Harry and Meghan's secret weapon
The Dukes of Sussex brandish the racism card and put the British royal house on the ropes with a more explosive television interview than the UK media anticipated
Prince Philip of Edinburgh (99 years old) asked an English student who was doing tourism in Papua New Guinea in 1998 how “he had managed so that the inhabitants of the island had not yet eaten it”. Elizabeth II's husband, who was on an official visit to the former British colony, assumed that all the tribes in the region would continue to practice cannibalism. The anecdote is part of an abundant list of outbursts that the British conservative media publish from time to time with a mixture of complicity and affection towards the Duke of Edinburgh, now hospitalized after having undergone a delicate coronary intervention.
This Sunday was the Commonwealth Day and the BBC broadcast a special ceremony at Westminster Abbey. The queen's recorded speech spoke of the "courage, commitment and selfless dedication" displayed during the pandemic throughout all the territories that were once part of the British Empire. Images of all the races of her inhabitants accompanied her words. And then a mixed choir sang, under the towering stones of the sacred precinct, greatest hits from the king of reggae, Bob Marley.
The idea of a community at ease in its own skin, celebrating its cultural and ethnic diversity, received hours later a jug of cold water from the other side of the Atlantic. Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, revealed to the American journalist Oprah Winfrey, in a television interview broadcast on CBS, that the British royal family had openly expressed their "concern" about skin tone ("how dark it could become ”) that the child would have that the couple was expecting at the time. Markle is the daughter of a mixed race marriage and she defines herself as African American. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex did not want to reveal the full content of that conversation (in which only Henry was present) or who exactly was the member of the royal house who expressed those prejudices. "It is something that I will never share publicly," Lady Di's son and Elizabeth II's grandson told Winfrey.
The couple's strategy when faced with an interview that had generated a worldwide expectation was not to depart from the golden rule: to criticize the monarchical institution (especially the high-level personnel who manage the day-to-day running of The Company, as they refer to it British tabloids), but not carry out personal attacks against members of the royal family. And on paper, they fulfilled it to the letter. But the depth charges that they were releasing, especially Meghan, who starred exclusively in the first of the two hours of interview, threaten to provoke a crisis of similar dimensions to the one that Diana Spencer starred in after her divorce from Prince Charles . The Duchess of Sussex struck all the emotional springs that can most affect not only the American public, but all those viewers under the age of forty who have followed this story.
Buckingham Palace, Markle accuses, did not want to grant little Archie neither the title of prince nor the official security that it entails, given the possibility that his skin was darker than appropriate. The royal household staff whom the Duchess of Sussex turned to imploring help when she, five months pregnant, she began to develop "suicidal inclinations" because of the isolation to which she was subjected, ignored her demands. "She no longer wanted to live", she came to confess to the interviewer.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have managed to convey the image of a loving couple whom the royal household decided to leave helpless, deny them their protection, allow the tabloids to ruthlessly dismember them and even spread lies against them to protect others. Most Valuable Members of the House of Windsors.
It was clear throughout the interview that Markle is the strongest voice in that marriage, but Enrique also had his own problems pending that he did not hesitate to unleash. He accused his father, the Prince of Wales, heir to the throne, of not wanting to answer his phone calls in the worst moments of the crisis.
"I was disappointed," he said. He expressed purported compassion for his father and his brother, Prince William, hopelessly "trapped" in the system. And he admitted that, among the children of Lady Di, there is today a "space" of sentimental distance. Both had words of affection for the queen and tried to save her from that television coven. Without giving the impression of understanding that Elizabeth II is the cornerstone of a construction with which they began hammering it.
Anecdotes that, under normal circumstances, would have made big headlines almost went unnoticed in the torrent of complaints that was the conversation with Winfrey. Like the announcement that the second baby they expect will be a girl; that they were married in private three days before the official ceremony; or that in the famous disagreement prior to the wedding with her sister-in-law, Kate Middleton, the one who ended up crying was Meghan and not the Duchess of Cambridge. They were almost the crumbs of a huge reckoning that is going to keep British tabloids busy for days, weeks and months to come.
