I’m no fan of the monarchy. I’m particularly no fan of the current occupant of the throne. I don’t want to be anyone’s subject. But I especially don’t want to bend the knee to King Charles III, a reactionary environmentalist whose ideas about the world are even weirder than all that stuff about him talking to plants would suggest.

Still, the grim return of the nonsense ‘royal racism’ row is enough to make this republican sing ‘God Save the King’. The attempt – first by Meghan Markle, now by her tame journalist, Omid Scobie – to smear senior royals as racists, based on a tenuous alleged microaggression that may or may not have even happened, is a grim move on the part of the Sussexes that everyone – monarchist, republican or neither – should reject.

If you’ve missed this story, I envy you. A swift recap:

Back in 2021, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, suggested to a horrified Oprah Winfrey in their blockbuster interview that part of the reason she and her husband, Prince Harry, left the royal family in 2020 was because of racism within the House of Windsor. There had been ‘concerns and conversations’, Markle said vaguely, among some royals about what skin tone the Sussexes’ then unborn son, Archie, might have.