AFTERTASTE

The British Royal Fam­ily’s scan­dals seem­ingly slowed to a crawl a cou­ple of years ago: no more adul­ter­ous princesses for­ni­cat­ing (when preg­nant with a royal child) with toe-suck­ing Amer­i­can bil­lion­aires, no more heirs to the throne wish­ing to be mag­i­cally trans­formed into boxes of Tam­pax, no more princes lying through their regal teeth on TV in­ter­views be­fore fi­nally pay­ing a king’s ran­som to a woman they had de­nied abus­ing when she was un­der­age.

Here in Cat­alo­nia, cov­er­age of the British roy­als tends to be fairly scarce, un­less there’s a death in the fam­ily or an­other sex­ual scan­dal rears its en­tic­ing head (it got to the stage where I even for­got some of their names). Nev­er­the­less, I did binge watch the six-part Net­flix se­ries about Harry and Meghan Markle, cu­ri­ous to see why it had upset the en­tire royal in­sti­tu­tion far more than any final exit or furtive rumpy-pumpy.

The first thing that stood out was that Harry spoke nor­mal Eng­lish, com­plete with mod­ern slang, in­stead of the horsey, mar­ble-crunch­ing id­i­olect em­ployed by most of the aris­toc­racy. But the real sur­prise was that Harry and Meghans’ pop­u­lar­ity be­came so im­mense at one point, they were mak­ing the other roy­als look like walk-on parts. On top of which, the fact that Meghan was a woman of colour - the same colour, in­deed, as the vast ma­jor­ity of the cit­i­zens of the Com­mon­wealth - meant that her pres­ence in the royal fam­ily might have helped re­vi­talise this dwin­dling con­sor­tium.

But then (most of) the British tabloids put the boot in, ap­par­ently with the con­sent of the var­i­ous royal PR of­fices: Harry was ac­cused of hav­ing been a drug ad­dict and drunk­ard, and Ms Markle of com­ing from a crim­i­nal back­ground, along with var­i­ous other fab­ri­cated de­meanours. Even more se­ri­ously, pri­vate and com­pro­mis­ing let­ters to her es­tranged fa­ther were in­ter­cepted and pub­lished. In short, the Eng­lish hacks had a field day with her by lying their tiny heads off with im­punity in a crypto-racist way that drove her to the point of se­ri­ously con­sid­er­ing sui­cide. The pu­tre­fy­ing cherry on the top of this un­ap­petis­ing cake came to­wards the end of last month when an al­co­hol-faced man called Je­remy Clark­son wrote an ar­ti­cle in The Sun (the tabloid par ex­cel­lence) say­ing that he hated Ms Markle ’on a cel­lu­lar level’ and wanted to see her pa­raded naked through the streets of every town in Britain while peo­ple threw ’lumps of ex­cre­ment at her’. (For those Cata­lan read­ers lucky enough to have never heard of Mr Clark­son, he is a TV jour­nal­ist who had a pro­gramme about cars from which he was sacked for mak­ing ho­mo­pho­bic and racist com­ments and jok­ing about mur­dered pros­ti­tutes).

In a nut­shell, any­one who se­ri­ously wishes to alter the tra­di­tional image of the British Royal Fam­ily - and Ms Markle and her hus­band did just that - will get it in the neck from the right-wing media while the royal in­sti­tu­tion it­self turns a wil­fully blind eye. To those who say that none of this mat­ters, it might be pointed out that one of the rea­sons why Britain is still such a so­cially strat­i­fied coun­try is be­cause at the pin­na­cle of the class-con­scious pyra­mid into which its pop­u­la­tion seems to be per­ma­nently crammed, sits the Royal Fam­ily, to­gether with their kith and kin. As long as they re­tain their stolid, age-old, cer­e­mo­nial fa­cade, they help the rest of Britain to stay in thrall to its fatu­ous class prej­u­dices. No won­der Harry and Meghan moved to Cal­i­for­nia.