Diana came back as Meghan

If I were to single out the most soul-destroying offshoot of post-Enlightenment modernity, universal egotism would spring to mind first.

Remove faith in the absolute authority infinitely higher than oneself, and one’s own feelings and thoughts assume an inordinate importance. Eventually they’ll become all that remains. The baser the feelings, and the punier the thoughts, the likelier such a spiritual death.

This brings me to Harry, his mother and his wife.

Diana had little intelligence, but plenty of cunning; no morality, but a talent for faking eyelash-flapping innocence; no talents, but boundless ambition; no ability to influence but an endless capacity to manipulate.

In short, she was the quintessential modern woman with her head lodged deep in her own shapely rump. As such, she was the worst person to be admitted into a family whose raison d’être is to serve public good.

Yet Meghan has matched Diana in the harm she has done to the royal family. British monarchy, the country’s constitutional linchpin, has shown enough sturdiness to resist assorted emperors, führers and kaisers. But it seems weak in the face of two self-serving nonentities with a knack for sanctimonious demagoguery.

(I shan’t bore you with the details of the revolting TV stunt perpetrated by the Sussexes. Over the past couple of days, the papers and airwaves have been filled to bursting with luridly detailed accounts, making any more reminders redundant.)

In a way, Diana’s transgressions were worse than Meghan’s. After all, she was raised in an aristocratic English family that had served the Crown for centuries. Hence she had no excuse of ignorance – she couldn’t possibly have been unaware of the singular significance of the institution she tried to hurt.

Meghan has such an excuse, but it’s a lame one. Grasping the constitutional aspects of British monarchy, along with its rituals and protocols, isn’t astrophysics. Even a Hollywood airhead should be able to do so, with a little application.

But application was never forthcoming. Meghan saw her role in England as a grander equivalent of her role in Suits: as one of the stars of the show.

Once she got there, her Hollywood instincts told her she now could do as she pleased. She was a star with proven box-office appeal, and the show was to propel her to an even greater stardom. No one could stop her now – not directors, co-stars or, in this case, senior royals.

Meghan’s personal qualities apart, her American background also worked against her. Since British monarchy is no longer a threat, Americans don’t hate it now as they used to. They just don’t get it (like all generalisations, this one allows for exceptions).

I’ve heard many Americans expand on our monarchy with benign condescension. They see it as a Ye Olde England theme park, a sort of Disneyland London to match Disneyland Paris.

Americans find it hard to understand the monarch’s significance to the constitution – in fact, they find it hard to realise that Britain has one. After all, a few dozen revolutionaries never got together to write down what the country is supposed to be all about.

Much less are they capable of understanding the intricate ganglion of love, veneration and historical memories activating the synapses of the British psyche whenever the subject of the monarchy comes up (again, notable exceptions aside). It’s no coincidence that, Diana apart, the greatest damage to the House of Windsor has been done by two American women of dubious past who married into the family.

Americans prize the rugged individualism of a self-made man more than the British do. That’s fine, provided it’s mitigated by the community spirit that used to come from faith. In its absence, a self-made man’s job is never quite finished.

He lays a foundation of self-importance, tops it with a floor of ambition, another of energy and leaves it at that. The edifice of his ego is complete. All else is mere furniture, to be put in or, if necessary, removed.

If that type is widespread in the country at large, it’s predominant in Hollywood. Every year thousands of young girls descend on Los Angeles with dreams of stardom and a readiness to claw their way to the top, through human flesh if necessary.

Some have genuine talent, but they are few. Most of the others end up as waitresses, call girls or pole dancers. In between those groups are girls like Meghan, who manage to compensate for their modest thespian talents with hypertrophied ambition.

They end up as B-actresses, a type as unsuited as call girls or pole dancers to the selfless service demanded of the British royals. Yet Meghan is proud of having achieved much in a dog-eat-dog Hollywood by her own efforts (I shan’t speculate about their nature).

That added another layer to her sense of solipsistic self-importance. She simply couldn’t get her head around the fact that she no longer mattered as an individual. A British princess isn’t one first and foremost. She is the personification of her institutional status, a loyal servant to the family and through it to the country.

If Diana couldn’t understand that despite her background, Meghan can’t understand it because of hers. Both women felt slighted, their whole concept of the world and their place in it was turned upside down. Spiteful as they were, they set out to take revenge, and both chose a similar path.

They went on TV to tug on the heartstrings of the silly public, the only kind susceptible to such puppetry. Those poor people were regaled with stories of coldblooded royals crushing the newcomer’s ego with grotesque demands and refusal to heed their hysterical shrieks of I WANT TO BE ME!.

Both women talked about suicidal tendencies, with Diana adding emetic allusions to bulimia and self-harm. Meghan complained about having to learn how to curtsy, which must have taxed her acting skills no end.

She was crushed by her title and, self-refutingly, by her son Archie being denied one. If royal titles weigh so heavy on one’s shoulders, she should be happy that her son will be spared such crushing pressures. (Actually, Archie is already an earl, set to become a duke in due course, although not an HRH.)

And then Meghan hit the royal family with the most damning accusation known to modernity, that of racism. When she was pregnant, one unspecified royal wondered what colour Meghan’s child would be.

This question doesn’t strike me as ipso facto racist. Actually, it’s quite interesting, involving as it does the old wives’ tales of throwbacks. In fact, the chances of a child to be darker than the darker one of his parents are one in millions. It’s conceivable that the offending royal didn’t know that and was genuinely curious.

What’s not conceivable is that anyone in that family could be openly racist. As head of the Commonwealth, the Queen has many black-skinned subjects. Hence, even assuming for the sake of argument that a senior royal harbours racist sentiments, expressing them would be a political faux pas the likes of which none of them has ever made.

Yet Meghan knows how to appeal to woke sensibilities. Hence her teary complaints about her and Archie being discriminated against on racial grounds.

Now, our royals aren’t first-rate intellectuals, nor are they expected to be. Some of them are intelligent, some less so. But Harry stands out among them by being downright dumb – sufficiently so to give credence to the rumours of his questionable birth.

But whoever his real father was, Diana was definitely his mother. She was the tree and Harry is the apple that didn’t fall far from it. Now it’s being gobbled up by his wife who combines all of Diana’s awful qualities with quite a few of her own.