The prejudice that dare not speak its name...

The biggest battle in the lives of the upper classes is perhaps not the one between them and the ‘normal’ folk outside their privileged circle, it is more of an internal struggle, between the high brows and the low brows.

There is in fact a third, slightly harder to pin down group: those who are only really interested in horses and other ‘country pursuits’, though this tribe overlaps a bit with the other two.

When our late Queen was on the throne, there was a time of relative stability, because the horses held sway. Charles III however, considers himself a fully signed-up member of the cultural elite, and although his wife used to be into horses a fair bit, she now has a book club.

William and Kate are pretty middle-brow, but now more than ever aligned with Charles and Camilla against the deleterious effects of the dummies, a group Harry in which has always been a stand-out and occasionally problematic member, as indeed was his mother.

I think Harry might have initially over-sold Meghan as a way to re-establish equilibrium. There were bridges she could build, but not the ones everyone else was focused on. Yet in spite of her self-appointed role as a voice, it’s clear she has little of great interest to say. An alternative kind of culture war will quickly have erupted within the royal residences as the end of the longest reign ever approached.

Idiots might be counted amongst the most innocent victims of unconscious bias. They can’t exactly help it, can they?

But from the point of view of the high brows they are natural troublemakers, and it certainly doesn’t help that some of royalty’s biggest fans ‘outside in the real world’ are fairly permanently lodged in their camp, which makes this the prejudice that dare not speak its name, more taboo than racism in certain contexts.