ACCORDING to the front page of the Sunday Times, a newspaper which once filled that slot with proper news, the Queen “won’t watch the Harry and Meghan circus”. You and me both, Your Majesty.
It’s common to ask whether or not you are “Team Meghan”. For the record, I am Team Big Shrug. My shoulders have been raised for so long they seem to be stuck.
In this country it’s not always easy to say you are not bothered about the royal family, but that’s the way it is. Not republicanism so much as a long, whistling sigh of, “Here we go again” as the Windsor Waltzer spins off, this time for Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, showing in the US first and airing on ITV tomorrow (although not at Buck House or in this house).
All this takes up so much national headspace. It doesn’t help that royal reporting is mostly assembled from shoddy scraps of nothing. The patron saint of this thankless art is the BBC’s Nicholas Witchell, who pops up on the evening news as if he’s just burrowed into the studio, shaking earth off his nose as he opens his mouth to relay hardly anything at all.
He was at it when the Duke of Edinburgh went into hospital, suffering from heart problems. Witchell knew nothing more than we did, which was that an extremely elderly man had been admitted to hospital again, but there he was, sharing his frown and the little he did know.
The headlines are filled with the royals at the expense of so much else, avoiding the need for proper reporting or investigation.
Yet even a member of Team Big Shrug can see that Meghan and Harry appear to have been set up as convenient media villains, and her more than him, as she ‘stole’ the good prince, and because she’s American, an actress, a woman in her own right, and a black or biracial woman in her own right, too (the nerve of that woman).
Nice, conventional Kate had none of these problems when she married William, the less troubled prince, slipping straight into the dutiful mould prepared for her.
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BECAUSE I am kind like that, here is a new motto for Boris Johnson: accept the praise but never the blame.
That seems to sum up his chaotic, self-centred approach to a life in which nothing that goes wrong has anything to do with him. So it is that he wants full praise for the vaccination programme, and not a whisper of blame for one of the highest death rates in the world, and the endless billions spent on a track and trace system of dubious benefit. Endless as in, at the latest count, £37 billion. How on earth is such a mind-boggling sum even possible?
Why is ‘NHS’ often shoved in front of track and track, while it is the government’s vaccination programme? The vaccination programme shows the NHS working at its collaborative best, and the NHS should own it.
After being half-asleep at the wheel, after being too distracted to even bother attending the first five Cobra meetings on Covid-19, after boasting a year ago about shaking the hands of coronavirus patients, after chucking out PPE deals without regard to the usual rules, Johnson eventually grabbed the steering wheel.
But all he did was start doing his job a little more properly, and he doesn’t deserve praise for that.
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IN explaining away the government’s insulting 1% pay rise for nurses and other health workers, health secretary Matt Hancock blamed “issues of affordability because of the consequences of the pandemic on the public finances”.
I am confident we will see a lot more of this, with the pandemic becoming a handy get-out clause for everything. Blaming the pandemic is convenient because the pandemic can’t exactly answer back. And it avoids taking any responsibility for the spending of extra billions that perhaps didn’t to be spent so freely.
How long before “the consequences of the pandemic” are blamed for bringing in even more privatisation of the NHS?
Still, £3.50 a week for nurses – that’s almost what it said on the side of that bus.