Sarah Vine’s tribute to the duke showed how even the saddest of events can be press-ganged into the Tories’ divisive agenda
Once, Richard Thomas’s Jerry Springer the Opera, to which I contributed unpopular elements, held the TV hate record, with 62,000 complaints. But last week it was out-hated by the BBC’s saturation coverage of Prince Philip’s death, which didn’t even win four Olivier awards and had no singing coprophiles. BBC appeasements of unappeasable bad faith actors backfire reliably. More than 110,000 people, missing EastEnders under lockdown, protested the all-channel mourning. That said, the complaints of our day were proper complaints, etched on to stone tablets and delivered by pigeons, not these “e-posts” they have now which any idiot can send. Indeed, it turns out that 116 of the people complaining were complaining that it was too easy to complain.
It is sad that an old lady has lost her companion of 73 years, grieving alone. And the supposedly controversial comments made by Prince Philip, that critics foregrounded, aren’t that bad, given that he was born 100 years ago and left normal life for the ermine cocoon of royalty in 1947. No one would expect Rip Van Winkle to wake up and understand the complex terminology of 21st-century transgender rights. Sadly, the duke was too far ahead of the zeitgeist to be declared a warrior of anti-wokeness and get a lucrative book deal. But only just.
