DON’T PAINT ME AS RACIST

HAVING accused the royals of racism towards his wife in last week’s Oprah interview, apparently Prince Harry spoke subsequently to his brother and his father but, according to the Sussex camp, the talks were ‘not productive’ because they failed to ‘acknowledge the problem’.

In other words, Charles and William refuted the claim. And quite right too. Why should they be forced to admit to something they say isn’t true?

On a much more minor note, last week American Vogue jumped on this particular bandwagon by accusing me of using a ‘racist’ term — ‘niggling’ — in an article I wrote about Harry and Meghan’s engagement pictures back in 2017. But, as has been explained several times and at great length in this newspaper — and also in a letter to the editor-in-chief of Vogue, Anna Wintour — the word in question, ‘niggling’, is a) not racist and b) was not in the actual article but in the headline, which I did not write or have any part in writing.

And yet they persist. On Saturday, in response to the Daily Mail’s complaint about the accusation — which as far as I’m concerned amounts to libel — they simply repeated the lie, saying ‘our editors concluded that Sarah Vine’s word choice was indeed surprising’. I think this is what is known as ‘confirmation bias’.

The truth is, it may well suit Vogue’s agenda to paint me as a racist, just as it may suit the Duke and Duchess’s agenda to paint the Royal Family as such. But just because we want something to be true doesn’t always mean it is. And repeating a lie doesn’t make it true. It just makes you an even bigger, nastier liar.