Prince Harry and Meghan in the moral maze
Their behaviour polarised the radio show panel just as it has polarised public reaction
Michael Buerk, in the chair on the Moral Maze
On BBC Radio’s Moral Maze this week, we tackled the story that’s been dominating the agenda for days — the Oprah Winfrey interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, aka Prince Harry and Meghan. We asked how much the media was to blame for the ill-treatment which Meghan claimed at its hands, whether it was institutionally racist or whether she was a hypocrite for having exploited it for her own purposes. We also looked at whether her complaints about the Royal Family and the monarchy were justifiable and whether these institutions needed to change.
My co-panellists were Ella Whelan, Mona Siddiqui and Ash Sarkar. Our witnesses were Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, a lawyer and women’s rights activist; Camilla Tominey, associate editor of the Daily Telegraph who covers the Royal Family and politics; Dr Kehinde Andrews, professor of black studies at Birmingham City university; and royal biographer Hugo Vickers.
I found this discussion particularly chilling. Obviously, there are occasional blazing rows on the Maze and I’ve been in a few of them. And readers may know from what I wrote here that I was distinctly underwhelmed by Prince Harry and Meghan’s behaviour in the Winfrey interview.
But some of the heated exchanges on this Maze featured views shared by many millions both in Britain and America but which shone a quite sickening light on the moral and cultural rot now poisoning the west. For example, there was Dr Shola’s absolute incredulity that anyone should question the veracity of what Meghan said because she, as a woman of colour, had said it; end of, apparently. And anyone who did question this (guess who), or took issue with the assertion that the Royal Family, media and Britain itself were institutionally racist, was a moral cretin.
As bad, if not worse, was the assertion by Kehinde Andrews that the Royal Family and the monarchy were racist and had been enriched by colonialism; that the Queen wore jewels the Royal Family had stolen from Britain’s colonies; that Britain was institutionally racist, had historically gained its wealth from colonialism and was still colonialist; that the Queen’s devotion to the Commonwealth was irrelevant because the Commonwealth was colonialist (so much, then, for independent black countries); and that any examples of obviously non-racist individuals in the Royal Family, including Prince Charles who has devoted much of his life to helping disadvantaged black youth, were also irrelevant because the monarchy was parasitical upon — how did you guess? —colonialism.
Yet conquest and exploitation, tyrannical oppression and slavery have been perpetrated throughout history — as they are still being perpetrated — not just by pale-skinned people but also by people with black and brown skins. It seems to me that the only explanation for ignoring these deeds by the non-white world, and painting instead a warped picture of Britain that obsessively presents it and the west alone as guilty of these evils, is nothing other than anti-white bigotry. And what is so sickening is that this is the kind of thing that is being taught to Britain’s young at an institution of higher education.
You can listen to the programme on the BBC website here.
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