I have tried to avoid knowing anything about the revelations in Prince Harry’s book, so that I could use the privilege of these column-inch opportunities to ridicule something more significant. But the Harry headlines snigger from the newsagent shelves, elegant sirens shouting about sex and drugs but in the gruff tones of high-street newspaper vendors. Readallabahtit!
“Prince Harry admits he had frostbitten penis when he was best man at William and Kate’s wedding,” exclaims the Daily Record. The topical radio comedy hack writer I was 33 years ago kicks in. “Frostbitten penis. Wow! That was an extravagant wedding menu! Were the gangrenous testicles off? Was there no sunburned anus?” But of course, a quick search of social media reveals that the infinite number of monkeys of the general public have already made an infinite number of monkey variations on this joke, and with far greater speed than we professional satirists, still tilling the arid soil of legacy media, winding up the letterpress to hand-crank out our already irrelevant opinion guano.
The Sun’s headline “Harry: I did coke and weed” invites the more infantile among us to imagine the word “weed” is a verb, suggesting the luxury cocaine Harry enjoyed made him lose control of his royal bladder, and it conjures other headline possibilities. “Harry: I did speed and puked.” “ Harry: I did ketamine and shat.” And my own favourite: “Harry: I did LSD and realised we are all essentially just molecules of energy drifting in a meaningless cosmos and should love one another. And then weed and puked and shat.”
“She treated me like a young stallion,” wails the Daily Mail, on the subject of Harry losing his virginity to an older “woman who loved horses” in a field behind a pub. I envy the exploited prince. I lost my virginity to an older horse who loved women in a pub behind a field. But then I am not a prince.
“Harry declares: ‘I killed 25 Taliban fighters,’” the same paper announced later. Except he didn’t “declare” it. He said the figure gave him no satisfaction and he’d prefer to live in “a world without war”. But the Taliban interior minister’s aide, Anas Haqqani, has tweeted: “Mr Harry! The ones you killed were not chess pieces, they were humans.” Thanks to press misrepresentation it now looks like Prince Harry is on the Taliban kill list. He should take some consolation from the fact that they think he is called “Mr Harry”. If assassins put that into Google they will be directed to a hair and beauty salon in Droitwich. Mr Harry’s offers “something for everyone, including barbering, ladies’ hairdressing, restyles and tints”, all treatments that are sure to anger already inconvenienced Islamist fundamentalists even further.
The Daily Express announces: “Kirstie Allsopp says Harry and Meghan are ‘in bed with the devil’.” The devil here appears to be whey-faced ITV News at Ten host Tom Bradby, but Lucifer is cunning and takes unexpected forms. In June last year, Allsop swallowed an Apple AirPod that she thought was a vitamin pill, but was able to regurgitate it unaided, exactly the sort of skill that, not so very long ago, would have seen her accused of being a handmaiden of Satan.
A cynic would say the Harry headlines are a useful tool for the rightwing press, or “the press” as it is more accurately known, to distract attention from the unfolding twin disasters of the Tory Brexit and the Tory governments they urged their readers to support. I know Gran just died in a puddle of her own urine in a hospital corridor but look! Over there!! A frostbitten penis!!!
Because while the papers poke the prince, Boris Johnson’s 2020 Covid fantasy – “Let the bodies pile high in their thousands!” – has become a reality many times over, not in the plague pits of the pandemic, but in the A&E departments of a National Health Service that his party have run into the ground. How sad Johnson must be that it is backstabbing Sunak that gets to take the credit for his fever dream made flesh. Those dead bodies had Johnson’s name on them!
The NHS staff must now be demonised and blamed. Where once we clapped for them, now we must clap for the hardworking thinkers at the thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs, who have been thinking hard for years about how best to outsource determinedly defunded NHS operations to profit-making companies. They are the real heroes here.
As the health service collapses, and public support for striking workers across many different fields grows, the Conservatives must be delighted that Prince Harry’s revelations are filling the spaces. There’s a lot of bad news that needs burying right now and where better to bury it that beneath a rancid pile of royal revelations?
It seems most likely for example, despite Defra’s alternative truths, that the mass die-off of all marine life in the Brexit-voting heartlands between Hartlepool and Whitby was caused by chemicals disturbed during preliminary work on the proposed Teesside Brexit Benefit Bullshit Freeport. The livelihoods of Brexit-voting fishers are destroyed. Johnson, whose lies pushed Brexit through, has the blood of thousands of crustaceans on his hands, and not for the first time, as suppressed photos of the 1987 Bullingdon Club’s Seafood Sextacular event show. But that Times headline telling us all about the Brexit crab catastrophe will never cut through a cloud of frostbitten penises and horse-loving Mrs Robinsons. Cry God for Harry, England and Saint George!
Maybe some good will come of all this. In destroying the royal family for ever, Harry may yet succeed where Oliver Cromwell failed.
Stewart Lee’s shows Snowflake and Tornado are available on BBC iPlayer. Basic Lee tour dates are booking now. Stewart will appear in Stand Up for Ukraine at the Leicester Square theatre, London, on 28 January
