The New York Times hates Britain.
Barely a month goes by without it launching some new assault on how dreadful my country is.
And in particular, it loathes our monarchy, which it regularly depicts as a vile, racist institution.
Within just three hours of the late, great Queen Elizabeth II dying in September, it published a horrible column by Harvard professor Maya Jasanoff urging readers not to “romanticize her era” because it “helped obscure a bloody history of de-colonization whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged,” and accusing Her Majesty of being “a white face on all the coins, notes and stamps circulating in a rapidly diversifying nation.”
Jasanoff suggested the Queen may have known about “crimes committed in her name,” said that the IRA terrorist murder of her beloved cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten was “karmic,” and attacked her for her “personal relationship with Winston Churchill,” a man who is often voted the greatest Briton ever but who was sneeringly dismissed as a retrograde imperialist.
Several days later, the Times unleashed another tirade from novelist Hari Kunzru, who sneered that she was a “white queen” who “spent a lifetime smiling and waving at cheering native people around the world, a sort of living ghost of a system of rapacious and bloodthirsty extraction.”
This was all before she was even buried.
So it was no surprise to wake up on Monday and read another excoriating Times takedown of the royal family and the institution it represents, written by self-acclaimed “bad feminist” author Roxane Gay.
In it, she demands the monarchy be dismantled for its failure to “shield” Meghan Markle from racism and writes the following shocking claim: “When Prince Harry met and married the American actress Meghan Markle, we saw, in real-time, just how high a price the crown was willing to extract from an outsider, up to and including her life.”
To suggest the royal family was willing for Meghan to die is a disgusting lie.
But then, what else could we expect from a writer who says she believes everything the Sussexes say, despite a growing welter of evidence that many of their incendiary claims are a pack of lies?
Gay’s unctuously sycophantic and one-sided piece laughably describes Meghan as “a perfect princess … flawless … surprisingly diplomatic,” while deriding the monarchy as aging, deluded and “deeply problematic.”
She scorns: “It’s chilling to realize that racism is so powerful that the royal family would ruin what is, for now, the one opportunity they were given to reach the hearts and minds of the very people who make their lives possible. They had a gift: In Meghan Markle, they had a woman who is intelligent, poised, and largely able to live in the public eye, play the role of princess and give the best of herself in service of something bigger than herself.”
I snorted incredulously when I read this garbage.
Is this the same Meghan Markle who, with her husband, has devoted the past two years of their lives to destroying the image of the royal family, the monarchy and Britain, with their never-ending, vicious, hypocritical and largely unsubstantiated public mudslinging?
What kind of “gift” repeatedly brands its own family a bunch of callous racists on global television without producing a shred of evidence?
I’m so sick of the building narrative — cynically fueled by the New York Times and the sniping Sussexes — that Britain’s a racist country.
In fact, we’re one of the most multicultural and racially tolerant nations in Europe, as is reflected in the people who run the country.
Our first British Asian prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is the Hindu son of Indian immigrants.
Our foreign secretary, James Cleverly, is the black son of an immigrant nurse from Sierra Leone.
Our home secretary, Suella Braverman, is the daughter of two Indian immigrants who came to Britain in the ’60s.
London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, is the son of a Pakistani immigrant bus driver and the first Muslim to hold that office.
Yesterday, an 18-year-old cricket sensation named Rehan Ahmed helped bowl England to a thrilling win against Pakistan, where his taxi driver father was born before coming to England.
And England’s recent World Cup football squad included seven black players.
This tells the real story of my country, a place that is becoming more racially tolerant by the year.
A 2020 Ipsos Mori poll showed 89% of Brits would be happy for their child to marry outside their racial group, compared with 75% in 2009, and 93% disagreed with the concept that you must be white to be “truly British,” compared with 82% in 2006.
That’s why Meghan “The Gift” Markle’s relentless attempts to brand Britain and our monarchy as racist are so wrong and so damaging.
The truth is that she was welcomed with open arms into the royal family and by the British people, who were thrilled to see a biracial royal wedding, encouraged by a media that, contrary to all the “merciless” allegations, was equally ecstatic about it.
As I wrote myself about the televised marriage: “It’s hard to overstate the significance of today’s ceremony, beamed live around the world, to black people everywhere. To borrow the words of Dr. [Martin Luther] King, this was a day when little black girls could watch TV and genuinely share little white girls’ long-held dreams of one day marrying a Prince.”
That was the mood of the nation.
And it was only when Meghan and Harry began behaving in a rankly hypocritical manner, constantly preaching about things like the need to reduce our carbon footprint but then doing the complete opposite by using Elton John and George Clooney’s private jets like cabs, that the media grew more critical.
Now they sit in their California mansion, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars by trashing their families and the monarchy that gave them the royal titles they so ruthlessly exploit.
It’s shamelessly two-faced.
Aside from anything else, why would they WANT to keep titles bestowed by a supposedly racist institution?
It’s also downright cruel.
I know most of the royal family well and Prince William was right to say they are “very much not a racist family.”
The longtime sterling work that the senior royals have all done with the Commonwealth and myriad charities dedicated to combating racial injustice and inequality is proof of this.
Britain, and the royal family, deserve better than this reputation-shredding nonsense from a pair of royal renegade narcissists and a newspaper that thinks it’s OK to attack a 96-year-old woman hours after she died.
