In the back of my head I had at least hoped that by moving to the other side of an ocean and a continent we would hear less of them, but it seems that what scares Meghan and Harry most of all, more than anything else that they claim to be scared of, is to not be famous anymore. They hated being in Britain. They hated the attention, or at least any attention that they perceived to be negative, and by the time they left these shores they must have driven themselves into such a self righteous frenzy of paranoia that there was no other kind of attention to be offered. If their move to California was a gossamer thin veil of trickery to make us believe that all they wanted was to live their lives in peace and keep a low profile then it was never going to hold up for long. If you don’t want to be the centre of attention then you don’t agree to be interviewed by Oprah and you don’t negotiate your own fucking Netflix channel. Still, hopefully one day the world will grow tired of them and move on, and then we can just imagine their real tears.
And we shouldn’t be so coy as to ask why the world might grow tired of them, because the answer is glaringly obvious: they’re so fucking boring. Meghan and Harry are boring. Frankly the whole royal family has become boring too but Meghan and Harry are out there, like some odd, soft focus version of Colonel Kurtz, operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the scale of any human conduct, working on a level of boring that is quite astonishing. There is something inherently dull about the way they carry themselves; how she floats on some smug, snide little special mummy cloud of her own construct, and how he still raises his hand at belly level to acknowledge their thick, adoring, boring crowd, as if giving a proper wave is just all too much bother because, you know, his mother. His mother and all that other shit he uses for an excuse to justify the sadness in his pampered, privileged beyond measure, totally unaware of reality, off-white life. But for all the boohoo sadness and simpering and the cold hard cash they can’t wait to accumulate there just seems to me to be absolutely nothing truly of interest about them. Their interviews, their endless lawsuits, their tortured backgrounds, their cloying (in)sincerity, their film making pretentions and their fucking charity work: nothing they are involved in is remotely worth following, yet one of them farts in the bath and Oprah gets a look in. Meghan says it’s a relief to be allowed to speak, but I don’ think she’s ever really had a problem with that.
At least that Prince Andrew interview was interesting (in a kind of truck full of babies rolling slowly into a cave of hungry bears way), almost unbearably so – the wrong and right kind of attention at the same time. Attention is a fickle thing. I expect they thought that Oprah Winfrey was the obvious choice. I don’t get Oprah. Perhaps she’s too American for the likes of me to get. Her reputation amongst her fans sits somewhere in a zone of cosy, lovely, earthy, motherly, utterly fucking buttery; she’s reliable, a breathing bosom of comfort, and she’s also astonishingly powerful. I think she is seen as some kind of home grown, all American moral and spiritual chat show keeper of the keys, as well as the mother you never knew you had. She is famed as a philanthropist but is also worth $2.5 billion, and if she has all that money stashed away maybe she isn’t philanthroping quite as much as she could be. So Oprah is safe, which is another word for boring. She may think she’s a hard hitter but asking a list of crap questions everyone else would like to ask doesn’t qualify this. You must remember that most interviewers are only as interesting as the people they’re talking to and most interviewees only say as much as they want you to know; for instance – she didn’t make Lance Armstrong confess, like some papal jailer, he just decided to admit as much as he wanted to and that was as much as most people had already found out anyway. That aside, we’ve not seen this interview with sourpuss and soldier boy in full yet – and I’m also not going to bother when we can because I know it will turn me into concrete; and I know that because like all boring interviews the best bits have already been leaked.
That’s right, don’t be fooled – there may be “revelations” all over the shop but I doubt there’ll be many surprises. There are a few critics saying the interview shouldn’t go out at all while Harry’s great, great, great, great, great grandad Philip sits in hospital feeling his exhausted heart push intermittent dollops of blood around his system and tracing them through translucent skin as they labour along bulbous arteries. But Harry clearly couldn’t give a shit about all that, either because he’s had enough or because Meghan has told him he’s had enough. Rather foolishly Winfrey has promised that “no subject is off-limits”, foolish because we all know what kinds of subjects will really be approached – how hard their life in California must be, how hard it is raising a child with so much money to think about, all those lawsuits, their voices being muffled by dark forces, their fucking charity work. Harry won’t be asked if he dresses as a baby in the bedroom and Meghan won’t be probed about how she manages to shit rose petals. If the interview was genuinely a free for all it would be brilliant and we might actually get to see some squirming. Frankly I’d like to hear their quick fire thoughts on fundamentalism, abortion, badger baiting, the crimes of Fred and Rose West, the congestion charge and fisting, but Oprah is now one of their new best friends and so when she invites them to “speak your truth” it means that literally – the rest of us safe in the knowledge (unless we’re stupid enough to believe everything or anything they say) that ‘their truth’ is just as true as ‘their lies’.
Lies or truth aside we know that the interview is already in the bag and we have some clips of Meghan looking like a resting but vengeful hawk, taking centre stage while Harry the tit sits on her shoulder, pecking on biscuits and thinking about, what else, his mother again. He says his “biggest concern was history repeating itself” but I say he doesn’t have much room to talk because he repeats the same thing every time he opens his mouth. His story is the sob story of his generation and she has chosen a life going back and forward between self pitying bunny and ravenous vampire bat. One can only wonder what they talk about in their quiet moments together – her dad and his mum surely can’t be the limit. One can only wonder what they talk about with friends. I could be wrong but I can only assume that they spend every day consumed by their own perceived problems – that the world is against them – but they are so arrogant, so sad, so idiotic and so bloody boring that I wonder why I’m wasting my time writing about them at all. I suppose it’s just to keep me occupied and because if Harry and Meghan disappeared overnight I would not miss them one bit, but while they exist they make me itch and irritable because they really aren’t worth all the bother that they insist on causing. And ultimately they’re boring too. There are lots of cures for boredom but it’s much harder to find one for being boring. Pity, as then all this fuss would just go away.
G B Hewitt. 05.03.2021
On stupidity......and other causes for concern. 