In May that year (Archie was born on the sixth at 5.26 a.m.) Meghan was still busily emailing and texting round the clock on her ‘Forces for CHANGE’ for British Vogue, and Harry was working on his own particular contribution to the magazine, his interview with Dr Jane Goodall, the chimp expert and campaigning anthropologist. Goodall had come for the interview to Frogmore Cottage, the freshly renovated group of dwellings described in Chapter 1 that was the Sussexes’ new family home in the grounds of Windsor Castle – and Meghan came into the room as the interview drew to a close. She was holding the newborn Archie tenderly in her arms and she offered the baby to the eighty-five-year-old Goodall for a cuddle.
‘He was very tiny and very sleepy – not too pleased to be passed from his mummy,’ recalled Goodall. ‘I think I was one of the first to cuddle him outside the family. I made Archie do “the Queen’s wave”, saying “I suppose he’ll have to learn this.”
‘Harry said, “No! He’s not growing up like that.”’
On 8 May, just two days after Archie’s birth, BBC Radio 5 Live anchor Danny Baker, sixty-one, one of the corporation’s most beloved and prolific award-winning presenters (Speech Radio Personality of the Year for 2011, 2012 and 2014), posted a vintage photograph on his massively popular Twitter account. The black and white image from 1925 showed a smartly dressed couple on some Tennessee courtroom steps holding the hand of a little chimpanzee dressed like them in overcoat, bowler hat, shiny shoes and spats.
It was an American propaganda shot that had been staged for the notorious Scopes Monkey Trial – subject of the movie Inherit the Wind – in which Fundamentalists and Modernists battled over Adam and Eve and the nature of creation. Had God literally moulded humans from clay in his own likeness, as per the Bible, or were we descended from apes as Charles Darwin said? This photograph, set up with actors and a well-known movie chimpanzee, had been meant to illustrate the Fundamentalist argument that you may dress a monkey in a bowler hat, but he is still a monkey.
However, this was not the message of the BBC’s Danny Baker. ‘Royal baby leaves hospital,’ read his caption.
In the ensuing uproar Baker took down the image almost instantaneously, tweeting that he ‘would have used the same stupid pic for any other Royal birth or Boris Johnson’s kid or even one of my own. It’s a funny image … Anyway, here’s to ya Archie, Sorry mate.’
‘Yes, OK, he took it down,’ responded fellow 5 Live broadcaster Scarlette Douglas. ‘But his apology for me wasn’t really an apology. I don’t think it’s right.’
The BBC agreed, dismissing Baker immediately. ‘This was a serious error of judgement,’ said a Radio 5 spokesperson, ‘and goes against the values we as a station aim to embody.’
Buckingham Palace maintained silence, as did Harry and Meghan – though we now know that the couple noted bitterly how ‘non’-racist Britain quite failed to ignore Baker’s tweet or to treat his attempt at ‘humour’ with the contempt it deserved. On the contrary, the Monkey Trial image was lovingly reproduced by newspapers and social media across the country for several days, to be cluck-clucked over by millions.
The BBC had at least tried its best to do the right thing. But the corporation fared less creditably in a similar and rather sinister incident that had occurred a few months earlier, when Meghan was five months pregnant.
Early in December 2018 the BBC News website displayed a graphic image of a smiling Prince Harry splattered in bright red blood with a gun being held to his head. ‘SEE YA LATER RACE TRAITOR!’ The words were as shocking as the picture, which bore the credit of the Sonnenkrieg (Sun War) Division, a British neo-Nazi group that, said the BBC, was allegedly inspired by America’s right-wing Atomwaffen Division. Atomwaffen (meaning ‘atomic weapons’ in German) celebrated Adolf Hitler and the mass murderer Charles Manson, and had itself been linked to five murders of a racial and sexual character.
The BBC was rather proud of its revelations about the Sonnenkrieg Division, as a result of which Michal Szewczuk, nineteen, from Leeds, and Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski, eighteen, from Chiswick, west London, pleaded guilty to two counts of encouraging terrorism in June 2019, and were sentenced to quite lengthy periods of detention in a young offender institution.
Closer examination, however, revealed that these two young fanatics were the only named members of the so-called Sonnenkrieg Division. The high-sounding BBC Investigations Unit had failed to come up with the names of any further ‘members’, let alone details of any gatherings that might have been expected in a genuine network of activists. The poster had been treated by the BBC as a news issue of major significance, broadcast nationally and lingered over for some minutes on the News at Ten, the BBC’s main evening bulletin. But did these two teenagers truly provide evidence of a ‘group’, much less a movement? Or were they just a couple of poisonous young nutcases whose proposition that ‘Race Traitor’ Prince Harry should be shot had been taken up for sensationalist reasons and had been given far more attention than it deserved?
This was the gist of the complaint that Prince Harry lodged with the BBC straight after the broadcast, on the grounds that publicising the invitation to kill him raised ‘serious security concerns’ and had ‘caused his family great distress, specifically while his wife was nearly five months pregnant’.
The BBC
