Bad hair, fair hearing

BC PIRES

EVEN IN a crisis involving psychological pain dread enough to tip the sufferer towards suicide, such as the misery described by Meghan and Harry in their interview with Oprah, you’ve still got to feel an abiding gratitude to anything that gets rid of Piers Morgan.

Now, despite being glad to see him go every time, I’m usually also delighted to see Piers Morgan arrive on any scene, from The Celebrity Apprentice through Good Morning Britain to Real Time (especially if Jim Jeffries is on set). Subject to his admittedly severe personal limitations, Piers Morgan can be very good at his job – sometimes even the best – and he is no fool. You can very easily almost like him and I very often do (almost like him).

And even if you file him permanently under “Arse----,” you’ve got to grudgingly admit Piers Morgan has a mind that goes from zero to 60 mph in two seconds.

But, ultimately, he parks that mental Alfa-Romeo of privilege and prejudice in the same deep, dark underground right-wing garage where you find all the racist bigots.

What really grinds your gears about Piers Morgan – to stay within the motoring analogy I’ll probably regret before the end of this road trip – is that, in even the clearest case of someone hugely powerful lording it over someone entirely powerless, people like Piers can always manage to portray the bully as the victim. At the height of emancipation, people like Piers secured compensation for slave owners and, at the depth of the Catholic Church’s paedophile scandal, they protected priests.

What shatters your gearbox, though – this motoring metaphor-thing is going to drive me to drink before I get the chance to pull up the handbrake – is that Piers Morgan, and people like him, can very often be right.

As he may perhaps be in this case.

In the whole Oprah interview, the lynchpin of our collective righteous outrage was the unbelievable, the shocking idea that a family member could even mention the prospective complexion of the first mixed race, part black, baby in the family.

But suppose the person wasn’t being shade-ist, in the sense that we employ the term in the race debate?

Is it beyond impossible to think that any privileged old white man at all, far less a leading member of the last truly royal family in the western hemisphere, could have, in his own dim head, an idea that he expressed carelessly that, had he taken care to say it clearly, might not have troubled anyone at all?

If I had a dollar for every time, in the heat of the moment, I interpreted as hostile what I could later see were neutral words, I could afford to fly to Trinidad and quarantine at the Kapok; if I had a dollar for every time I misinterpreted an e-mail or a WhatsApp and got annoyed when I should have been grinning at what I later saw was actually a great joke, I could take a suite at the Hilton.

Only Harry and Charles (likely) were likely there.

One of them said something about the unborn baby’s colour.

One of them heard yet another comment from yet another insensitive white man about his part-black son, the grandson of his dead mother whom his own little pickney will never know.

I have been so angry with my own adult son, I could not talk to him for the days it took to realise I’d misunderstood what he said.

Suppose that old interbred duffer, that clown prince, genuinely intended to ask whether his grandson would have a carrot-top, too? Even without Meghan Markle as the mother, a discussion about the complexion of Harry’s unborn child would be legitimate.

No?

Old white men assume – no, maintain – their default position of unquestioned and unquestioning entitlement and speak their mind, damn the torpedoes and the darkies, too.

But we, who have hearts as well as heads, have to remind ourselves that what we hear may not be what was said. Especially if the consequences are devastating.

People like Piers Morgan will never consider that they are not right. People like us must always remember we could be wrong.

The best and the worst families in the world will have the same arguments and the best and the worst drivers in the world will pick up the same skid. Piers Morgan, and people like him, will crash into a brick wall at full speed and with full conviction. And everybody onboard will die.

Only people alert enough to know they are in a dangerous skid can steer everybody to safety.

BC Pires is a PH driver with Formula 1 fantasies. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com. Happy Birthday to James and Trevor