If you believe in the royals’ fiction you’re away with the fairies
YOU may have missed the story about four well-known royal commentators taking cash to comment on the Oprah interview before they had seen it.
YouTuber pranksters fed them a couple of snippets and off they went, dissing Meghan and defending the Palace, one saying “this was an actress giving one of her great performances, from start to finish”, despite not having seen that performance.
But amid all the other outrage no one had time to be outraged.
I wasn’t surprised, having worked alongside the late James Whitaker, who, whenever a royal story broke, would be inundated with media interview requests. They guessed he had nothing new to tell them, but didn’t care, so long as he said nothing in a posh voice. And he was so posh he drank vending machine coffee from a champagne flute.
The Royal Family is a fiction, you see. For the majority of Britons it’s their favourite children’s book. A sort of Alice in Windsorland. And for those who hug its battered cover nostalgically to their bosom, it doesn’t have to
be true, or real, just reassuring. As in all fiction this story throws up regular baddies – Wallis Simpson, James Hewitt, Paul Burrell and now Meghan Markle. But no royal is allowed to be seen as a baddy. Not even if they associate with paedophiles.
A mass grave could be found in Balmoral containing the corpses of babies murdered by a senior royal, who coughed to being an infant serial killer because he was bored with his pointless existence. And the majority of Brits would say “yes, but who’ll be head of state if we abolish them? Diane Abbott? No thanks”.
The plot twists are a brilliant distraction from reality. Right now we’re hearing that post-Brexit trade with the EU is down by a third, lowpaid workers who saw us through the pandemic face wage cuts, and the poorest schoolkids will fall a year behind in their education. But what’s that compared to wetting our knickers over a pair of spoiled rich kids pleading they’ve been left destitute in a Californian mansion with only a multimillion pound inheritance and an in tray full of lucrative media deals to live on?
Who cares about record use of foodbanks when they can listen to true patriots like Nigel Farage tell Americans there’s not a scintilla of racism at the top of the British state.
That’s despite the current Prime Minister once writing that the Queen “has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies”.
On Monday, “abolish the monarchy” was trending on Twitter with Republican groups demanding we strike while the iron is hot. But, like a tantrum at a nursery, the temperature always cools.
This is an infantilised nation obsessed with the Queen the same way Jacob Rees-Mogg is with his nanny. The monarchy is a comfort blanket too many won’t let go of for fear of growing up.
Its loudest supporters can be heard lustily declaring that Britons never, never shall be slaves, without realising that they are slaves to a fiction. And anyone who doesn’t buy into it is a heretic.
I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere in Kent, right now, there are people holding mass burnings of Suits DVDs to punish the American witch.
Still, kids will be kids, eh?
They’ve only got a multimillion pound inheritance to survive on
What do you think?
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