BORIS JOHNSON: Wokery is damaging the West – and nothing illustrates that better than this absurd ‘royal racism’ hoo-ha whipped up by a tripe farmer

Wow! Shock horror. It’s the latest scandal to rock the royal family, turning it into a giant whodunnit.

Someone is said to have said something about the possible physical appearance of an as yet unborn prince – Harry and Meghan’s son – and the world is thrown into an ecstasy of manufactured outrage.

In the Netherlands, the name of the alleged perpetrator has appeared, accidentally and deliberately, in the Dutch version of a new book on royal mischief, and a terrible battle has been waged in the British media.

Do we have the right to call the royal family ‘racist’? Can the British public be told the truth about the blue-blooded gaffer who blurted something about royal baby Archie?

Can you handle it?

You know what: I don’t know and I don’t care. I don’t care about a monkey who said something about the possible genetic inheritance of the impending arrival of a child who is in yet another place in line for the throne, because I don’t think such speculation is even remotely racist .

Asking such questions in anticipation of a happy event is human nature.

It is one of life’s great joys and mysteries that in the womb we have no real idea what our children will look like.

We can see their shapes on the amazing prenatal scans, and we can hear the heartbeats; but despite all the heartbreaking details of the images, the fingers, the toes, the thumb in the mouth, they are still tantalizing. We cannot be sure which traits the babies will visibly inherit.

Every family is the same. As soon as a baby is born, and with each week that passes, we pore over him and pathetically look for signs of family continuity. Whose nose is this? Whose eyes? And what is the origin of this mysterious eggplant-colored hair?

My own children have all kinds of exciting antecedents – Indians, Russians, Turks, you name it.

I am so honest myself that I have been accused (wrongly, I assure you) of suffering from a kind of albinism. So of course in the past I have thought – probably out loud – about which set of chromosomes would prevail this time, or which gene would be dominant and which would be recessive.

I expect this was exactly the kind of ruminative debate the so-called royal racist was having. It was a completely innocent and completely normal antepartum meditation, which takes place when a family is expecting a baby.

So why the epic hoo-ha? Well, I suppose that’s partly because it’s meant as a hoo-ha, not least by the tripe-mongering author.

We all love a hoo-ha, especially when it comes to the royals.

Piers Morgan can fulminate beautifully in his TV program. Government ministers have the relief of talking seriously about something other than politics through the media.

In a way it’s all innocent; and yet I cannot help thinking that there is still something pernicious in the whole affair.

What is this accusation of ‘racism’? It is yet another example of the process by which ordinary human patterns of thought and behavior are challenged, demonized and expunged from the canon of acceptability. The royal family is said to be considering legal action to prevent the name(s) of the alleged perpetrator(s) from being published.

Such legal action seems to me to be a mistake. The attempt to suppress identity seems to indicate that some transgression has indeed occurred, that someone actually said something that requires public censure – which, as far as I can see, is total nonsense.

There has been no transgression, no sin against 21st century values, no unsavory comment made.

To say otherwise – and to give in to the hysteria – is to once again surrender to wokeness and cancel culture.

People have had enough of all this. Ask yourself why the viewing public has abandoned BBC Newsnight, the once great haunt of Jeremy Paxman – whose own political views, however searing his questions, were always forgotten.

Is it perhaps because the public has had enough of the endless de haut en bas* speeches to the majority of the British population who voted for Brexit?

Or ask yourself why so much of the United States electorate seems so determined – based on current evidence – to elect Donald Trump for another term as president.

It seems astonishing that they are willing to overlook his behavior after the last election, and his refusal to respect the outcome of the democratic process; and yet, for now, he appears to have a big lead in the race for the Republican nomination.

The fact is that many millions of Americans regard him as a man who speaks his mind, even if it is quite unpasteurized, and they increasingly resent the way the left-liberal establishment is trying to abolish him, use to crush him. and to keep him from seeking their vote again.

To this extent, wokeness proves self-defeating. But it’s worse than that.

I have spent a lot of time over the past eighteen months campaigning for the Ukrainian people in their heroic struggle for freedom.

I am shocked when I go around the world to find so many places where they are willing to give Putin the benefit of the doubt; and one reason for that, I think, is that he can satirize some aspects of our values.

He can point to us in the liberal Western democracies and say: look at all these people, they don’t even have the guts to say what a woman is.

Or he can say: look at Western liberal education, they let pre-pubescent children decide what gender they want to be.

In other words, he presents himself as the custodian of common sense against the wacky Western workers – and, fair or not, it works.

In Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia, they read about the debates in Britain and the cancellations of people like JK Rowling and think: hmm. . . Maybe Putin has a point.

That’s a disaster. We stand up for Ukraine because we believe in freedom, democracy and human rights, and because we want to help Ukrainians defeat an evil and criminal invasion. We can win the argument on all these points.

But when it comes to wokeness, cancel culture, and banning people from saying things that have always seemed completely natural – then we lose our audience. Wokery costs the West, and we must wake up to that.

Honestly, I don’t know or care which royal said anything about Archie, but I’m sure he or she wasn’t even remotely racist. It’s time to stop all this nonsense and redraw the distinction between the ugliness of racism and prejudice – against which we have abundant laws – and ordinary, innocent patterns of human thought and behavior.

It’s time to wake the woke from their trance and cancel cancel culture; because it begins to make a mockery of the liberal values ​​that really matter.

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*De haut en bas: In a condescending or imperious manner