Royal ‘celebs’ Harry and Meghan add to toxic assault on the West

In their interview with Oprah Winfrey, Harry and Meghan have ‘actually done something politically significant, and wholly destructive ..’ Picture: Harpo Productions

You can cavil at the ubiquity of television, or its intrusiveness, or superficiality. But it is powerful and relentless in bringing the underprivileged into our living rooms, our head space. Suffering Rohingya in Myanmar, slum dwellers in Kolkata, Ebola victims in Africa, even the chronically unemployed and drug-addicted in the worst inner-city blight spots of the big Western metropolises, from Detroit to Marseilles.

Rarely have the sensitive viewer’s withers been rung so much as by the heartbreaking spectacle of disadvantage, persecution and suffering revealed by the ace investigative journalist Oprah Winfrey this week. There, in the slums of Santa Barbara, is a family forced to cower in their miserable nine-bedroom house, worth only a handful of royal dust at $US15m (nearly $20m in our money), trapped in the Montecito ghetto, where more than 90 per cent of the wealthy residents are white.

Harry and Meghan splashed $US15 million on this California home. Credit: Sotheby's International Realty

And such rough neighbours — Oprah, Ellen De Generis, Kevin Costner. What a neighbourhood. The suffering young couple have been forced on to the bare bones of a rough-and-tumble existence, down to a communications team, security detachment, domestic staff of nannies and cooks and housekeepers and what have you. Harry and Meghan — just two ­ordinary kids doing it tough.

And, Harry told us, he has to live on the inheritance from his mum, which when he got it was some tens of millions of dollars, no doubt shrewdly invested since. And there is allegedly a similar-sized inheritance from the Queen Mother. But they are a wonderfully unaffected couple. Theirs is not the artificial life of contrived gesture and showbiz nonsense. Look at their generous if tiny pen for chickens rescued from battery farms — these lucky poultry occupy surely the most expensive real estate of their species.

That Harry and Meghan succeeded in garnering overwhelming sympathy from the US public — and warm messages of support from the Joe Biden White House and the likes of Hillary Clinton — shows how perfectly they have mastered the dynamics of celebrity culture.

There is a serious dimension to this. Celebrity dynamics now dominate Western culture, and increasingly Western politics, in new and increasingly destructive ways. Harry and Meghan deployed the two most lethal weapons of personal testimony — mental health and race. It goes without saying that if Meghan ­really felt suicidal she was entitled to proper medical and emotional help. She and Harry blame the palace for refusing it to her. But surely if Harry failed to summon medical assistance in a life-threatening situation for his wife, he is not quite as heroic as billed. Of course, it’s silly to invade the emotionalism of celebrity strip poker with either logic or facts.

Now they protect their privacy with tell-all television interviews. This one was watched at first cut by 60 million people. Their earning power in the US will now be stratospheric.

If, in her time as a royal, Meghan was truly exposed to racist sentiment, that too is completely, absolutely unacceptable. Racism is a profound human evil. It ­deserves to be called out and ­opposed wherever it exists. But identifying racism where it doesn’t really exist is corrosively damaging. The media criticism that seemed in their royal days to exercise Harry and Meghan the most had nothing to do with race. The couple famously preach the most oleaginous, moralistic version of opposition to global warming, yet took multiple private jets on numerous holidays. That’s a standard hypocrisy among celebrities.

Pointing it out, no matter how gracelessly, is scarcely racism. Similarly, Meghan dropped the “bombshell” that she didn’t make Kate cry over the flower girls’ dresses, but Kate made her cry. And the palace would not correct the record. Plainly, this is a shocking assault on human rights, and surely it should be referred to the International Criminal Court, but it’s not necessarily racist.

Meghan strongly implied young Archie didn’t get to be a prince at birth because he is of mixed race. This is preposterous but important because it sustains the allegation of racism. The convention is that for grandchildren of the monarch, only the direct heir’s children are princes and princesses at birth. The cousins become princes and princesses when granddad, in this case Charles, gets the throne. Nor does Scotland Yard’s police protection depend on having a title — Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie don’t have Scotland Yard police protection despite being princesses.

All this is a matter of supreme indifference to any sensible human being, important only because Harry and Meghan used it to make the charge that British society generally is racist. And that is the nub of celebrity’s increasing assault on Western societies.

Harry and Meghan also said that some senior royal questioned how dark Archie’s skin would be. This seems so grotesque as to be even beyond the normal tone-deaf nuttiness of British royals. Not only that, it’s inconsistent with everything else that happened. Meghan was lavishly ­welcomed by the whole royal establishment. Her wedding could not have been grander. She was the first royal divorcee given a full church wedding. She was welcomed to holidays with the royals well before her marriage.

The Queen, in her response to the interview, noted that “recollections may vary”, which seems a polite way of casting doubt on the context of this story. It might be as harmless as someone saying to Harry: I hope your baby resembles your wife and not you. Or it might be something worse.

This is all in many ways meaningless falderol. And I have no desire to defend the royal family, apart from the Queen herself, the only member who always behaves with dignity and discipline. But as one member of the British public said in a vox pop: “They (Harry and Meghan) are not having a shot at the Queen, they’re having a shot at my country.”

Britain surely has its faults. As an Australian insanely proud of my Irish heritage I can enumerate these at length. But there would hardly be a society anywhere in the world less racist than contemporary Britain. Racial inter-­marriage rates are very high, the government is ethnically diverse, the mayor of London is a Muslim, and so on. Show me a notably less racist society.

But the dynamics of celebrity have now embraced the truly toxic doctrine that all Western ­societies, especially the US and Britain, are irredeemably racist.

So Harry and Meghan, against all expectations, have actually done something politically significant, and wholly destructive: they’ve helped turn celebrity culture against the Western project.