What do we learn from Harry & Meghan, the docu-thingy that launched yesterday on Netflix with three hours’ worth of material, and the same to come next week? Well, you won’t learn what’s in it from me, or not directly. Three hours! You must be kidding.

There are better ways to waste time. After all, that’s what Walter Presents on All 4 was invented for.

There are better ways to use time, reading, listening to music, writing. Or indeed streaking naked through the icy garden (this is only a theoretical example, you’ll be relieved to know).

Netflix seems to have got good value for its investment, though, as former Sun editor David Yelland, a sensible observer of these matters, pointed out on Twitter…

Netflix playing the British tabloids with utter brilliance… page after page of anger… precisely proving Harry & Meghan's point… all they have to do is copy and paste to the US networks…. pic.twitter.com/nDAqUekRea

— David Yelland (@davidyelland) December 8, 2022

All that free publicity!  TV, radio and, especially, the old-style newspapers are full of it, cram-jammed with Harry and Meghan-propelled indignation.

As for Piers Bloody Morgan, he hasn’t shut up about them for ages, locked forever in a weird hateful embrace with Meghan, a woman he adores to hate or hates to adore, or something.

The inky sheets are mostly aghast, with the Mail going for “Palace anger at ‘assault on the Queen’s legacy’”, while the limping old Express chooses: “So hurtful! Royals ‘deeply upset’ by Harry’s slurs.”

The Times stoops to conquer the populist moment with “Palace and Netflix clash over Sussexes soap opera” (no apostrophe after the offenders’ collective name, but there you go).

Skimming pieces written by those with stronger stomachs that mine, there doesn’t seem to be anything too shocking in this soapy documentary.

Not that you’d know that from those inky headlines. What happens at times like this is that the newspapers seek out insults to the monarchy, and if they can’t really find any, they still make a big fuss, fuss-fettling being what motivates them.

Only the Mirror has a headline to agree with: “Stop this royal circus” as “ordinary Brits are choosing between heating and eating”.

Sarah Vine in the Mail does that old trick of pretending to be a softie at heart, slipping mittens over her talons to declare: “Harry is a very damaged man – and I feel for him.”

I am sure Harry is consoled by that.

What we learn, what we are reminded, in all this is that the British media is obsessed with the royal family. It’s good business, it’s an easy way to fill newspaper pages and TV hours. The slightest whiff or whispered rumour of a simmering row, the merest hint of royal offence having been taken, and they’re off.

Often the newspapers take up cudgels on behalf of the royals – who in turn have little to do with newspapers, other than inviting them along to official events and so on.

Yet  this relationship rolls along, suiting the newspapers and the royals, at a guess. Yet with Harry & Meghan, the Sussexes have grasped bolder, bigger way of using the media. Never mind all that sickly old subservience in the newspapers, here is Netflix.

And I say all this as someone who really doesn’t care. Taking sides in these royal squabbles seems absurd, as does accusing Harry and Meghan of casting their life as a soap opera. Isn’t it all a soap opera, a pageant played down the centuries to keep us vaguely amused and in our place?

Still, it’s a useful distraction from the cost-of-living crisis, the energy crisis, soaring use of food banks, the ever-growing number of strikes.

Anyone who sticks their nose in the tattered book of Tory tactics, with its torn-out pages and new characters added every other week, will know that the government we have likes playing these old games.

Pretending the strikes are the fault of militant unions or “union barons” (whoever they might happen to be). Rather than at least being partly the fault of a government that sees political mileage in the strikes continuing as it might reflect badly on Labour.

Same with that terrible decision to open a coal mine in Cumbria, while lecturing the world about how they shouldn’t so the same. Assorted right-wing MPs dragged a dirty sack of an argument around, bellowing at Labour opponents of the scheme, “Oh I thought you lot liked mines!”

Same with the unending “migrant crisis”, a subject deliberated pushed by the Tories as it usually plays well in right-wing circles.

They’ve run out of other ideas. Division is all they know. But then Harry and Meghan seem good at that splitting game too