THAT interview

Yeahh, I know, sorry guys, I couldn’t not comment. Having seen a fair bit of the Stateside reaction to that interview I thought it might be an idea to put down some of my observations and lay out just why my friends on BW.com should take notice of what might, quite rightly, seem at first glance to be merely an amusing spat within the British Royal family of no concern to decent Republican Americans. If you come out in a rash at the mere mention of Dukes and Princes, you might want to skip to the last section.

Do not underestimate how much this has hurt the Royal Family (in both senses) and how upset both the members of the family, and the people who work in the Royal Household are. I spent two hours with a member of the Household the other day, we were meant to be discussing something else, but we spent very nearly the entire time talking about the John and Yoko situation and the issues arising in the interview. Let’s take them one by one.

The Archie not getting titles thing.

In 1917 there was an overhaul of the styles and titles of the Royal Family with a view to avoiding a proliferation of spare princes and princess that naturally happens if left unchecked (the example of Russia was not lost on George V, who was cousin of the last Tsar). Children of the monarch’s sons may receive the title prince or princess, great grandchildren do not. Even then, the monarch’s grandchildren do not automatically become princes/princesses. The children of HRH Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, the queen’s youngest son, are Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn, not Princess Louise and Prince James. As and when Prince Charles succeeds the throne (probably as George VII, be wary of any “Royal Expert” who talks of Charles III) then Archie would be the grandson of the monarch and could be made a prince. Prince Harry must be aware of this and it will have been explained.

The security for Archie thing.

He’s 22 months old and not given to going off on his own very much. He is assumed to be protected by the security of the adults he is with. His parents concern about a lack of security does not sit easily with their decision to move to LA, where the murder rate is seven times higher than in London (and London is a dangerous place compared to most of the UK). It is noticebale that many of the folk here bleating about this are the self same ones thta usually p*** and moan about how much the Royal Family costs.

The Archie skin colour thing.

What actually happened? I’ve heard Harry talk as if the conversation was with him, but also that it was reported to him. It certainly wasn’t with her. We do not know who made the remarks, or even what the remarks actually were. At one end of the spectrum, they could have been a variation on the quite usual and innocent speculation as to the eye and hair colour of a child, and who he would favour in his looks. At the other end they could have been genuinely racist comments hoping the child wasn’t “too black” or some such. As Harry has refused to go into details, we are left hanging. I tend towards the former interpretation, if only because with a very white dad and a mother who used to put down “Italian” on her acting CV, anyone with eyes could see Archie was hardly likely to come out resembling 50 cent.

This is the insidious completion of the “Archie trifecta”. In the interview Meghan skilfully wove the idea of this nebulous and dubious conversation about the potential complexion of the then unborn Archie with the other two points as if they were related. The idea that Archie’s race and skin colour would have any bearing on his acceptance, titles or security is as deeply hurtful as it is damaging. By reporting the conversation, but not who it was with or the exact details, the couple are quite deliberately attacking the Royal Family as a whole, an attack it is next to impossible to defend against.

I know folk have the idea of Britain as very white, I can assure you that race is a hot button topic here. Although the Afro-Caribbean population of the UK is around 3% it’s over 13% in London, where opinions are manufactured and exported to the rest of the UK. With mixed-race and various Asian communities, the non-white population is over 15% in the UK as a whole. Watching British TV, however, you might think it was at least 50%. The UK version of The View even has a black only panel once a week. One of the most distressing things over the last week is seeing how many black comentators here have bought the “racism” line wholesale, and they’ve not been alone. I’m not talking about the usual race baiting supects like the vile Diane Abbot, but otherwise non-political folk of usually good sense. They’ve been genuinely outraged and hurt. Of course, any attempt to counter the lie is met with “You don’t know, you’re not black”. The accusation of racism is very damaging indeed here.

The mental health thing.

First off, I’ll say that I don’t doubt that Meghan had a hard time settling in to “The Firm”. It is a very different environment, with different rules and expectations to the world outside. The Royal Household is known to have a good many rather catty queens running the show and all of the women who have married into the family had difficulties. That said, I simply don’t buy the line they couldn’t get help. Meghan says she went to HR and they were no help, well, the HR department is for the staff, not the Royal Family. They were no doubt quite thrown by her approaching them at all. It’s speculation, but I’m pretty sure what she says was a refusal to allow her to get help because of the optics was more like her interpretation of them saying it wasn’t in their remit.

The very idea that she would be “refused” access to counselling on the grounds it would look bad simply doesn’t stand up. A number of members of the Royal Family are known to have had counselling for various mental health issues, including her husband and his father. In fact, the Royals have been ahead of the curve on mental health. The idea that they couldn’t get help is equally ludicrous. As stated, Harry has had counselling himself and is the patron of a mental health charity! Are we to believe that when he needed counselling, he just stood in the street until an itinerant mental health professional happened to wander by? They have access to phone and email, they could’ve got help.

The who made who cry thing.

Who cares?

The lecturing the Queen on service thing.

At 14, in 1940, the then Princess Elizabeth did a radio broadcast to children evacuated to Canada. She and her sister were not sent to Canada because, as her mother said. “The children won’t go without me…I won’t leave the King…and the King will never leave.” At 17, in 1943 she undertook her first solo public duties. Towards the end of the war she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service (the women’s branch of the Army) and trained as a mechanic/driver. When her father died, and she became Queen, she was not yet 25. That was sixty-nine years ago, and since then, her life has been devoted to the people of Britain and the Commonwealth. It’s been a physically comfortable life, but not truly her own. She has known (so far) fourteen British Prime Ministers and fourteen US Presidents as well as a myriad of other politicians from across the globe. She has had to deal with her family business being public entertainment and has been looked to in times of national crisis to set the tone. The two people lecturing, criticising and to be frank, attacking her and the institution leads and represents were toddlers when she reached an age when most folk are thinking of retirement. They give the impression of being toddlers still.

Why should a patriotic American give a hoot about all this nonsense?

Good question. I can quite understand why you might not, but here are some reasons why I think you should.

The UK and the USA are close allies, something that damages the UK and its relationship with the US can harm America as well as Britain. The UK is a constitutional monarchy, whatever you think of this fact, it is a fact. British Conservatives and the Right in general are monarchists (with some libertarian exceptions) and the Left are largely republicans (small r). Should this business lead to the fall of the British monarchy (unlikely, but by no means far-fetched.) this would not be a good thing. The Right in Britain would be massively damaged, not least because many of us would never accept a republic and would soon be dead, in gaol or exiled in the States, hatching plots and hanging around in bars singing maudlin songs about the “old country”, and you really don’t want that.

Beyond poor old Blighty herself, there are wider ramifications. If the monarchy falls in the UK it is not going to survive in the rest of the Commonwealth. At the moment Trudeau is just a Prime Minister, the idea of that twerp being President of Canada, with presidential powers, does not raise a smile.

Lastly, America itself. Much of the MSM reaction I’ve seen has been ignorant, predictable Woke guff based upon deeply mistaken ideas of both Britain and the monarchy. It also often frames things as USA vs UK, which is not helpful. Make no mistake, this might seem to be just a nasty family spat, but it is a battle in the Woke war on all that is good. At the moment this looks like yet another culture war fight where one side is fighting while the other side is unaware they’re in a fight at all.

The accusations of racism are a weapon in that battle and were aimed not just “The Firm” but against the British as a whole. As Bill and the lads have pointed out before, being accused of something you’re not guilty of is especially hurtful. There are certainly racists in this country, but to say that we are a racist country is just plain wrong and betrays a wilful ignorance of the real Britain. We have had difficulties of course; but considering we have gone from a non-white population of much less than 1% to over 15% in a few decades I think we’ve done remarkably well.

Although the history and issues around race are different, British patriots feel very much as American patriots do about the repeated accusation of racism, and seeing it coming from the American media, and even the Whitehouse, is not helping the image or standing of the US in Britain. A wedge is being driven between British and American patriots, which has British leftists (who hate America almost as much as American leftists do) rubbing their hands with glee.

The wedding day, thousands of flag waving racists turn out to racislty celebrate the racist marriage of a ginger bloke and a nearly black woman.

Harry and Meghan’s wedding day was met with genuine joy and celebration. Far from disliking Meghan because of her modest amount of blackness, most Brits saw it as a refreshing addition to the Royal Family. That is of course, once her blackness was pointed out to them. The usual reaction to her early accusations of racism was to look puzzled and say “She’s black?”.

Some were unsure about her because she’s American (sadly there is a strain of anti-Americanism even among some right-wingers). Most people who voiced concern about Meghan did so on the grounds of her coming from the entertainment sector and her possibly expecting a Hollywood Princess fantasy life, rather than the very comfortable but restricted life of often very dull duty within a hierarchy that it really is. It did occur to me quite early on that she might have some sort of game plan when she started to use her new position to make political statements. The speculation has now become a certainty, I’d assumed she was the usual vacuous Hollywood lefty, I’d underestimated how much of a believer she really was.

Indeed The Donald himself was prophetic when he said “I wish a lot of luck to Harry, ‘cause he’s gonna need it.”.

Far from being entirely innocent of the world she was entering she is said by former friends (a group much larger than her current friends) to have been reading up on Diana before she even met Harry. The fact that her mother was the only member of her family invited to her wedding, while any number of bemused A listers she had barely met got invites, also suggests degree of forethought. Oprah (who she had met once) was one of the guests in St. George’s Chapel. Ex-friends have also said that she has more than once expressed a desire to run for office in the US. As for Harry, he now sounds like he’s joined a cult, which in a sense he has. I don’t know where this will lead, or where she intends it to lead, but I doubt it’s somewhere that my friends at BW.com will like.