Harry and Meghan are buggering off and the Daily Telegraph is being snide about Labour leadership hopeful Rebecca Long-Bailey. There’s a link here somewhere.
The ins and outs of the royal family don’t ripple my pond. That attitude is not shared by former Daily Mirror editor (and national irritant) Piers Morgan. The decision of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to step back from public life set the Good Morning Britain presenter off on one of his Twitter tirades.
Morgan said the departing pair were “the two most spoiled brats in history”, adding that the death of his mother Diana did not give Harry “licence to treat the Queen so appallingly”.
Even glancing over my unrippled pond, I can see that Harry and Meghan don’t behave like other royals.
For a start they don’t go on television and blather on about not sweating while trying to excuse their friendship with a convicted sex offender (deceased). But they did appear on ITV once to grumble about their lot in life, or so I heard.
What links the departing Sussex pair and the Telegraph’s unnecessary rudeness about Rebecca Long-Bailey is the attitude of the media towards certain topics.
With the royals, the traditional newspapers wear two faces. The first doffs a cap while spouting lickspittle hymns to a great British institution, blathering on about history. The other wears an inky frown and puts the boot in with ‘offending’ royals.
In two short years, Harry and Meghan have received both style of treatment, moving from sparkly modern royals to spoilt brats. Praised and fawned over not long ago, now they are getting the rough treatment.
Both styles of reporting have their roots in the royals being good newspaper box office. And errant royals are the ‘best’ box office of all.
While the Daily Mail often produces loyal gush, its columnist Sarah Vine is ready with her hatchet, writing two days ago: “The woke, somewhat humourless and very entitled Harry we see before us now is almost unrecognisable as the rumbustious fellow we knew and loved.”
Oh, come off it! You liked him when he was mixed up and misbehaving, fancy-dressing up as a Nazi while suffering the long fall-out from the death of his mother when he was 12. But you don’t like him now he’s trying to untangle his life at the age of 35.
Should you wish to go looking, there is plenty more of this stuff from Sarah Vine (perhaps being married to Michael Gove puts you in a mood).
Even a shrug on legs such as myself can see that Meghan has put up with much media hostility laced with undercurrents of racism – while admitting in the same breath that she and Harry do carry on in a high-handed hurry.
Maybe if no one reported anything about the royals, they’d all just, you know, fade away. Sometimes it seems that the Queen is the only true royal glue and she can’t hang around for ever.
If newspaper attitudes to the royals are fixed in this country, the approach to Labour politicians is much the same. All the newspapers bar the Mirror and the Guardian are anti-Labour to various degrees of hostility.
I don’t wish to rehash that one right now, but it is worth pausing over the Telegraph describing Rebecca Long-Bailey as “looking like the love child of the Roswell alien and Mrs Merton”.
Not sure she’s the right choice for Labour leader thanks to the heir-to-Corbyn baggage, but that really is an appalling description.
Snooty, dismissive, rude and public school snarky.
On the day of the election, the editor of the Yorkshire Post, James Mitchinson, received much support for a front-page leader in his newspaper. In this he wrote: “The people of this country must never again be asked to navigate a maelstrom of misinformation in order to decide who will govern them.”
Rarely off Twitter, Mitchinson was on it again to comment on that Telegraph slur to RLB. Fair to say he wasn’t impressed. That maelstrom is still whirling.