Princess Yoko has split up the royal band.
From the Beatles to Spinal Tap it’s an all-too-familiar scenario: pushy new girlfriend arrives on the scene with ludicrous, fancy ideas about how to improve the band’s image; rest of band objects violently to the meddling arriviste; band splits due to ‘creative differences.’
This is what has now happened to Britain’s Royal Family.
Playing the Yoko role is former Suits actress Meghan Markle — aka Princess Pushy; aka the Duchess of Sussex.
Playing the Lennon role is former bad boy heartthrob Afghanistan vet helicopter pilot turned bleeding heart, henpecked pantywaist Prince Harry.
Playing the rest of the Beatles are the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince William, Kate and all the other royals quite understandably concerned that if this nonsense carries on for much longer it could be the end of everything.
Obviously, in this particular tiff, the majority of British people are very much Team Beatles rather than Team John ‘n’ Yoko. This is partly because most of us support our Royal Family, a bastion of traditional values and a unifying force in times of national celebration and crisis. Mainly, though, it’s because we can’t stand Princess Pushy.
As I may have hinted in my last piece on the subject – Princess Pushy Go Home! – Meghan Markle is a dangerously and unnecessarily divisive figure.
We don’t mind that she is an actress: the Royal Family has accommodated plenty of those in its time from Charles II’s mistress Nell Gwynne onwards.
And we’re certainly not bothered that she is ‘black’. No one even noticed Meghan was of mixed-race heritage until she and her supporters kept banging on about it, as though she were the first ‘person of colour’ the extremely cosmopolitan and well-travelled Royal Family had ever met.
Rather, it’s that ever since attaching herself to Prince Harry she has tried to push the Royal Family and, by example, the whole country in a direction that the vast majority of us find utterly repellant.
Meghan’s ideological role model is Woke Hollywood: the kind of hypocritical, spoilt, identity-politics-obsessed, whiny, needy, thin-skinned, crass, cry-bullying, virtue-signalling cesspit that Ricky Gervais so deservedly mocked at the Golden Globes.
She could have kept her woke politics to herself – that would have been the sensible thing, especially in the early days of her marriage, so as to allow the British people to get used to her. This is the usual quid pro quo when you marry into the Royal firm: in return for your newly elevated social status and your freebies (like Meghan’s multi-million-pound grace and favour cottage on the Queen’s estate in Windsor) you accept that you have certain duties, one of which is not to come across like an entitled gold digger.
Right from the start, though, Princess Pushy wanted to have her cake and eat it: to be famous — but still enjoy her privacy whenever she wanted it; to be rich — but not to have to knuckle down, like all the other Royals have to do, and act like you’re a servant of the people.
I witnessed some of this personally at Wimbledon last summer. Wimbledon tickets are like gold dust and usually, you can only get them by ballot. But there was Princess Pushy, several rows in front of me, in the zone reserved for royals and other celebrities, watching her pal Serena Williams.
I’ve no problem with royals getting preferential treatment at tennis matches: they’re part of the entertainment, after all. What I did very much object to was Princess Pushy’s security staff going up to ordinary punters and telling them they couldn’t take photographs. In some cases, I believe, these punters weren’t even aware that Princess Pushy was there till her people started wagging their fingers.
Even worse than her hoity-toity behaviour, though, is her tiresome and very unwelcome political meddling.
As I wrote before:
Princess Pushy, on the other hand, has charged into the most divisive issues of the day like a bull into a china shop – especially regarding anything to do with identity politics.
She has, for example, spoken out publicly in favour of ‘decolonising the curriculum’ at universities: woke speak for ‘removing any remaining intellectual content from dumbed-down academe, replacing the pursuit of excellence with the usual rag bag of feminist and race-baiting grievances.’
Also her relentless quest for the cutting edge of woke has led her into some unforced errors which a better-advised royal would have avoided like the plague: promoting a charity cookbook raising funds for a notorious mosque with links to several terrorists; wading into the fraught sexual identity debate by apparently contemplating raising Archie in a ‘gender neutral’ manner; persuading her husband Harry that there’s a thing called ‘unconscious bias’ which secretly turns all white people into racists…
Britain isn’t ready for this crap. Britain — outside London, at least — will, I hope, never be ready for this crap.
How entirely appropriate that the place Meghan and Harry should be heading for their Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson style semi-exile should be President Bieber’s uber woke Canada. Truly, they deserve each other and I hope they will be very happy there. So happy that they never want to come back.