Meghan, Harry, Oprah, the Royals, Piers Morgan: a Punch and Judy show of the rich and famous

Amid the pages of Bertolt Brecht’s classic collection, The Svendborg Poems, you encounter the following verse:

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.”

Brecht, who came of age during the First World War and who lived through two abortive German revolutions on the back of which was born the beast of fascism, carried in his head a creative brain of inordinate force. It was married to a heart in which the travails and struggles of the common man remained the cause of his life, informing his work and worldview to the end.

With this in mind, it’s interesting to ponder what Brecht would make of the plight of the common man in these dark times, informed by a global pandemic that has changed the way we live and has wrought searing economic dislocation with all the attendant stress and despair.

In the UK NHS workers, over a hundred of whom have perished in the fight against Covid, have just been offered a one percent pay rise in gratitude for their Herculean efforts in dealing with the failures and criminal negligence of a Tory government and establishment from the beginning of this public health emergency. We have millions in poverty, children going hungry, foodbanks struggling to cope with the demand for their services, and tent cities have begun to appear in London.

Despite this — in the face of the evidence of the failed state the UK is fast becoming in the throes of Brexit — we find that we have been infantilised as a society so much that we are invited to spectate at what amounts to a Punch and Judy show of the rich and famous in the wake of Harry and Meghan Markle’s interview with Oprah Winfrey. The cause of this infantilisation is the mainstream media’s obsession with the lives of the rich and famous, an obsession fed to us 24/7, and semi-feudal institutions such as the Royal Family, the acme of class privilege and ostentation in our midst.

The questions that were not broached in the interview were the ones most germane. To wit: Not why Harry and Meghan’s son Archie was denied a royal title, but why in 2021 there is…