You can bank on the Sussexes to be at the height of hypocrisy
SHORTLY after their wedding, a joint coat of arms was unveiled for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
On Meghan’s side, a shield containing the colour blue, representing the Pacific Ocean, and rays, symbolising sunshine, paid homage to her Californian roots while Prince Harry’s reflected the ‘Support Arms of the Sovereign in right of the United Kingdom’.
Unlike other royal coats of arms, no Latin inscription was given.
But last week, after the couple made their first paid-for appearance, they would be hard pushed to beat ‘Quemadmodum praecipio non feci’ – Do as I say, not as I have done.
For after the royal runaways preached to us how to live our lives and how we must each do our bit for the planet, it was disturbing to see Wall Street titan JP Morgan become their first paymaster.
Experts predict the couple netted up to $1m for their appearance at the bank’s billionaires summit, held last week in
Miami, their first engagement since splitting from the Royal family.
Famously, the Sussexes have repeatedly railed against “fossil fuel emissions... jeopardising” the Earth.
And while the pair refused to say how they travelled 4,500 miles from their current home near Vancouver to the Sunshine State, the flight details of JP Morgan’s plane appeared telling.
The bank’s £50m Gulfstream 6, described as the “biggest, fastest, and overall best private jet money can buy”, had flown to the Canadian city two days before their appearance.
The following day it left Vancouver at 12.10pm landing in Palm Beach at 8.03pm – close to where Serena Williams lives and where the couple are believed to have stayed.
If the Sussexes had been on board, their flight would have spewed out 10 times the carbon emissions of a commercial airliner, flying in the face of climate concern.
Their choice of JP Morgan also dug a more dubious hole, as it were.
The investment giant is, over the years, reported to have pumped about £52bn into companies behind fracking, as well as Arctic oil and gas exploration, the Rainforest Action Network said in its Banking on Climate Change 2019 report.
But it isn’t only the bank’s record on climate change that sent temperatures rising.
Its lengthy rap sheet of wrongdoings includes a £282m fine in the US for manipulating the electricity market in September 2013, a £268m fine for ripping off credit card customers and, separately, £572m for the ‘London Whale’ scandal (which refers to two former JP Morgan traders who committed fraud to cover up massive losses in a trading portfolio). Months later it was hit with a £3.5bn fine for mis-selling ‘toxic mortgage’ debt to government-backed loan firms.
In January 2014, the bank famously had to pay £1.8bn to Bernie Madoff’s ‘Ponzi’ scheme victims, while nine months later it got slapped with a £920m fine for rigging foreign exchange markets.
This is in addition to it having clients including Prince Andrew’s paedophile pal Jeffrey Epstein, while building its business on banks that profited from the slave trade.
There is no celebrity in the world right now hotter than Harry and Meghan. America’s own ‘royalty’, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, can’t hold a candle to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
The couple has huge earning potential but how they accept money, and from whom, is going to be their challenge going forward if the pair want the world to listen to what they preach.
When it comes to the rich and famous, there is an awful lot of hypocrisy over climate change.
But while Harry and Meghan take JP Morgan’s money, they’d do well not to say another word about being kind to the environment.