Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'
Covid
Spain: At first it was reported that the blood-clot concern wouldn’t lead to Spain suspending use of the AZ vaccine. Then it was reported that 6 of Spain’s regions had done so, as health is a devolved matter, at least to some extent. All I know for sure is that a friend in her early 50s was jabbed this morning, while those between 55 and 80 won’t be done for weeks yet.
Cosas de España
Speed limits are going to be reduced in built-up areas, it’s reported here. Apparently according to the height of the kerb at the side of the tarmac. Which might be a criterions unique to Spain.
'Loizu Man' died about 12,000 year ago and thoughtfully left his bones where they could be found recently. Apparently - though he probably wasn’t aware of it - he was sitting on the very cusp of evolution, as a member of one of the last societies of hunter-gatherers in the Navarra Pyrénées. Moore here.
Lenox Napier takes us into his Spanish garden - and politics - here.
The UK
That Interview hasn’t done much for the popularity of H&M back in the old country. Especially in the case of M, of whom only 31% now have a positive opinion. But it's higher among younger folk, of course,
The USA
H&M Corp is said to have a net worth of more than €100m. One can't help wondering what M would be worth now, if she hadn't married into such an awful family. And what she'll be worth in 5-10 years' time, once the deals have rolled in. A canny woman, one might say. And I'm sure she'll find the right in-laws one day.
Opinions abound this week on That Interview and its aftermath, and not just in the UK of course. Below are 3 interesting British takes. En passant, I rather doubt 'Giles Coren' is reader Perry's nom de plume . . .
The Way of the World
The complexities of modern life . . . Following the murder of a young woman walking home in London around 9pm, a Scottish member of the House of Lords has suggested all men should be banned from the streets after 6pm. Questions being asked of her include:-
- Would all Muslims be banned if one blew himself up in a Scottish city?
- Would she - as a liberal progressive - ban all men who've tranzed* via simple self-identification into women, retaining their equipment?
- Would she ban all women who've tranzed into men?
*I might have just invented this verb. Though my spellcheck disagrees.
A UK vicar has become an online sensation after a Zoom filter blunder by his wife turned him into one of the Blues Brothers during an online service.
Religious Nutters/Crooks Corner
Televangelist Robin Bullock, who said the Covid crisis could be blamed on people who voted for Hillary Clinton and that President Joe Biden doesn’t exist, now claims prophets have the power to restore Donald Trump to the presidency. To which the only reply can be: Bollox, Bullock.
Finally
Why ships fly.
Finally, finally . . .
Some readers will have noticed that one of the quotations at the top of this blog is by Christopher Howse. Yesterday, I came across this Private Eye reference to him, reflecting the fact he’s a Religious Affairs Correspondent:-
I believe the dog in question belongs to BoJo's prometida. Who seems to place more reliance on his promises than the rest of us.
THE ARTICLES
1. You’ll never guess my opinion about Piers Morgan: Giles Coren. The Times
And do you know why I am not going to defend him? Because I don’t dare. I am afraid of what would happen to me if I did. Which is not to say that if I did dare, I would. Because maybe I don’t agree with him. Maybe I think that everything Meghan said to Oprah Winfrey should be believed, no matter what, because she is a black woman and I am a white man, and I have not lived her experience, so am in no position to make a judgment.
But you will never know. Because I will never tell you. Because I don’t dare. Do you think I want to lose everything, like him, and have to go back to night shifts and bar work? No, sir.
Once upon a time, I, too, was a controversialist. Indeed, initially, I did it just for fun. In my student days I sniffed the prevailing wind on Thatcher, Russia, Israel, football hooliganism, Aids, raves and Princess Di, and argued at parties the very opposite of what everyone else thought, just for thrills and giggles. Unsurprisingly, I don’t have a lot of friends left from those days, but the ones I do have understand, and love me despite everything (you should be thinking about Piers here, even when I’m not telling you to).
Later, as a journalist, I was not especially controversial because I didn’t have the confidence to be. I wrote tight, funny little pieces about nothing very important, mostly food. Then a rude, sweary email I sent to a colleague went viral, in the days before things went viral, and ended up on the front page of The Guardian. And everything changed.
Initially, I was mortified. I feared that people would take this one stupid email, written drunk in the middle of the night, to stand for my entire life’s work and I would be ruined (spookily, within months, a social media site called Twitter would be launched to monetise this very principle). But that isn’t what happened. What happened was that television and literary agents emailed me to drool, “you’re so hot right now”, and I got a six-figure book deal, two megabucks glossy magazine columns and a TV career across three channels.
I earned more in a year from one outspoken email than I had made in ten years of even-handed commentary, and the die was cast. From now on, there would be no more “six-of-one-half-a-dozen-of-the-other” stuff from me. It would all be about taking an indefensible position, such as “tax fat people directly to punish them for eating too much”, “education is a waste of time” or “kill all dogs”, and defending it to the death.
Obviously, I didn’t really hold all these positions. But I held some of them. And the game was seeing if you could tell which. Apart from anything else, being wilfully controversial was just so much more efficient, in terms of filling space and getting attention (keep thinking about Piers) than being thoughtful, clever or truly funny. I also joined Twitter, where I said outrageous things and swore a lot, quickly accruing 200,000 followers (back when that was a lot) and regularly being told that my angry tweets were my “best work”.
Then, in 2017, in the week the Harvey Weinstein story broke, I wrote a column asking where the case left me, a middle-aged narcissist compelled to interact professionally with younger women. We’d had three days of comment pieces on what a monster Weinstein was (and he is, and I said so) but I felt that my job was to give a viewpoint you hadn’t heard yet. Turns out it wasn’t. Led by a handful of furious junior Guardian hacks, Twitter went tonto. So I took legal and reputational advice, issued a fulsome apology I didn’t feel (which Piers has signally refused to do) and it went away.
Except it didn’t. Now that they had me in their sights (“they” meaning “young left-wingers excited by the opportunity for collective action” — I feel no need to apply dismissive labels), they doubled down hard. They dug up decontextualised tweets and half-sentences from ancient pieces and formulated, first, the case that I was a racist, which trended at number one on Twitter, then a homophobe, number one again, and finally, on the basis of a piece I had written in 2015 about going on holiday with my daughter, a paedophile.
I hated it. I began to weaken. I remember moaning to Piers about it a couple of years ago (he’s not a friend but he’s a solid enough bloke with time for other people he perceives as not threatening) and him saying, “Why on earth do you care? I really couldn’t give a shit what they say about me!”
God, how I envied him the not giving a shit. Look at the towering personal fiefdom this not-giving of shits had built for him! I wished I could be that strong. But I wasn’t. I gave a shit the size of China. Every time I wrote an opinion about anything, people (young, left-wing people) lined up to shout “racist!”, “sexist!”, “homophobe!”, “paedophile!”. And I just couldn’t handle it.
So I left Twitter for a year, without explanation or apology, and by the time I re-joined they had forgotten about me. It was that easy. I write more precisely now, rarely pretend to have an actual opinion and life is peaceful once again. But I have not been silenced. I have not been cancelled. Because (I hope you’re still thinking about Piers) I never really had any opinions anyway.
This week — a week full of big, massive opinions — a writer I admire, a sort-of friend, tweeted (in a tone shared by many others): “White men can’t understand that sometimes, just sometimes, their opinion is neither relevant nor required.”
But some white men can. I can. Which is why, for slightly different reasons than Piers, I haven’t got an opinion for you this week. And may never have again.
2. Meghan and Harry blew the chance for royal renewal Trevor Phillips. The Times
I have too much skin in the game to be neutral about the row sparked this week by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. I am a black divorcee in a mixed-race marriage. Like Harry I have fathered two mixed-race children. Their mother is herself of mixed heritage. One daughter has recently given birth to my first grandson, a gorgeous melange of genes from four different continents, whose skin colouring may not be a million shades off Archie’s.
And though I have thankfully never sunk to the despair described by the duchess, our family has spent more than two decades watching helplessly as my older daughter battled a severe eating disorder. Hours before writing these words she and I bade farewell on a familiar threshold: the specialist unit to which she admits herself periodically when the daily struggle against her demons proves just too exhausting.
Add to all this the fact that, like the Sussexes, I have spent more time on the enemy radar of British newspapers than I would have liked, and that legitimate criticism has far too often strayed into racial prejudice that should shame those — on the left and right — who wrote it.
So from whatever point of view, I watched their interview with Oprah Winfrey with a deep sense of sorrow. I think there is some truth in the Sussexes’ accusations. But it could all have been so different. They, not just the palace, bear some responsibility for the blunders and misjudgments of the past three years.
None of us can truly know what the duke and duchess experienced when they talk about the toll on their mental health. I am no professional, and the therapy-speak they use is alien to British ears. But I do know what it feels like to have to pin your teenage child to the floor of a speeding car to prevent her throwing herself out of the door. I understand what it is to hear that she may not live long enough to go to university. I have met the girls with whom she shared the hellish wards reserved for the most distressed, and learnt not to look away when she tells me that I’ll never see one of them again because she has taken her own life. So I don’t take the duchess’s words lightly, even though her Californian vagueness on the subject doesn’t help. In my experience anyone with a diagnosable mental health condition is not only willing but eager to explain precisely what they think is wrong with them.
But it is hard to imagine that any family or firm, no matter how callous, would knowingly ignore such distress, as the duchess alleges happened to her. It puzzles me that the duke, having led the young royals’ Heads Together campaign, could not draw on its resources to support his own wife. This is not scepticism on my part; it is, perhaps, hope that if any good comes from this interview, it is that we become a country in which mental and emotional difficulties that affect so many cease to be silent, forbidden territory.
By contrast, there are no positives to draw from the duchess’s insinuations of racial prejudice within the royal family. Britain now stands in the dock internationally as a breeding ground for casual racial bigotry. Brits will see some irony here. Most of the finger pointing comes from the United States, a country where young black men are frequently gunned down by white police officers; where black families on average have one tenth of the wealth of white households; and where, outside work, people of different colours seldom mix. As for our European neighbours, aside from tiny Malta, people of colour in every EU country are more likely to report racial harassment than here in Britain; rates are over twice as high in Germany, Italy and Ireland.
Yet many of the duchess’s supporters have taken her words as confirmation that Britain is an irredeemably and uniquely racist society. The Sussexes told Oprah that there had been “conversations and concern” about the colour of her unborn child’s skin among unnamed royals. Crucially, because Winfrey failed to ask, we have no idea what Harry’s response was. The duchess’s enemies will quibble about the fact that she and Harry differed in their recollections of when and how many times this took place. But I believe what she says. It is almost certain that members of the family speculated about whether the child would look more like his mother or father. Any clan in which that conversation does not take place would be a pretty heartless outfit; even the Addams family were able to lampoon the inevitable cooing over their new baby :
Gomez: “He has my father’s eyes.”
Morticia: “Gomez, take them out of his mouth.”
But as Sir Ken Olisa, a black businessman who serves as the Queen’s lord lieutenant in London observed, we do not know the context or intent of the remarks, which makes all the difference in the world. His own (white) mother-in-law fretted for days about her first grandchild’s likely skin tone: “I just don’t know what colour wool to buy” she said to her daughter. It is equally possible that what Harry experienced was some antediluvian pearl-clutching from one of the royal family’s less sophisticated members. No tribe is without its embarrassing uncles and aunts: Windsor weddings are rich in such individuals. In such a big family, it’s likely there were conversations of both kinds.
Generally speaking, if both parents are Caucasian, there’s not going to be much doubt about skin tone so the talk is of eye and hair colour. Among black families like mine, we ponder other features — quality of hair, shape of the nose, hue of skin. In mixed families, the range of possibilities can be gloriously infinite. Of course, it can feel like a very different conversation depending on who is speaking. And concern might not be for the image of the family, but for the child herself.
The parent or grandparent of a black or mixed-race child knows that no matter how talented, intelligent or spirited your offspring, he or she will face prejudice of some form or another. One of my daughters carries my dark colouring while the other could easily pass for Spanish or Italian. At various times in their lives they have been treated differently by others. Any family that fails to confront the fact that being non-white in a largely white society will influence the life chances of even the most privileged child is simply delusional.
But on the evidence presented so far, the royal family looks no more or less prejudiced than any other family in multiracial Britain. However, the same cannot be said of the royal household — the palace bureaucracy. The Prince of Wales may seem an unlikely hero of wokeism but he has had his moments. After the urban riots of 1981 and 1985, Charles decided that his charities needed a more ethnically diverse leadership. One palace adviser suggested that he should take reform a little more slowly; after all, the boards had been monopolised by white Old Etonians so perhaps he should recruit the odd Old Harrovian or Wykehamist before leaping to the product of a Tottenham comprehensive? Charles ignored the advice and went ahead anyway; I became the first black face at his board table.
That said, it should not have been a surprise to anyone that Meghan would face a sometimes hostile press, irrespective of her colour. All female additions to the royal family have had a rough time: Diana, Fergie, Sophie bear witness to that. And who would have changed places with Camilla Parker Bowles in the wake of Diana’s death? Prominent black women, from Shirley Bassey to Diane Abbott, have been targeted at least as often. Meghan is not wrong to call out racism in the British media but it was naive to expect anything else.
Could things have been different? Yes, I think so. Meghan had an admirable pair of role models for being a successful “first black”: Barack and Michelle Obama. Obama’s record in office is middling to average: cautious at home, largely invisible abroad. His limited health reforms were stymied by his lousy succession planning. But none of that mattered. His main task, as far as history is concerned, was to be a successful first black president. By his eloquence, personal dignity and intelligence he effectively neutered race as a barrier to high office in America. In fact, it is unthinkable that in future any party could offer Americans a presidential ticket without at least one person of colour on the ballot. Without Obama there would be no Kamala Harris.
By contrast, Meghan and Harry blew the chance to normalise diversity within the royal family — an epic fail in a country where we have more people of colour in high ministerial office than the whole of the European Union put together. A Conservative administration counts among its top team Priti Patel and Kwasi Kwarteng. The electorate appears utterly undisturbed that the runaway favourite to be our next prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is the son of East African Asians. Each of these people has had to deal with dreadful treatment by the media, and not just the tabloids; Priti Patel’s portrayal as a bull with a ring through her nose by The Guardian was not only more hurtful personally but, in my view, politically far more offensive than anything levelled at Meghan. The duchess lacked a canny, steadying hand to guide and protect her. As chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, a job which guaranteed trouble, my inner team was led by a black woman, Colleen Harris, a veteran of both No 10 and the royal household. Like me, Harris is of Guyanese heritage, leading Prince Charles to christen us the Guyanese mafia. In her first big role, in the Downing Street press office, a reporter inquired “So, if you don’t mind my asking, how black are you?”. She replied crisply “black enough” and put down the phone. Meghan could have done with some of that toughness; and, by the way, it was known to the palace that she was available.
Instead, Meghan has placed a bet on TV therapy. It is a poor gamble. Oprah offered the facsimile of the analyst’s couch without any of the benefits of self- examination. I cannot believe that the couple had no idea what questions would be asked. Surely their deal with the streaming service Netflix would have clauses requiring consultation on the content of such a high-stakes interview. At the very least, Netflix would have wanted to be sure that they gave away nothing that would be of subsequent value.
So what we witnessed felt more like a performance. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. This was an encounter between two accomplished actresses, one of them twice Oscar-nominated, brilliantly scripted to convey a narrative that would exalt the couple and bury the royal family. I don’t think it will work out that way. Viewers who did not come to the programme with minds already made up might have wondered why there was no mention of the duchess’s father and half-siblings, whom the Sussexes have allowed the media to present as trailer trash.
And Oprah missed what should have been the most important question of all. When Meghan met Harry, she claims she knew little about him or the royal family. Even so, two facts that most of the world knew about Harry were that he had once worn a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party and that he had called a fellow army officer “my little Paki friend”. He has apologised profusely for both transgressions. But the issue was never raised by Oprah. In a world where far too many communities are divided, the story of how these young lovers managed to get past that history could have been a true moment of openness, generosity and forgiveness. Those qualities are badly needed in a world where, partly thanks to the cesspits of social media, too much bigotry still flourishes.
Instead we were given the Disneyfication of difference. The duke and duchess have fled the poisoned palace, leaving their relatives trapped by its dark intrigues. The account we heard of the past was a black and white story of heroes and villains, of victims and persecutors. But the reality of our modern world is a struggle for understanding between the past and the present, of failed attempts at reconciliation, of trade-offs between justice and tribal self-interest.
The day that Meghan and Harry wed, I believed that they might bring to life Nelson Mandela’s injunction to “let your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears”. The handsome couple baring their souls in a Californian garden wanted us to believe that they had chosen hope. But the truth told by their actions is that their flight to the west coast is really driven by bitterness, anger and fear.
3. Oprah with Meghan and Harry: You can be a courtier or an interviewer, but not both. Hugo Rifkind. The Times
For me the most interesting, human bit of all of this was the few short minutes we saw in the California royal chicken coop, with them all squatting in the sawdust. Did we know they had chickens? Is that why Meghan’s dress looked like it had bird poo on the shoulder? They built it for rescued battery hens. “Well, you know,” Meghan said, “I just love rescuing.” Oprah will have known that bit was gold, which is why it made the broadcast. Although she didn’t chase it up. And that, I think, was everything.
Winfrey’s comfort zone is the emotional. That works with these two, because that’s their comfort zone too. It’s a valid approach and whatever Piers Morgan says about it, a princess talking about being so miserable in her palace that she ponders suicide is not a story to be sniffed at or doubted.
What Winfrey doesn’t do is nail stuff down. Her follow-up questions are “What??” or “Wow!” or sometimes a combination of the two, delivered solely through the medium of her eyebrows. This works when you want to eke out more of the same. But it doesn’t do detail.
Some of the follow-up questions I would have liked to hear would have included, “Wait, you seriously faked your own wedding?” and “The archbishop was in your backyard?” Or perhaps something along the lines of: “Harry, although it is sad to hear that you’ve been cut off by your family financially, am I right in thinking you’re still a 36-year-old man who is worth an estimated £30 million?” I would like to have known more about Meghan’s passport being taken away, and whoever it was who said she couldn’t see her friend, and the extent to which her experience really did match that, as the impression was given, of a princess not in Kensington but in Dubai.
Why not ask Prince Harry about Prince Andrew? He’s Harry’s exact parallel a generation up, and I hear he’s been in the news a tad. Might his horrible nonsense of an adulthood not represent quite a lot of what the younger prince is running away from? Why not, indeed, swoop a bit more decisively on the allegations of racism from the royal family themselves? This isn’t just me being a prurient hack; this stuff matters. What we have is a budding constitutional crisis on the basis of Meghan telling Oprah that Harry told her about words unknown said by a person unknown at a time unknown. Important yes, but vague as anything. The whole world wants to know more. And she had the pair of them right bloody there. For ages.
Look, I’m not quite saying I’d rather have seen them interviewed by Piers Morgan. Watching this, though, I did find myself thinking of his unctuous, piss-poor interviews with Donald Trump, which were all about two men flirting and not about the audience at all. Oprah on Trump would have been a vivisection. Here she was little more than a facilitator.
You can be a courtier or an interviewer, but I do not think you can be both. Sorry. But that’s my truth.