JAN MOIR: Princess Lilibet? I thought Harry and Meghan wanted nothing to do with the rotten Windsors!

Princess Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor. dear little thing A thousand blessings for this American child, who was baptized at his home in California a few days ago.

As the gospel choir sang and sprinkled herself with holy water, the 21-month-old’s ties to the British royal family deepened. And that, frankly, is amazing. Because one can wish this little girl all the best in life, but still wonder about the proper dissimulation and collusion of her parents.

One princess? Is there an error here?

Since fleeing to the United States to escape the hardships of royal life in 2020, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have come across as a couple who utterly loathe the concept of a monarchy, along with the royal family and just about everyone else. its members.

By his often told account; as an institution it is racist, as a historical construct it is indefensible, and as a crucible of family life it failed so badly in every way that, while she was in its grip, Meghan contemplated committing suicide when she was first pregnant. And that’s horrible.

An Archewell-issued photograph of Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor, the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, after celebrating her first birthday in June last year.

You’d think they’d want nothing to do with the rotten scoundrels Windsors and their bad, bad ways, right? Mistaken. Very badly.

When you boil the royal oil, when you crack open the ermine crust, and finally get to the golden sauce underneath, what you discover is that Harry and Meghan actually want everything to do with royalty after all. All! But above all the prestige, the cachet and above all the scrumptious titles, for them and for their children as well.

If they both had any morals or decency, we wouldn’t be at this hypocritical juncture, because surely the baptism of their young children provides a perfect parting of the ways.

Refusing to use or glorify in royal titles for Archie and Lilibet would have suspended the monarchy in their troubled lives in a sweeping and admirable gesture.

The Sussexes could have said goodbye forever to the boiled meat and custard sludge of a British life they clearly found hateful. They could have freed themselves from stifling tradition and embarrassing privilege and instead fully embraced America’s glittering meritocracy.

That would have been bold, progressive and not elitist, which is exactly what this couple always claims to be, against all evidence to the contrary.

Instead, the reality is that they want to cling to titles and prestige like a limpet clings to the teak hull of a royal yacht; the way a leech fixates on a real vein that thumps and pumps and sinks its fangs in for the long haul. They’ll stick with and suck on these Windsor connections, because it suits them financially and it suits them socially and frankly, without them, what do they have? She’s a TV actress, he’s a walking rag of fashionable neuroses with a mind we now know has been “wiped off the windshield” by cannabis and hallucinogenic drugs.

Prince William, second right, Kate, Princess of Wales, right, Prince Harry, left, and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, second left, leave after paying their respects to Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Hall for the state lying in September. last year

Charles, Prince William and Catherine, Prince Harry and Meghan attend the annual Commonwealth Service at Westminster Abbey in March 2020

Tyler Perry at a Los Angeles airport last Friday, the day he attended Lilibet’s christening as her godfather

Harry’s father, King Charles III (centre), met the Governor of Western Australia and his wife at Buckingham Palace today.

Even recently, Harry allowed himself to be diagnosed by some sort of mental doctor live on a pay-per-view streaming platform, watched by millions around the world. This is a new low, even for him.

Gazing at monsters fell out of favor in Victorian England, but our exiled prince seems to be blazing a rich new vein of curiosities of his own—and I don’t mean his frozen penis.

One has to wonder if Harry and Meghan have thought of this. After all, what does it really mean to be a prince or princess in a constitutional federal republic like the United States? Aren’t they historically inclined to be against all that nonsense? Perhaps this christening signifies a consolidation of plans to form a lightweight monarchy on the West Coast, complete with the officiating Bishop of Los Angeles and more celebrity millionaires than family members present at the ceremony.

News of Princess Lilibet’s christening was broadcast to the world via the glossy and gossipy People magazine, along with news of Priscilla Presley and Riley Keough’s feud over the recently deceased Lisa Marie Presley’s trust fund and news of the new Disney production of The Little Mermaid.

Dear God. Such royal events used to be announced on a small card in the Buckingham Palace courtyard, but now they are in a very different reality.