Woman has baby

No matter how hard I try – and to be fair, I didn’t try THAT hard – I was unable to feel all that cynical about today’s royal birth announcement. “Woman has baby!” was my first thought. My God: no woman has ever managed that before. But why be all cynical about it? Meghan Markle has had her baby and for some odd reason I felt happy for her.

I certainly felt happy for a child-like Prince Harry on the TV news, gushing like, well, every man who has every attended the birth of his first child. No, Harry is plainly not the sharpest tool in the box. He is part of a slightly barmy concept of a royal family that has no power, influence or anything else on the country of which it represents the state and still I empathised with him.

I’ve liked Harry from the outset. he isn’t ‘one of us’ because he is a royal, yet there is definitely something about him I find attractive. He has genuine empathy with your average punter, he actually makes a real effort to understand how ‘normal’ people live their lives. Just like his mother and unlike his chinless wonder of a father. His work with the Invictus games and on mental health has been truly wonderful.

Make no mistake, there is some hostility towards Harry and Meghan. If it is not proper out there racism, the underlying snarky behaviour of some journalists and many readers of – and we should not be surprised by this – of the Mail and Sun carries with it the objection that Ms Markle is black. If she’d been around in 2016 when the country voted to leave Europe, mainly because millions of people hated the idea of migrants coming to work here, doubtless Nigel Farage would have stood in front of a poster of her, titled ‘Breaking Point’. After all, the royal lineage is going to be a little more brown from now on. Honestly, people really feel that way. Scary, isn’t it?

Now me? I couldn’t give a toss that Ms Markle is black and don’t quite understand why anyone would. To my old eyes, she is a very nice woman, highly attractive and as bright as a button and, rather like me in my life, Harry is batting well above his average.

“Woman has baby!” is the cynical reaction. “Many congratulations” is mine. And if you don’t like the idea of a black woman being part of the royal family and having a baby, just fuck off. I’m really not interested.