Why America is the only place lapping up Harry and Meghan’s claims

Multiple new claims from Harry and Meghan have been branded completely laughable, with one line in particular from the Duchess making no sense at all.

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More than three thousand years ago the two mightiest powers in the ancient world went to war because two over-privileged aristocrats decided their love was worth the downfall of civilisation.

That event would become The Iliad, the oldest story of the Western canon and, for many, the foundation stone of literature itself.

According to legend, the Trojan prince Paris exploited the friendship and hospitality of the Spartan king Menelaus and swept his wife Helen away to the towering walls of Troy, the great economic powerhouse of the Mediterranean.

A great oath had been sworn to protect Helen’s future and that of the man she married, and so when this was violated her husband called on the power of his brother Agamemnon, the most powerful of the Greeks, to restore his honour.

Thus, the legend has it, a thousand ships were launched and a decade-long war began that crippled the known world.

Archaeological records suggest that not only was Troy famously obliterated but the once dominant Greek kingdom of Mycenae was also mysteriously destroyed thereafter.

Whatever the truth, it was a sufficiently seismic event that wandering bards told the story for generations to come, until Homer — the world’s first bestseller — put it into writing some 400 years later.

Now, some 2800 years after that magnificent book deal, we are seeing history prove itself eternal with the story of Harry and Meghan.

Unlike much of the rest of the world, America seems to be lapping up Harry and Meghan’s claims. Picture: Netflix

As with Troy standing alone against the vast array of angry armies from Ancient Greece, America seems to be the only place where Harry and Meghan’s story is actually believed.

Maybe it is only in the land of dreams — the land that literally produced the phrase “the American dream” — that their absurdly fanciful claims of oppression could actually be believed.

Because while Harry and Meghan’s increasingly laughable allegations about their ongoing mansion-clad suffering have been met with almost universal derision around the globe, America — or at least the mainstream American media — remains remarkably susceptible to their “truth” bombs.

In many ways this says more about the US than it does about the quasi-royal couple. After all, in America anything is possible — including, one must assume, the fantasy of Harry and Meghan’s complaints.

Chief among these remains the allegation that they were subjected to intolerable racism by the royal family, a claim that — as far as I am aware — still rests on the sole assertion that an unnamed person once speculated upon the complexion of their unborn child.

What horror! Perhaps the unconscionably racist royal was a closet Nazi or perhaps they were merely trying to be sun smart.

Tragically we will never know, because all these accusations are directed towards invisible and amorphic forces that never appear to take human form. It’s kind of like an episode of Stranger Things but without the plot or character development.

Still, any claim of racism rings loud and long in America, where black slavery lingered far longer than in many other jurisdictions. Such as, oh I don’t know, Britain?

But it’s nice to know Harry and Meghan feel safer in the nation that perpetuated slavery for decades after the British Navy was sending warships to stop it, even if they do still feel oppressed by the historical legacy of empire.

A still from episode four of the Netflix series. Picture: Netflix

Of course the British Empire was originally built on slave labour, as was the Spanish, Dutch and French. And as was the Egyptian, Greek and Roman. And as was the Chinese and Japanese — the latter quite latterly, if you cast your mind back 80 years or so, and the former even today, if you’re unfortunate enough to be a Uighur.

And, if you want to get down to brass tacks, the invasion of William the Conqueror marked the end of Anglo-Saxon slavery in England. Yep, whites were enslaving whites and Vikings were enslaving everybody, and then a dodgy French Norman dude killed a bloke called Harold and it stopped.

But strangely we don’t seem to hear much commentary on such historical and global matters in Harry and Meghan’s cripplingly sorrowful video diary, even though they tell us so often how much they care about history and the world.

In truth, if they really knew or cared about history or the world, they would know all this.

But all they really know or care about is themselves. Their uncanny capacity to perceive almost every conceivable situation as a slight against them is proof of that.

Yet the latest instalment of their catalogue of woe has crossed the Rubicon from whinge to unhinged. Their performance is now not just narcissistic but deranged, to the point where I cannot see how their credibility will ever recover.

A case in point is Meghan’s nonsensical comment: “I wasn’t being thrown to the wolves, I was being fed to the wolves.”

How on earth did anyone let her say this? Being thrown to the wolves is, by any rational understanding, exactly the same thing as being fed to the wolves.

But the more profound truth is that she is the wolf. In this sad and sorry 21st century Iliad the kidnapped princess isn’t her.

It’s Harry.