Section:GDN 1J PaGe:3 Edition Date:190807 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/8/2019 18:11 cYanmaGentaYellowblac
Wednesday 7 August 2019 The Guardian •
3
Zoe
Williams
I
’ve been asking strangers random questions for
20 years in the name of journalism, but I’d never
been vox-popped myself until last Friday, when
I was approached on Oxford Street by someone
from a Japanese television station. What did
I think of Meghan Markle? I said I thought she
was great. Furthermore (warming to my theme),
I thought the reaction against her in the British
media was symptomatic of a deeply disturbing moment
of racist hegemony that has crashed over us like sewage,
following the dam burst of Brexit.
Yes, I admit there was quite a cock-eyed, irrigation-
system riff going on in that metaphor, and I must have
been talking for about 15 minutes, but they wanted
more. What did I think of the cover stars Markle chose
for her guest editorship of Vogue? The list had already
had some hostile attention in the press, which is why
they were asking. The princess’s heroines included
Greta Thunberg, Jane Fonda, novelist Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie and actor Jameela Jamil. It was glitzy but
it was political, and most of the confected rage seemed
to centre on the fact that she hadn’t chosen the Queen.
I thought Meghan’s list was great; I think she’s great.
Unnervingly, I think the royals are great.
If you dwell too hard on how things used to be, it
becomes surreal: the royal family have typically been
seen, by the forces of progress, as part of the apparatus
of the status quo. With their unearned wealth, and
protected by inscrutable silence, they symbolised the
entitled establishment more trenchantly than anyone
could by making a speech. It’s true that the staunch
republicanism of your average leftie in the 1970s and
80s faded in the callow 90s, when it simply wasn’t
cool to worry about privilege. But even as many anti-
monarchists turned to other issues, none could have ever
imagined standing on the same side of the barricades
as the royals. Yet here we are. “The Queen won’t accept
that,” people say sagely to one another, as another hard-
right ideologue fl oats the possibility of proroguing
parliament to crash Britain out of the European Union.
The thrust of the attacks on Markle’s Vogue editorship- condemning it as virtue-signalling of the worst kind, as
Hollywood self-aggrandisement shoving its hypocritical
values down our throats – was a variation on the theme:
“Get back in your box, princess.”
The Duchess
of Sussex at
the Smart
Works charity
in London
PHOTOGRAPH:
@SUSSEXROYAL/
AFP/GETTY IMAGESIt is typical of the age that anyone allying
themselves with an optimistic vision – what if we
could avert climate catastrophe? What if we stamped
out prejudice? – is immediately greeted with this kind
of ire. The mean-spirited arguments are constructed on
a foundation of bad faith. Only the underprivileged can
talk about privilege; only the excluded can talk about
bigotry; only the monk can talk about consumption.
The ploy is quite clear: virtually nobody counts as quite
deprived enough to have ambitions for a better world,
so everybody should just pipe down. It’s like some
infuriating riddle, devised by Breitbart and recycled on
the pages of once-respectable newspapers. Ultimately
the targets are more interesting than the impoverished
arguments themselves.
Why would it be Markle who riles them like this? Kate
Middleton, when she fi rst married into the royal family,
chose as one of her charities a women’s addiction
rehab centre called Hope House. Did anyone jump up
and down about that? Could it be anything to do with
Mark le’s race, this constant provocation she seems to
present to people who hate being called racist?
It is an uncomfortable thought experiment to imagine
Prince Harry explaining the mainstream British media
to his relatively new wife: “Look, the tabloids have
never been great. They hounded my mother to an early
grave with their insatiable scrutiny. But as bad as
the treatment of my mother was, it would have been
unimaginable that weird, misogynist rumours such
as ‘she’s faking her pregnancy’ would circulate in the
darkest recesses of the blogosphere. The mainstream
British media has suff ered some catastrophic bypass of
decency that may or may not be related to your race.”E
ven with such a sober account of
the facts, Harry would be placing
himself considerably to the left of
that mainstream. There’s no evidence
to suggest that he is left wing at all.
But he too has been pilloried by the
self-appointed scourges of political
correctness over his foregrounding of
the climate emergency. The royals haven’t moved , but
the political context in which they are now operating has
shifted so far that merely through anti-racist advocacy,
or trusting in science, they’ve fetched up on the same
team as the socialists. References to the “Overton
window” don’t really do justice to the changing political
parameters that have turned our royal family into a
stronghold of progressive thinking in modern Britain.
The lexicon of political analysis needs a new gloss; the
Overton hall of mirrors, the Overton trap door.
The royals have become potential allies in the
rebellion against lunacy. Could the prime minister
really refuse to resign following a vote of no confi dence,
and use the lack of precedent and fog of chaos to force
through a no-deal Brexit? “Oh, the Queen would never
have it.” We hope. “She’d be bound to intervene. She
loves the constitution. It’s her favourite thing, after the
Commonwealth.” We envisage the monarch intervening
with sound sense, while Prince William goes on a Pride
march and Prince Charles gives Davos a piece of his
mind about carbon emissions.
Some of it is wishful thinking, but there’s a truth at its
heart. English nativism, in all its petty media iterations,
has turned the royal family into renegades. To explain
that to a Japanese television channel would have been
the work of a year.I never thought
I’d see the royal
family as a
beacon of hope
Opinion
The thrust
of the attacks
on Markle’s Vogue
editorship was
a variation on the
theme: ‘Get back in
your box, princess’
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