show with Oprah Winfrey?
The results of the poll are exactly what we might expect. Old people – that is to say anyone over 50 – say it’s inappropriate for them to do so. Quite why they regard it as inappropriate, we never find out. And younger people think it’s not inappropriate. What does this all mean?
Older people are more conservative, and Conservative for that matter, and many are happy to doff their caps and bow to the royals. They expect the royals to behave in a certain way, which is essentially a world of forced smiles, handshakes, cutting ribbons and to be the family we all look up to. Role models. And what great role models they are.
The adulterous Prince Charles, the friend of Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Andrew, and his toe-sucking ex wife Sarah ‘Fergie’ Ferguson, divorcee Princess Anne and the quiet one Prince Edward. Just your normal family, eh? But the ones who get it in the neck? Well, that’s Harry and Meghan, obvs.
It didn’t take long, did it? Yesterday, the gutter press were gushing over Harry and Meghan’s highly successful shag, today, they are the villains and Britain’s sleazy red tops know how to keep their readers happy.
However, is this opinion poll accurate? Well, as with most opinion polls, it depends on the question you are asked, in this case, appropriate, inappropriate, don’t know. I think there’s one missing here: who gives a fuck?
I doubt very much whether the results of my age group would change a great deal. For very old people in particular, the royals have a special place in their hearts. For young people, they’ve grown up in a world where the royals appear more like an expensive soap opera, living out enormously luxurious and pampered lives for no obvious reason. I suspect that of the 52% who think it’s appropriate for Harry and Meghan to go on Winfrey’s show, very few of them really care.
And while I have no evidence with which to back this up, I’m wondering if Meghan’s, ahem, appearance might have something to do with how certain people view her. Meghan has always ‘enjoyed’ a far less positive presence in certain right wing red tops than Kate Middleton. Or perhaps it’s one big coincidence? Either way, younger people, I would suggest, are less bothered about Meghan’s ethnicity than some of their elders.
The gutter press is excited about the upcoming Winfrey show because, they hope it will sell papers and the more horrid they are about Harry and Meghan, the more copies they will sell. This is how newspapers work. Your average punter, perhaps, less so.
Let’s face it. We pay far too much attention to what newspapers think. The Mail is the most popular paper in the land and it sells less than a million copies. The Sun sells slightly less than that. The newspaper I take, the soggy liberal leftie Guardian, sells a whopping (not Wapping) 114,000. In a population of 67 million, these figures are nothing. And hardly any young people buy newspapers at all. Why? Because like the royal family, they are traditions from an era that is coming to an end.
The opinion poll about Harry and Meghan appearing on Oprah Winfrey probably asks older people the right question, but for anyone under 50, ‘who gives a fuck’ should be one of the options.
