The royals will only thrive if they are anti-woke

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex must not have believed their luck when the Lady Susan Hussey scandal blew up just a week before their show landed on Netflix.

It wasn’t just convenient that the “race row” – itself an inherently biased description – should overshadow the Prince and Princess of Wales’s visit to Boston last week. It wasn’t even that Ngozi Fulani’s account of being repeatedly asked where she was “really” from by the late Queen’s longest serving lady-in-waiting seemed to fit the narrative of “unconscious bias” at the heart of the monarchy. No, it was the fact that Buckingham Palace so quickly kowtowed to the wokery of it all that must have truly delighted Their Royal Righteousnesses.

In dispensing with a loyal servant who had devoted more than 60 years of her life to serving Crown and country, and to have done it with so little due process, royal aides displayed a weakness that the likes of Harry, Meghan and their “Sussex squad” are only too happy to exploit.

For it demonstrated the zero-sum cancel culture advocated by so-called “progressives” who think anyone who disagrees with them is not just wrong, but a bigot. The gospel, according to Harry and Meghan’s right-on cheerleaders, is that everything should be seen through the prism of race – a theory as disingenuous as it is divisive and dangerous.

In the warped world their Sussex heroes inhabit, where they have never put a foot wrong, they are not just victims of “institutional racism” at the palace but a Britain made more bigoted by Brexit. Forget the fact that they were nicknamed “Duchess Difficult” and “The Hostage” by staff who lodged bullying complaints against them – before leaving their service in swift succession under NDAs – it was the couple who were treated badly, supposedly because Meghan happens to be mixed-race.

Even the Commonwealth, the institution Harry’s grandmother painstakingly helped to build, and which unites countries of all races, comes under intense criticism.

And so it goes that Lady Susan is a racist because that is what the wokesters have decided. Precisely the same dynamic is to be seen in the Harry and Meghan case: their side of the story matters more simply because it is spoken loudest. There is no such thing as a right of reply. And if you do dare to question their testimony, you are labelled racist.

For what it’s worth, I think Lady Susan was wrong to so aggressively pursue her line of questioning of Ms Fulani’s background. But the Palace’s knee-jerk response was equally misjudged. Indeed, reflecting on it now, after the couple have once again trashed the institution that gave them everything (while hypocritically clinging on to the cachet of their royal titles), the way Lady Susan was treated seems more than just appalling; it was cruel. According to her friend Petronella Wyatt, the 83-year-old widow is “broken-hearted” and unable to leave her home.

No consideration appears to have been given to her version of events, or the fact she is slightly deaf, let alone any acknowledgement of her personal relationship with the black community. Had Palace officials been minded to visit the mother-of-two’s church in Kennington, south London, described by worshippers as “90 per cent black”, they would have heard from fellow parishioners that Lady Susan “didn’t have a racist bone in her body”. As one black female worshipper at St Agnes Church put it: “She is not a racist person, not in any way. She is a lovely, beautiful lady, and everybody in that church will say the same thing.”

Instead, the Palace treated as scripture the word of someone who has a history of publicly attacking the monarchy and its role in society. They sided with a person who was invited into the palace in good faith but turned a private conversation into a national row by posting about a “transcript” on social media. There was no serious attempt to establish the facts.

Now the Royals should learn lessons from this sorry affair. They should no longer cave in to the wokesters, with their Critical Race Theory, which is at the heart of Harry and Meghan’s Netflix series. It is not enough to simply assert that something or someone is racist without actually proving it. It isn’t acceptable, in civilised society, to cast around deeply offensive generalisations about individuals and institutions, as Harry and Meghan have continually done, based on mere “feelings” without having the evidence to back it up. It is neither harmonious nor fair to insist that all white people are inherently racist when the reality of our increasingly multicultural Britain is that race is less of a factor than it has ever been.

There has been a tendency of late, by the Palace powers-that-be, to “bring in” these sorts of misguided views in the interests of “inclusivity”. It’s an understandable hangover from Megxit, as well as being a way to prove to sceptics that the institution does good work.

The King is acutely aware that the future of the monarchy depends on the embrace of younger generations from all walks of life. This is a matter of fact, and he has done remarkable work in reaching out to the margins of society throughout his life. But this openness can also be vulnerable to exploitation by those who do not mean well. A careful balance will have to be struck between welcoming everyone and exposing the institution to those who will only seek to damage.

If the case of Lady Susan is to be avoided in future, the Palace will have to distance itself from the trap of prioritising American identity politics (derived from social media) over British culture itself.

This country does not have the same history or dynamics as those from across the pond. Slavery had no legal basis in England. And after British politicians abolished the slave trade, they spent the subsequent decades encouraging – at times coercing – fellow governments in the West to do the same. In part due to these differences we have a less race-obsessed society. Whereas the colour of a person’s skin is the predominant factor in American affairs, the equivalent here would probably be class status.

Moreover, Britons have been sympathetic to the monarchy’s position in the Harry and Meghan affair. Years of whining and flaky allegations have turned even the most open minds against the California couple’s woke whinge-fest. A survey by People’s Polling for GB News yesterday found that one in four Brits are so angry with the couple they think they should be banned from Charles III’s Coronation next May. Asked which royals “best represent the values” of Britain, more than half the country said William and Kate compared with only 7 per cent for Harry and Meghan. Meanwhile, fewer than half of the 1,200 polled (45 per cent) said they believe Lady Susan should have resigned.

Overall, just 22 per cent of the public had a positive view of the Sussexes and 48 per cent had a negative view. The remainder “prefer not to say or have no view” (translation: they couldn’t care two hoots about the Montecito multi-millionaires).

In all this, there might even be an opportunity for the royals. The British people know they are under attack, unfairly, and have rallied around them. The Netflix show will only serve to entrench those feelings. But they are explicitly anti-woke feelings – the sense that the Sussexes have indulged theories with little bearing in reality. The monarchy can capitalise on such sentiments if it reflects them.

One of the most endearing things about the late Queen was she was scrupulously fair and unwaveringly decent. She understood that her subjects aspire to traditional British values, not new-found American customs. Today’s royal palaces would do well simply to follow her lead.