In 2005, the then 20-year-old Prince Harry appeared as a Nazi at a fancy dress party. Perhaps the uniform had been inherited from his great-great-uncle, Edward VIII, who was not averse to a spot of recreational sieg heiling.
But next year Prince Harry is to marry the mixed-race descendant of a black American slave, his wedding garments scrupulously stripped of any stray swastikas. Cosmic order is restored.
Has the Prince nobly taken upon himself the symbolic role of a healing force in our rapidly unravelling world, suddenly riven with the sort of open racism and fears of nuclear annihilations that we had assumed had been laid to rest? I’m all for 70s and 80s revivals, but these aren’t the parts of my childhood I feel nostalgic for. A Fab lolly, an Altered Images 12-inch remix and a vibrant trade union movement would have done.
Today, we need the hope that the forthcoming royal nuptials offer more than ever. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s marriage could be a healing ritual for our ruined land, a joining of races that fascists would have us divide. But of course, the racist writing has been on the wall for years.
In 1965, during Eric Clapton’s tenure in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, the phrase “Clapton Is God” began to be grafittied around London. But in 1966, Jimi Hendrix arrived in the city and Clapton was usurped, a seething Salieri to Hendrix’s soaring Mozart.
Ten years later, on stage in Birmingham, a drunken Clapton praised Enoch Powell and declared, “Get the foreigners out, get the wogs out, get the coons out. Keep Britain white.” The Rock Against Racism movement was formed soon after his pronouncement, and the Stranglers brought cavorting strippers on stage with them to smash racism at a Victoria Park RAR concert. Different times.
Today, western world leaders openly praise neo-Nazis, but instead of forming a grass roots rock’n’roll resistance, young people remain passively plugged into their PS4s playing PacMan Go, waiting for their braindead fuck-buddies to come round with some pacifying bong-weed, I expect, while laughing at You-net films of people gobbling down more cinnamon than is necessary, squandering bakers’ dwindling spice reserves.
There’s currently a cynical viral marketing campaign for Clapton’s forthcoming Hyde Park show that sees the ancient phrase “Clapton Is God” sprayed up all around London once more by paid PR-vandals. I have prepared a stencil saying “Clapton is an alcoholic racist”, but getting it out there doesn’t, at the moment, seem like a great use of time. There are worse people to worry about than Clapton or, to give him his blues name, Mississippi Nigel Farage.
We should have seen all this coming, but I thought the culture wars were won when New Order got John Barnes to do a rap on their 1990 World Cup single. I expect I was too busy being ironically racist in a Shoreditch bar, drinking Grolsch from a pop-top bottle and toasting Tony Blair. It’s not only Eric Clapton who has a shameful past.
Alarm bells should have been ringing. Somewhere around the turn of the century, in the perineal period between the ubiquity of email and the pervasive idiocy-tsunami of Twitter, my BNP-voting auntie sent me an attachment, typical of the era, designed to melt my snowflake mind.
It comprised a supposedly scientific study, using history and genetics, to prove that all Muslims were demonstrably culturally and morally inferior, and downright dangerous. Of course, a quick Google showed that neither the academic who wrote it, nor the institution he worked for, had ever existed, a discovery that one would have thought would discredit the piece.
But confronted with this evidence my auntie just said, “All the same, I think it makes a lot of good points.” How pleased she would be, were she alive today, to know that her research reached the same exacting standards as that of the president of the United States of America.
This morning, on LBC radio, the professional wasps’-nest-poker Nick Ferrari was audibly rattled. Ferrari, a man who is 85% wazzock, and who has made a living out of inflaming the unstable passions of the “political correctness has gone mad” brigade, realised the monster robot he had reared on raw opinion meat and a vapour of Facebook hearsay was now beyond his control and he’d forgotten to install its emergency-stop button.
Cautiously describing Trump’s Britain First-endorsing missive as “a tweet too far”, Ferrari suddenly found his white-knuckled listeners largely disagreeing with him, and retorting that these videos needed to be aired, whether they were verifiable or not. Could straight-talking Ferrari smell the smoking torches of a previously loyal mob approaching his own mountaintop castle, his Jaguar F-type aflame on the brick-paved driveway?
On Monday, as Theresa May cautiously accepted that we will have to pay for EU schemes we were already signed up for, and the inevitable impossibility of the fluid Irish border was at last made flesh, it seemed to me that the wheels had finally fallen of the lie-encrusted Brexit battlebus.
Who is Meghan Markle?
Meghan Markle is an American actor, best known for her role in the hit series Suits. She has described herself as “an actress, a writer, the editor-in-chief of my lifestyle brand the Tig, a pretty good cook, and a firm believer in handwritten notes”. She has also campaigned for humanitarian causes.
The 36-year-old grew up in Los Angeles. She studied at a girls’ Roman Catholic college there before attending Northwestern University. Recently she has lived in Toronto. She is the daughter of a clinical therapist and a TV lighting designer. Markle has written about her mixed heritage, describing herself as “a strong, confident mixed-race woman”. She was married once before, to film producer Trevor Engelson, but the pair were divorced in 2013.
Since news of her relationship with Prince Harry broke in 2016, she has closed her blog and given an interview in which she described the couple as “really happy and in love”. She said: “Nothing about me changed. I’ve never defined myself by my relationship.” She will become a duchess or princess when the couple wed.
But the quiet coup currently enacted by the billionaire tax-avoiders behind Brexit continued its forward motion, as cognitive dissonance drove their brainwashed leave-voting serfs to misdirect their ongoing anger towards everyone but themselves.
But Harry knows the power of symbols and he begins the enactment of a healing ritual. Has Harry, ever the self-aware prankster, chosen the tiny St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, as his wedding venue in a coded satirical message every bit as meaningful as the clearly pro-EU hat his grandmother wore at the opening of parliament last June?
In a comic pantomime of self-immolating isolationism, our next National Royal Ceremony will be performed in a room too small to accommodate all those who might have been expected to attend, in a building named after our national saint, a man famous for fighting something that didn’t exist, a dragon as unreal as Boris Johnson’s Daily Telegraph vision of a banana-hating EU.
The chapel’s roof is decorated with heraldic animals. Guests might find themselves staring up at a unicorn, which canters away into the mist of myth, as gaseous as an NHS promise, the porous Irish border, the cake that can be eaten and had.
And here come the prince and his scion of slaves, to make us whole again. Meghan Markle. Her name even sounds like “Mrs Merkel”, and she symbolises an America far better than Trump’s, a virgin new land coming into conjugal union with a grizzled Britain that, like the Prince himself, could still choose to divest itself of its unattractive fascist garments and begin again.
Stewart Lee’s Content Provider is in London until 3 February and continues to tour in 2018
