“The very idea that we should even be paying homage to King Charles is somewhere between laughable and revolting. And if that were not enough, I steeled myself to actually watch the toe-curling Australia Day address by their man in Yarralumla, who, we’re told, should be greeted as ‘Your Excellency’,” writes “The Gadfly” columnist ROBERT MACKLIN. 

UNTIL very recently I gave the Harry and Meghan tattle-tale show a wide berth. Spoiled brats of the British monarchy firing explosive verbal darts at each other…really, who cares?

But that was before I read a devastating column in the “New York Times” by one Zeynep Tufekci (Americans do have the weirdest names). Zeynep is a woman who really knows her onions concerning the royals and their hangers-on. 

I found some of the appendages quite sad. I expected better of Dame Judi Dench and Dame Maggie Smith than to lunch with Camilla, the queen consort, and the execrable Jeremy Clarkson. After which, says Zeynep, Clarkson penned his magazine piece “dreaming of the day when [Meghan] is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds cry ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.”

That put me right off my own lunch, but the rest of Zeynep’s report revealed the extraordinary symbiosis between the royals and Britain’s gutter press. 

I’d heard previous stories from a good mate who, as cadets on the old “Courier-Mail”, we’d shared our first by-line (an op-ed on the “colour bar” against Aboriginals in Brisbane hotels). 

He later became an editor in the Mirror group, and when I was in London I stayed with him in his Mayfair flat. 

He often spoke of certain royals visiting the office and pointed out the flat the Duke of Edinburgh kept for his not infrequent dalliances. I was tempted to write it at one stage, but my editor balked. However, that’s a mere bagatelle compared with the verbal blitzkriegs between Harry/Meghan and The Firm.

By chance, I read Zeynep’s piece on Australia Day when the debate about the Aboriginal Voice referendum was front of mind, and the battle royal could hardly have been more germane. 

It demolished all that ceremonial gibberish that gives the monarchy their phony gravitas, to reveal a bunch of very rich, very pompous plunderers of the public purse. And that’s fine if it’s the Pommy purse they’re pillaging.

But the very idea that we should even be paying homage to King Charles and his Operetta is somewhere between laughable and revolting. And if that were not enough, I steeled myself to actually watch the toe-curling Australia Day address by their man in Yarralumla, who, we’re told, should be greeted as “Your Excellency”. 

This is the chap who enabled the Pentecostal PM to hold five additional ministries without a squeak to those who already held them, much less the Australian public whom he was addressing. 

Whatever the findings of Virginia Bell’s inquiry into Morrison’s power-grab, the G-G’s silence was the enabler that permitted the PM to bulldoze the conventions of our democratic system until he boasted about it to a couple of journos.

And why not? The G-G doesn’t represent the Australian people. He is an instrument of the monarchical system. Indeed, he oversees the ceremony that requires ministers to pledge they will be “faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles the Third, King of Australia”.

I recently had the opportunity for a couple of conversations with him, on a quite different subject. A pleasant man, but I came away with the sense that under a PM like Morrison he’d have one duty above all: “Don’t make waves”. 

I ruminated on it while departing through the gates of Yarralumla, and I fervently wished for him a song my mother and I used to sing back in the day while washing and drying the dinner dishes: 

“Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye; 

Here I go, cheerio, on my way.”

robert@robertmacklin.com