Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announce their engagement. A good news story at last, but brace yourself for a wave of royal sycophancy and political opportunism.
VIDEO SCRIPT:
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.
It’s official – a royal engagement.
Brace yourself for a frenzy.
Hi, I’m Leon Hawthorne. A royal wedding beckons and the media is going mental over Meghan.
A beautiful actress and a dashing prince. Harry and Meghan will marry in spring next year.
It comes after months of speculation in the tabloid press asking: would they or wouldn’t they, with some papers revealing the engagement before it was officially confirmed today.
It’s the stuff of many girls’ fairy tale dreams… marrying a Prince Charming and becoming a royal princess.
Meghan Markle is already a celebrity, starring in the hit TV show, ‘Suits’. She’s a 36-year old, American divorcee who’s father is white and her mother black. So, she’s poised to add some colour to the British royal family.
Her mixed race is perhaps the most significant fact of her life story, as far as the stuffy English aristocracy is concerned.
The pair seem like perfectly decent people. I wish them well.
My question is: why will there now be an inevitable wave of royal sycophancy?
They’ll be fanatics outside Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace wearing Union Flag clothing. People camping overnight for the wedding parade.
In a celebrity obsessed culture, royalty has become another branch of showbiz; and the Harry-Meghan story is a perfect fusion of those two worlds.
But I think it’s more than that. More than just fairy tales, love story and patriotism. The popular love for royalty springs from an irrational belief in royal blood… inherited talents… that children of great men can echo the achievements of their ancestors. This is the basis of hereditary monarchy. The reason we have a royal family.
We think the same of the sons of great politicians, authors, even footballers. We have a sentimental yearning for them to scale the great heights of their ancestors.
In Prince Harry’s case, the public took to heart a young boy who lost his mother and obviously wants him to achieve the happiness in marriage she never did.
And who would disagree with that?
So, brace yourself for endless stories about pretty dresses and celebrity friends attending a spring royal wedding. And the government is ecstatic the story will take people’s attention away from Brexit and create some goodwill for Britain in the coming months.
I’m Leon Hawthorne. Thanks for watching.
© Leon Hawthorne 2023 