PRINCE HARRY should be allowed to keep his military titles.
I don’t care if Harry spends the rest of his life sitting on a sofa in California, broadcasting woke sermons, cashing Netflix cheques and making kale smoothies with Oprah.
I don’t care how much money he earns. I don’t care how banal his insights into life become. I don’t care about the risible hypocrisy of lecturing the world about climate change from the best seat on a private plane.
None of it matters when it comes to Harry’s honorary military titles. Even if he has let down the Royal Family and this country that adored him. Even if he has traded in a lifetime of royal duty for the shallow glory of American celebrity.
Harry should be allowed to keep the military titles that Buckingham Palace are reportedly threatening to take away.
Harry is currently Captain-General of the Royal Marines, Honorary Air Commandant of RAF Honington and Commodore in Chief, Small Ships and Diving, Royal Naval Command.
“The view is clear,” says one Palace insider. “Either you are in or out. Any form of ‘hybrid’ role is incompatible with representing the head of state.”
And of course, Harry and Meghan should not be free to pick and choose when they are members of the Royal Family and when they would rather hang out with the Clooneys.
But Harry’s military titles are something else. These titles probably mean more to him than any His Royal Highness handle, or even being a prince.
To Harry, I reckon they matter more than anything. And stripping him of these honorary roles feels petty and spiteful and mean.
Look — I get it. I stood in Windsor on that sun-drenched day that Harry married Meghan. I felt the love of those crowds. I felt the joy and the optimism that people felt for this young couple.
‘WOKE LUXURY’
And frankly I share the disappointment that it has all been chucked away for a life of woke luxury in the US.
But Harry is not some Disney prince keen to sport the baubles and bangles of military service. Harry is a veteran.
He has a right to wear the uniforms and the medals. And he has a right to those military titles.
As an old soldier who saw his comrades killed and crippled in foreign fields, he also had the right to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday.
That right was denied him. The Royal Family got that wrong.
Harry should have been welcomed at Remembrance Sunday with open arms.
And I do understand that feelings are raw on both sides, and I do believe that he has rather foolishly turned his back on the nation that loves him.
But Harry spent ten years in the British Army and did two tours of Afghanistan.
Nobody should belittle that service.
And letting Harry keep his titles might even keep a bond to this country that he — and we — may one day be grateful for.
How totally brilliant he would have been during this health pandemic.
Helping his mates in the Army with the vaccine roll-out, unloading food parcels with Marcus Rashford, hanging with Captain Sir Tom. What a waste that Harry was sitting on a sofa in California.
But whatever his flaws, foibles and failings, and however much he may have disappointed the nation that adored him, Harry’s commitment to our Armed Forces is real and profound.
So let Harry keep his military titles. He has earned them.
Tom’s superhero cape
When Captain Sir Tom Moore died, Gavin Bond’s beautiful photographs of Tom for GQ were reprinted all over the world.
They all showed Tom with the Union Flag — wrapped in it, brandishing it and wearing it like a superhero cape.
These unforgettable images were a celebration of the national unity that Tom Moore so magnificently embodied.
Because that flag belongs to us all.
Keir Starmer’s Labour should not require market research to tell them the party has to embrace the Union Flag if it wants to win back the voters it lost under Jeremy Corbyn, that proud pal of Hamas, Hezbollah and the IRA.
It should be bloody obvious.
The British people will never send you to 10 Downing Street if you give every impression of despising this nation.
This fiasco spells the end for EU
History teaches us that every empire ends. From the Romans to the British Empire to the Soviet Union, every expansionist empire has its years in the sun, then disappears into the mists of history. Why should the European Union be any different?
If the Romans, the British and the Russian Communists can’t make their empires endure for eternity, then why should a cabal of bungling bureaucrats and tenth-rate politicians rule the European roost for ever?
Someone once said that Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, has a resemblance to Honor Blackman when she was playing 007’s girlfriend, Pussy Galore. But Ursula is more of a cock-ups galore.
Faced with the greatest crisis in Europe since the Second World War, she and the EU have been a catastrophic failure.
Germany’s vice-chancellor Olaf Scholz described the EU’s vaccine cock-up as “s***” – but it is far worse than that. It will have an unimaginable impact on European jobs, health and lives. This s*** kills.
Vaccinating more than ten million Brits already is a triumph for the nimble nation state.
In stark contrast, the EU put its faith in dogma and the collective negotiating power of 27 nations that don’t even speak the same language.
Europeans will die because the slow, stupid, penny-pinching, bean-counting bureaucrats in Brussels took the monstrously wrong decision that they would handle procurement of vaccines for all its members.
Ursula says the UK’s vaccine roll-out is a “speedboat” while the EU’s sloth-like progress is a humble tanker. A tad generous. The EU’s botched vaccine disaster is more like a leaky dinghy stuck in the English Channel, looking longingly at the White Cliffs of Dover.
Now, just like Donald Trump when his pride was wounded, the EU is viciously lashing out. They mercilessly slander our Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine (although they petulantly demand more).
‘HUMILIATED & EMBARRASSED’
They gleefully confiscate our lorry drivers’ ham sandwiches at their ports.
And – unforgivably – the EU even tried to impose a hard border in Ireland because they were humiliated and embarrassed by the scale and speed of the UK vaccine roll-out.
But the truth is out. The EU does not give a damn about Ireland. The EU does not give a damn about being a good neighbour to the UK.
All the EU cares about is holding on to power. And it is slipping away.
The EU may yet stagger on for a few years. Never doubt that pain will be inflicted on the British at every opportunity.
But the EU can’t survive endangering the lives of 500million Europeans.
Future historians will record that this was when a once-mighty edifice started to crack, crumble and collapse.
Coronavirus is the EU’s Berlin Wall moment.
Nicola a Brit petty
The reason I reckon the SNP would lose any new referendum on Scottish independence is because Nicola Sturgeon totally lacks the confidence to give credit to the United Kingdom where credit is undeniably due.
Surely Scots can see this for themselves?
Clearly, Scotland is benefiting directly from Brexit because Scots are being vaccinated at a rate that would simply not be happening if they were in Sturgeon’s beloved EU, where they are currently begging the Russians for a few million of their Sputnik jabs.
“You can make that argument but sometimes I think it’s over-simplistic,” sniffs Sturgeon through that mouth like a paper cut.
And clearly, it is the BRITISH Army who are doing their bit to increase the pace of Sturgeon’s rather sluggish vaccine roll-out.
And clearly it is the vaccine produced by Oxford-AstraZeneca that is saving the UK and may yet save the world.
‘SO PETTY’
But if Sturgeon has ever given the jab its full name, I must have missed it.
Laughably, she calls it the “AstraZeneca” jab, leaving off the name of a venerable English and British seat of academic excellence, just in case anyone should suspect the British of having got something right.
Sturgeon is so petty, so grudging, so unwilling to admit to any of the obvious benefits of Scotland being in the United Kingdom.
So I don’t think she would win her referendum.
Because I don’t believe the people in Scotland share her insane loathing for everything made in Britain.
