Please Ignore

If you have read about, watched, listened to or even merely wondered whatever the fuck the Sussexes are banging on about you are part of the problem. Sadly, as much as I loathe the ludicrous royal soap opera, even I have not managed to ignore it altogether and the fact that I am writing this means that I am at least partly culpable, too. In exactly the same vein, I heard on some R4 show the other day that Love Island is one of the most successful TV franchises ever.

What is wrong with us as a species that the zenith of popular culture celebrates and magnifies the worst instincts we possess? Driven by a prurient and morbid curiosity, we are mere fodder for facile, voyeuristic, lowest-common-denominator pap which neither educates nor truly informs. We are lower as a life form as a result. The Netflix ‘documentary’ (Fiction? Fantasy?) about the whining ex-royals (who nevertheless retain titles they don’t deserve) is just another low spot.

And there, I did what you do, I have a fucking opinion on something that I would be better off being completely ignorant about. So what do I do? Do I – like many – continue to have an opinion about something I steadfastly refuse to pretend to be interested in? Or should I dip a toe in the water and ‘do the research’? Wait, what am I thinking? I’d rather stick pins in my eyes, yet here I am, somehow trying to justify my own contradictory reactions.

I will resist reading about, hearing about or watching anything whatsoever to do with the hideous couple. I certainly don’t care what happens to them and still less what they think about it all. But all I have to do is open up a newspaper, turn on the radio or television or – heaven forfend – browse the gawdy baubles of the internet and there it is, splashed like projectile vomit all over the place.

Even hoping that the possible bill proposed by Conservative MP Bob Seeley to strip them of their titles is to engage in the topic, when my most heartfelt desire in this regard would be to see them not only defenestrated from the highest royal window but to be banished to exile and every trace of their existence to be expunged from memory. See how impossible it is to just ignore it all?

Amused we are not.

Amid the concerns over climate change, the current freeze and the cost of heating, inflation outstripping wages faster than any other time this century, the coming energy drought, the unstoppable influx of unwanted illegal migrants… In the face of all this how can it be true that the most pressing matter for the nation is what a pair of spoiled offence-mongers and race-baiters think about the in-laws? We don’t deserve the ability to communicate, do we?

Because she is black?

The pomp, the pageantry, the pontification from the pulpit! But most of all the punditry, by all and sundry of the significance of the royal wedding on Saturday. Given the manner of the demise of the groom’s mother you would imagine that the oh-so-well-tuned sensitivities of the self-appointed kinder, gentler spokespersons for society might have curbed some of the more outlandish claims for the Duchess of Sussex’s future role.

The Telegraph reports that she will fight for feminism. You do know, Telegraph, that it is the British royal family she has married into? Apart from the not insignificant fact that it has often been headed up by a woman it is practically the epitome of the sort of patriarchal system that feminism deplores. But it doesn’t stop there; if the blanket coverage across every platform told me anything it told me that a world of expectations lies on the young lady’s shoulders, not least that she is now to be the focus and figurehead for the race industry.

Unless you had been told, repeatedly, you would not realise that Meghan is ‘black’. I beg your pardon; she’s black? Without that information you might imagine she was of Italian extraction, or Spanish perhaps; there are darker skinned products of the sunbed culture in the Anglo-Saxon gene pools of our former working classes. But like the tale of the emperor’s new clothes we are being trained to see what we are told we must see; get used to it - latte is the new black... at least until the gloss wears off and we get back to reality.

But for now at least we are awash with the news that a ‘person of colour’ has broken down, infiltrated, multiculturalised [insert hyperbole of preference here] one of the last bastions of privilege and exclusivity that exist outside of EU politics and the Bilderbergers. Until she falls out of favour – for as sure as eggs is eggs she will – she will be lauded as an ambassador for every minority cause the grievance bandwagons can deliver. While most of us accept the match for what it is – just two people doing what millions of others before them have done – certain factions on the left are applauding this as a great victory for... for what, exactly?

Why is the left so obsessed with race? The British have traditionally taken people at face value and cultural markers have only been an issue when say, every stabber in London happens to be of Somalian origin, or pretty much every swept-under-the-carpet rape-gang exposé happens to centre around rapists of an identifiably Pakistani persuasion. And even then the colour of their skin is not the focus of prejudice, rather it is a handy marker of shared identity – the prejudice is in their actions, not ours.

The Firm is indefatigable...

The 'black duchess’ is identity politics writ large and it is at the heart of all that is wrong with Labour and the left. They accuse others of creating division but what could be more divisive than to perpetually plead the special causes of each of the segments of an ever more finely divided society. Rather than allow herself to be co-opted into the causes of the eternally aggrieved I hope Meghan assimilates seamlessly into the family she has joined and becomes a true royal. Let her stand up for everybody and let her rub the left’s nose in anything but diversity.