Meghan and Harry rip away at the royals
I watched the entire two hours of Oprah’s sit down with Meghan and Harry, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was hardly alone: it was the most-watched T.V. program since last year’s Oscars.
Of course, the interview’s fallout was immediate, as everyone knew it would be. Harry and Meghan dropped some bombshells, especially the part where an unnamed member of the royal family told Harry that baby Archie couldn’t be a prince because there were worries about how dark his skin would be.
On twitter, the interview quickly went viral. One of the most explosive strings was launched by the British tabloid gossiper, Piers Morgan. I never did like him, dating back to when he had a brief 15 minutes of fame here in the U.S. after CNN hired him to replace Larry King. Morgan struck me then as being snide, pompous and rude; the American people agreed. His ratings were in the toilet, and CNN dropped him.
Morgan’s relationship with Trump goes back at least to 2008, when he won the U.S. celebrity version of The Apprentice. In 2018, when Trump was the sitting U.S. president, Morgan interviewed him on Britain’s ITV network, an interview that was widely panned as a sycophantic “love-in” for Trump. A poll afterwards showed that 88% of respondents thought Morgan was “too soft” on Trump.
One viewer remarked, “Feel like I’ve just watched two people engaging in foreplay and now I need to bleach my eyes and scrub my skin off…”. Someone else put up this picture on Twitter to indicate what he felt Morgan had done:
Morgan, as big a fan of the royal family as he is of Trump, did not like the Meghan-Harry interview, to put it mildly. He tweeted:
“This interview is an absolutely disgraceful betrayal of the Queen and the Royal Family. I expect all this vile destructive self-serving nonsense from Meghan Markle—but for Harry to let her take down his family and the Monarchy like this is shameful.”
That resulted in a huge brouhaha in the twitterverse, with most commenters concluding—as I did—that Morgan is just a pissed-off old white guy—shades of Trump–with all of his white entitlement, defending the most powerful white family in the world, with all its white entitlement. Typical of the responses was from a guy who tweeted, “If you watched the entire interview & what upset you is that they dared to tell the world the truth, you @piersmorgan are part of the problem.”
Meghan came across to me as smart, likeable and savvy, a woman in the Diana mold who, once again, has been tortured by the Queen and the royal family’s courtiers. Harry astonished me with his even-tempered fairness, dedication to human rights and defense of his wife. If ever anyone was “to the manor born,” it is Prince Harry. He could easily have enjoyed wealth, fame and privilege, the way his brother, father and grandfather have, but he is his mother’s son—a man with a sensitive soul—who chose to renounce his birthright because he saw injustice and could not stand idly by and do nothing about it.
Princess Michael of Kent may be the one who brought up the skin color of the child. This is from her Wikipedia entry: In February 2005, she gave a series of interviews to promote her book, in one of which she said that Britons should be more concerned about the bloodlines of their children,[25] and claimed that the British media were “excited” by Prince Harry’s decision to wear a swastika for a fancy dress party because of the British press’ “ownership structure”. She claimed that “there wouldn’t have been so much fuss made” had he worn the hammer and sickle.[26]
Well, we don’t know, and we’re not likely to know, given Harry’s statement that he will never reveal who it was. But it hardly matters. Whoever it was, was expressing the sentiments of centuries of Britain’s upper crust.