Regular readers of these humble offerings will know that I am a monarchist. I have been in lock step with the Queen and her family from the day I was born. I had a Windsor baby carriage, just like Prince Charles. I remember the death of the Queen’s father George VI in 1952 when I was six. 

The Coronation of Elizabeth the next year was part of schooling. Princess Margaret not  marrying  divorcee Group Captain Peter Townsend in 1955 was part of dinner discussion in our home. 

All the marriages, the divorces, the births, the deaths and all the troubles with the family were background to my life. In my writing I have always maintained that it is really not easy to marry into the British  Royal Family.

‘Spot of bovver’

Everyone that watched Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle will have seen the latest “spot of bovver”  within the House of Windsor. Essentially it was an interview that featured one side of a two-sided story with Meghan Markle lobbing out bombs about being trapped in the Royal family and a certain unnamed “royal” wondering about the skin colour of then unborn, not a prince,  Archie.  

There was also Prince Harry complaining about not being able to get his father, Prince Charles, to accept his phone calls. Now the Oprah interview I do not think will change anybody’s mind about anything. The American press seemed four-square behind Meghan and Harry. The British press was more divided with some very real questions being raised about the airing of Royal dirty linen in public. 

Sin of Princess Diana

It just isn’t done in “the firm” as it is called. You may remember that was the sin of Princess Diana; not knowing how the game was played. 

Rightly or wrongly … the Royals are not like you and me. In my house my wife is with “the Oprah crowd” as I call them. 

My sympathies are with the Queen, now in her nineties, with her hundred-year-old husband Phillip, now gravely ill in hospital. What timing!

Prime-Time therapy

I ask aloud now, was it Meghan or Harry that concluded that going on American network television and airing their grievances with the Queen and company was a good idea and would fix whatever differences between them and the rest of the family?  

Eventually after a Day of Silence there was a carefully worded response from Buckingham Palace (The Queen)  saying the family members were not aware of the extent of the unhappiness of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. 

In the next sentence was the announcement that it was a family matter that would be handled internally. Somewhere tonight Meghan Markle must be thinking how difficult it is getting on in that family. She will be right.