Harry’s head-shaking hypocrisy hits a new level

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle turned on their own families — and it has taken things to a new level, writes James MacSmith.

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Those immortal words were penned by literary great Leo Tolstoy 150 years ago and never have they seemed more poignant or prescient in the wake of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s ‘trashathon’ interview.

We know the Russian Royal family and their 300-year dynasty was brought to a shuddering halt when they were bayoneted to death by Communist ‘revolutionaries’ in 1918.

Recent events are of course not even close to the same level of brutality but might the fall out from the Oprah tell-all also bring a dramatic end to the British Royal Family as we once knew it and loved it?

Did Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex deal a fatal blow to their royal family? Picture: AFP

A family we have long compared longingly and lovingly to our own?

At a time when Communism, Marxism, social democracy – however you want to cloak it – is unfathomably enjoying a resurgence in popularity in the west and disturbingly growing in influence and menace via China, it’s only natural that we look closer to home for comfort from the worries of the world in this pandemic age.

Cue Meghan and Harry to make us feel not so bad about our own lives, or our own familial relationships. Despite the daily (hourly?) challenges and travails of family life, I can’t think of anyone I know who would so publicly eviscerate their own flesh and blood.

Think your family is bad? Hold my beer says the Prince formerly known as Harry.

To be accused of being racist by a son, grandson, brother, nephew, brother-in-law, who as a 21-year-old (the age of an adult by any reckoning) viewed it as acceptable, humorous perhaps, to dress in a Nazi costume at a party has taken headshaking hypocrisy to a stratospheric new level.

Prince Harry wearing a Nazi shirt and swastika at a fancy dress party.

The party was in 2005 when Harry was 21. Picture: Supplied

But of course in this age of victimhood it is everyone else’s fault except for the offender.

In this digital age, what happened an hour ago is old news, and there are other people to scramble over, to cancel, while you make your way to higher ground.

Just make sure you start slinging the mud before it’s slung at you, or you’re shouting ‘racist’ or ‘Nazi’ before someone else says the same to you.

Hit them with a coward punch before they hit you.

How does any of this go to eradicating the scourge of racism? I don’t know. Especially when some of the accusations, such as Archie not having a title have already been exposed as falsehoods, subject to centuries old tradition, not neo-racism.

Does Archie have no royal title because of neo-racism or because of tradition? Picture: AFP

Like a lot going on in the world, it’s impossible to make sense of.

As such it’s no surprise when we feel the need to retreat into our own family, head back to the lounge room to have a beer, or soda water with mum and dad and laugh about the time we set the house on fire as a 12-year-old.

‘You little rascal’.

The whole slow motion car crash of the whole soap opera is what’s so shockingly appealing to so many people

It is also a comfort to many of us that our own families, while maybe sometimes unhappy, aren’t so bad after all.