Suzanne Moore, Opinion, 22 May 2018<\/p>\n
Meghan Markle brings glamour to the royals, and they benefit enormously, but Broken Britain can\u2019t be patched together by pageantry and a kiss.<\/p>\n
A<\/span><\/span>friend texts from the US: \u201cIs the monarchy safe for another 100 years now?\u201d Yes, I tell him, I think it is. Saturday was a sunny day and we were brought a\u00a0vision of ourselves as open, inclusive, free of politicians, full of celebs and horses; this was balm itself. The two people at the centre of it all radiated love, there was a gospel choir and a preacher, and a single mother sitting all alone with immense dignity. I was happy for them.<\/p>\n Meghan is a self\u2013declared feminist<\/a>, while Harry is a besotted prince. Thus the institution renews itself and there is a mood of self-congratulation. Look at us! We are not a mean-spirited, racist country, because we have let a little bit of the \u201cother\u201d into our theme-park monarchy. This is symbolically important: a woman does not have to be white to get her prince. The fairytale opens the door and in slips the wondrous Meghan.<\/p>\n Will the door stay ajar? Will she be assimilated into the firm? Her life will be absolutely controlled from now on.<\/p>\n Harry\u2019s mother did not declare herself a feminist, but she tore up the script that said Charles could have a mistress; that her children would be sent away; that she must not complain; that she was simply to breed in captivity. Diana\u2019s self\u2013dramatising made her disruptive, a genuine agent of change. Meghan is an actor and a social justice warrior and how she plays these roles is crucial as we face the prospect of an old and unpopular king inheriting the throne. The Daily Mail is already warning her to remain \u201cpolitically neutral\u201d, ie don\u2019t say anything too challenging. Kate Middleton is middle England\u2019s blandprincess and Meghan will be expected to be just as compliant.<\/p>\n The euphemism for her dual heritage is \u201cmodern\u201d. Somehow, in a country that is riven with discord about who should and should not be here, blackness gets reconfigured as modernity, rather than being recognised as part of our history.<\/p>\n As the homeless were cleared off the streets of Windsor<\/a> to make way for the well-wishers \u2013 who then listened to a sermon about making poverty history<\/a> \u2013 one has to ask for whom interracial marriage is a big deal. It is the establishment and the liberal middle classes who continually lecture the working classes on racism and yet it is at the bottom of society, not the top, that interracial relationships are so common as to not be remarked upon. It is the establishment that locks out black people. David Lammy called it \u201csocial apartheid\u201d<\/a> when discussing the astonishing fact that 13 Oxford colleges did not make a single offer to black A-level applicants over a six-year period.<\/p>\n