Too easy to give a duchess a bad name

HOW would you like to be in Prince Harry’s shoes? Nope, ne neither. One can’t help but feel the lad is on a hiding to nothing.

His wife certainly is. You get the impression that certain elements of the media are out to get her and at the same time it appears Meghan is not the sort of person to pour oil on troubled waters.

So watching her interview with Oprah Winfrey on Sunday will be like seeing a match being struck in slowmotion on the side of a matchbox.

Goodness only knows what the British tabloids will be saying by Monday, but the resultant bonfire could be lighting up headlines for weeks or months to come.

Do I care? Not really. Like most people, I’ve got more to worry about – doing my own little bit to survive a pandemic and serial lockdowns – than anything that could cause me to fear for a wealthy couple in California whom I’ve never met and probably never will.

But you cannot get away from the world’s biggest real-life soap opera. It’s almost as though the scriptwriters have spent their time in lockdown taking part in a brainstorming session on Zoom.

There’s Prince Philip closing in on his 100th birthday while recovering from a heart operation in hospital. The Queen – sad and home alone after 74 years of marriage – already has one one problem that won’t go away in the form of the strange, haughty and unpopular Prince Andrew.

Cut to an extremely unlikely scene where we see Prince Harry riding along on an open-topped bus with a chubby British actor pouring him cups of tea – admitting the surreal fact that he’s never been on such a bus before. No wonder these people need media advisors…

And what spin doctors know first and foremost is that it’s very easy for the media to chuck a load of mud and make it stick. Any newspaper editor will tell you that creating dramatic and eye-catching headlines while on the attack is far simpler than trying to promote anything relating to positivity or praise.

Once a story has legs (to use newspaper speak) it can be very difficult to reverse or subdue.

Look at Trump and his media team – the people who told the US electorate that all the nation’s problems were to do with a small bunch of overly powerful folk in Washington. Millions bought into this sniping negative story, even though Trump himself was an overly powerful billionaire who had not a jot in common with ordinary working people.

After entering the White House he tweeted his way through four years of bad decision-making, gaffs and errors (like his almost criminally inadequate reaction to Covid) – and still more than 70 million Americans continued to believe his tale about a wicked elite out to rob him of power.

Compared to that mayhem, stitching up a ‘dodgy duchess’ is relatively simple for British tabloid editors. A few carefully planted hints over the years that someone marrying into the best-known family in the world might be a little bit too big for her boots; that she’s just a tad disrespectful to our beloved Queen or; worse still, that she is downright manipulative…

Such hints are to character assassination what lighting a disposable barbecue is to a heath fire. Whoosh! Before you know it you are looking at a scorched landscape or a burnedout reputation.

My feminist friends would argue it’s even more incendiary if the target is a woman. Fuel the bonfire with some kind of ‘princess-and-the-pea’ syndrome, or that the person is cruel and bullying to staff, and you are well on your way to painting a pantomime villain.

You get the picture. I know you do. Because nine out of ten Brits already seem to have made up their minds… Meghan was a mistake. She’s not good for poor boyish Harry who, because of his mother, has every reason to fear the wolfpack otherwise known as The British Press.

There’s even a bit of previous… It was 85 years ago that the brother of

Harry’s great-grandfather turned his back on royal life to run off with an American divorcee. And Mrs Simpson wasn’t given a kindly ride by Fleet Street either.

What I find sad and worrying is the way in which negativity so easily spreads like wildfire – while attempting to portray anything positive is like attempting to set light to a pile of wet logs.

It’s as though we are designed by default to veer towards nastiness and suspicion.

“You wait and see, the tabloids will go after Meghan and Harry and those daft young things won’t stand a chance,” an old media hack told me on the phone this week.

“Accusations of her bullying staff are just the start of it.”

People say The Crown is one of the best television productions ever made. I’d agree. Vast sums were spent creating it.

But they might save a bob or two on scriptwriters if they ever decide to bring the series up to date. That edge of drama required to make a screenplay jump off the page is being penned as we speak.

Brits have made up their mind... Meghan was a mistake. She’s not good for poor boyish Harry