Royals

George Orwell famously wrote that an English intellectual would rather be caught stealing from the poorbox than be seen standing to attention for God Save the King. Such intellectuals must have had a terrible time last weekend when much of the nation’s gaze was fixed on the wedding of two young people who are part of an institution we think of as quintessentially British. The newlyweds have shown early commitment to those qualities we celebrate as particularly British: duty, charity and the service of others. Whether it is the two tours in Afghanistan served by Prince Harry, or the charity work that the couple has embraced, the hallmarks of the

I was lucky (or unlucky, depending on your sensibilities) to be in a prime spot for Saturday’s royal wedding. Wearing my BBC producer hat, I worked on the huge outside broadcast on the Long Walk in Windsor. Thursday and Friday was all bunting, dogs sporting union jack collars and the Household Cavalry rehearsing. I interviewed people who’d come to camp out, weaving my way through the increasingly packed streets, observing, gathering material and soaking up the atmosphere. It seemed very much like any other big ceremonial occasion. But on Saturday, something changed. Colour. People of colour to be precise, at first just one or two, but as the clock ticked

Well, a star is born. I refer to the Rt Rev Michael Curry, bishop of that vanishingly rare breed, the American Episcopal Church, who stole the show at the royal wedding. Anyone who can make Elton John look like that  – sort of a nonplussed toad  – and generate barely suppressed mirth in the congregation to the extent it wasn’t clear whether the Prince of Wales was laughing or crying or trying not to do either, is quite some preacher. He may be Anglican but there was an awful lot of Pentecostalist in there. The other star turn was the young cellist, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the Jacqueline du Pre of Britain’s

A professor of black studies, Kehinde Andrews, has claimed the monarchy will do all it can to ensure Meghan Markle ‘passes for white’ when she marries Prince Harry. According to Andrews, ‘the only way she can be a princess is to downplay her blackness.’ In the same discussion, one of his students agreed: ‘She can’t embody her blackness once she is part of that family’. ‘You ain’t gonna see Meghan at carnival’, she added. Well, they’re both wrong. As a black person, I find such arguments disturbing. Connecting skin colour to behaviour seems to be the very essence of the racial stereotyping that the left is supposed to fight against. It

Prince Harry’s imminent wedding to Meghan Markle will reinvigorate the dying special relationship between Britain and America. It is a boost for the fading American regard for the monarchy. In America, the mother country is increasingly the forgotten country – and it has been fading for a century, ever since the First World War. As Sellar and Yeatman put it in 1066 and All That, after the allied victory ‘America was thus clearly top nation, and History came to a full stop’. As the increasingly weaker party in the 242-year affair, we cherish the special relationship much more than the dominant partner. That great Anglo-American WH Auden – an exile

Isn’t Meghan fabulous? Hasn’t she totally brought the monarchy into the 21st century? Doesn’t she make Kate look like such a square? We were so bored of Sloaney English roses, weren’t we? Meghan Markle is widely considered to be the best thing to have happened to the royal family — and Britain — in a long time. The newspapers are ecstatic, and not just the patriotic ones. There will be pictures, pictures and more pictures to come. Or fake pictures, if that’s what sells. The Sunday Sport recently ‘discovered’ a fake topless picture of Prince Harry’s squeeze, stuck it on the front page and ran with the headline ‘Harry’s Meghan

We are congratulating ourselves and the royal family on overcoming prejudice by welcoming Meghan Markle’s engagement to Prince Harry. But in fact this welcome is cost-free: Ms Markle’s combination of Hollywood, mixed ethnicity, divorced parents, being divorced herself and being older than her fiancé ticks almost every modern box. It was harder, surely, for Kate Middleton. She was simply middle-class, Home Counties, white, and with no marital past — all media negatives. Her mother was a former flight assistant. People made snobby jokes about ‘cabin doors to manual’. There was nothing ‘edgy’ about Kate that could be romanticised. Luckily, she is also beautiful, sensible and cheerful, and politely concealed her

A Royal engagement is dominating the headlines once again. Here is how The Spectator has marked royal engagements over the years, from Prince Albert’s 1839 proposal to Queen Victoria, through to Prince Charles popping the question to Diana in 1981: 30 November 1839: Queen VictoriaNow that it is certain the Queen has done with declining and is going to conjugate, Speculation, like a tasked schoolboy, is once more turned down to discover the potential, the imperative, the conditional, and all the other moods of the political future… All things are possible through marriage; and Prince Albert’s present sigh conjugal putting every affair, as has been said, in the potential, may cause even

It has long been my belief that whereas the quality of gentiles drawn to Judaism is very high (Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, myself), the dregs are drawn to Islam. And leaving aside the dozy broads who gravitate to it for kinky reasons after watching one too many Turkish Delight ads (Vanessa Redgrave, Lauren Booth), there is something about this religion which attracts the very weakest of Western men. We think of those often half-witted types who learn to build a bomb online. Then there are the imam-huggers of the left who never met a wife-beating mad mullah they didn’t like. A lot of the reason left-wing men seem to have

Bestselling author Pippa Middleton has written this week’s Spectator diary*, in which she takes on her critics directly: ‘I have been much teased for my book, Celebrate. Lots of journalists are saying that my advice is glaringly obvious… It’s all good fun, I know, and I realise that authors ought to take criticism on the chin. But in my defence, let me say this: Celebrate is meant to be a guide to party planning and, as such, it has to cover the basics. If I were to write a cookery book, for instance, I would be compelled to say that, to make an omelette, you have to break at least

It is no secret that the Prince of Wales is a plant-whispering greeny; but the precise nature (and bias) of his ministerial lobbying is to remain secret. Republic, the gloriously self-important but sparsely supported campaign to boot out Brenda & Co, have been using Freedom of Information laws to expose what suggestions Prince Charles has made to government; but their attempts have been blocked, ironically, on grounds that publication would damage the future king’s claims to impartiality. The revolutionaries claim: ‘The Attorney General’s decision is all about protecting Charles and the royal family from scrutiny, putting his demands above the rights of the British people. The coalition agreement pledged to ‘throw open the doors of

Mr Steerpike is no Middleton fan, but it has to be said that the Duchess of Cambridge has maintained her composure remarkably well in the wake of topless photos of her appearing in the foreign press. Keeping her chin up while continuing the royal couple’s tour of the South Pacific, she even managed to keep smiling when greeted with open arms by a topless women in the Solomon Islands. This would have been prime gaffe territory for Prince Phillip, but there wasn’t even a hint of an a joke despite the unfortunate timing. For shame!