By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., November 12, 2021 – At the onset let me state that I am a huge fan of the British Royal Family and Prince Harry is my favourite member of the family.
Having acknowledged this fact, I am absolutely sick and tired of British journalist Piers Morgan’s unrelenting and distasteful criticism of Prince Harry and Meagan Markle and frankly do not understand why the ITV London Television Network provides him with a platform to continue his repugnant assaults on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
His latest assault on the royal couple was documented in a London Daily Express article written by Chris Byfield and published on Friday, November 12, 2021, under the headline: “PIERS MORGAN’S FURIOUS RANT ABOUT HARRY’S REMEMBRANCE DAY PICTURES:’DISTASTEFUL PR STUNT’ ”
Reporting on remarks made by Mogan on the “Good Morning Britain” television show, Chris Byfied noted:
“On Sunday, members of the Royal Family will pay their respects to Britain’s fallen soldiers at the Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph. The Queen’s attendance at the annual event had been uncertain in the wake of her recent health scare. However, Buckingham Palace confirmed in an official statement yesterday that the Queen will attend this year’s wreath-laying service.
The Palace noted that Her Majesty will, as has been the case for years, view the service from the balcony of the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office Building.
Last year’s Remembrance Day ceremony did include some notable absentees, such as the Queen’s son Prince Andrew, who missed the service after stepping back from royal duties.
Harry and Meghan were also absent in the wake of the couple having quit the Royal Family earlier that year.
The Duke of Sussex, who served in the army for ten years and undertook two Afghanistan tours, marked Remembrance Sunday in California.
Harry and Meghan visited the Los Angeles National Cemetery, where they left flowers on the grave site of two commonwealth soldiers and placed a wreath at an obelisk.
Mr Morgan unleashed a furious tirade at the couple on ITV’s Good Morning Britain after they published pictures of their time at the cemetery on social media and made them available to media outlets.”
Chris Byfield then quoted Mr Morgan saying: “What they then do, they go to a military cemetery in Los Angeles and they then invite a photographer, one of their preferred photographers…
“Now, Prince Harry is perfectly entitled as a former member of the armed forces to pay tribute to the armed forces, of course he is.
“However this smacked to me as a really distasteful PR stunt designed to say to the Palace ‘you might try and stop me having my right to have a livery servant lay my wreath, but you’re not going to stop me grabbing the PR headlines’.
“And I’m sorry, that sticks in my gullet, this guy is doing no duty.”
Chris Byfield noted that Mr Morgan’s “co-anchor at the time Susanna Reid was quick to jump to the defence of the Sussexes.”
She said: “My side of the story […] is that the armed forces mean a lot to Prince Harry. He served ten years, he was blocked allegedly from having a wreath in his name placed at the Cenotaph. Why wouldn’t he want to show his respect when he has such a strong connection to the military?”
To which Mr Morgan sharply responded: “Why do it with a photographer in an American cemetery?”
Ms Reid said: “Because if you don’t do it with a photographer people don’t know that you’ve done it.”
Mr Morgan scoffed and added: “Oh please, do me a favour, you could have just issued a statement saying you’re thinking of people.”
This guy is ridiculous. Clearly, his reasoning faculty is demented.
After reading Chris Byfield’s article, I decided to do some research on Wikipedia for some background information on Piers Morgan. He has had a very impressive career in journalism, during which, however, he distinguished himself as a journalistic muckraker.
Here is an excerpt from the lengthy documentation in Wikipedia on his career: “In January 1994, he became editor of the News of the World after being appointed to the job by Rupert Murdoch. Initially an acting editor, he was confirmed in the summer, becoming at 29 the youngest national newspaper editor in more than half a century. In this period, the newspaper led with a series of scoops for which Morgan credited a highly efficient newsdesk and publicist Max Clifford.
Morgan left this post in 1995 shortly after publishing photographs of Catherine Victoria Lockwood, then wife of Charles, Earl Spencer, leaving an addictive disorders clinic in Surrey. This action ran against the editors’ code of conduct, a misdemeanour for which the Press Complaints Commission upheld a complaint against Morgan. Murdoch was reported as having said that “the boy went too far” and publicly distanced himself from the story. Fearful of a privacy law action if he had not criticised one of his employees, Murdoch is said to have apologised to Morgan in private.
The incident was reported to have contributed to Morgan’s decision to leave for the Daily Mirror editorship. Morgan’s autobiography The Insider states that he left the News of the World for the Mirror of his own choice. It asserts he was an admirer of former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for most of her period of office, making the appointment surprising as the Mirror is a Labour-supporting title.”
Obviously, Mr. Morgan is so steeped in practicing muckraking journalism that it is extremely difficult for him to reverse his career course, so in my view, the onus is on ITV Television to put an end to his continued embarrassment of such a respected news medium.
As veteran journalist who spent a year in London in the late 1960s participating in a journalism training program at the London Evening Standard, I interacted with a number of excellent journalists; hence, one of the reasons why I decided to write this article.
Although I now live in Washington, D.C., I am a native of The Bahamas, a former colony of Great Britain, and this fact has resulted in many of my contemporary colleagues with whom I grew up in The Bahamas criticizing my avowed admiration for the British Royal Family, considering that Great Britain played a very active role in the slave trade and in later years during its colonial governance of The Bahamas it openly condoned overt racism in all its colonies.
It is impossible for a Black Bahamian to defend Britain’s wrongdoings post-emancipation, but it is nonetheless true that the British established and left in place some formidable institutions – Judicial, Political and Educational – that provided a solid foundation for The Bahamas to successfully navigate the rough seas of world diplomacy and remain committed to the tenets of democracy after obtaining independence from Great Britain on July 10, 1973.
With our independence coming at a time when the Soviet Union was emboldened by its success in establishing the political ideology of communism as a way of life in Cuba, if democracy had not been so firmly entrenched in The Bahamas, there is no telling how successful the several misguided groups of Bahamians who made serious attempts to introduce communism disguised as socialism to our political system would have been.
I can personally attest to the high quality of education the British established in our public schools. There was only one Government High School during my youthful years, for which you had to sit an entrance exam, and if you were lucky enough to pass, your parents had to be able to afford the 10 pounds, 10 shillings annual tuition.
The British, however, established Junior and Senior Schools in the Eastern, Western and Southern Districts of New Providence, and made it mandatory to stay in school until the age of 14, when you were required to sit an examination to obtain what was known at the time as your “Leaving Certificate.” If you decided to remain in school, two years later you sat an examination to obtain your Cambridge Junior Certificate and subsequently your Cambridge Senior Certificate.
During my time at Southern Senior, each of the senior schools had headmasters whose names are legendary in education in The Bahamas. At Southern Senior, Carlton Francis was the headmaster; at Eastern Senior, the headmaster was Donald Davis; and at Western Senior, the headmaster was T.G. Glover. There is a school of thought that the level of education a student received at one of these institutions was vastly superior to what the proliferation of public high schools in the country are providing their graduates.
To be sure, there is documented evidence that some students who received their Leaving Certificate from one of these institutions and decided to enter the workforce as civil servants eventually held leading positions in some government departments after continuing their education through correspondence courses offered by British continuing education institutes like the City and Guilds of London Institute.
I received my primary school education at Stanyard Creek All-Age School in Andros, and after my family moved from Andros to Nassau, I was enrolled in Southern Junior and subsequently moved up to Southern Senior, where I received both my Leaving Certificate in 1956 and Junior Certificate in 1958, before joining the workforce first at Bahamas Telecommunications Corporation and subsequently at the Parcel Post in Oakes Field prior to joining the staff of the Nassau Daily Tribune in May of 1960.
There is no question that my decision to pursue journalism as a career was due to the fact that I had excellent English teachers at both Southern Junior and Southern Senior in Naomi Blatch and Susan Wallace.
Following the Progressive Liberal Party’s history-making political victory on January 10, 1967, which ushered in the first majority-rule Black government, the public education system in The Bahamas was revamped and restructured using the high school model established in the United States, in which students graduated after completing Grade 12.
Under the British system, when I passed my leaving certificate in 1956, I was in Grade 5 and when I passed by Junior Certificate at the age 16 in 1958 I was in Grade 7, which by today’s educational standards undoubtedly was far more advanced than the educational standard of today’s high school graduates.
Given this fact, it may not be a bad idea for the current government to reintroduce some of the programs that undergirded the educational system when The Bahamas was a British colony. For example, in Grade 7 male students were required to receive technical job-related training for the entire day once a week at what was routinely referred to as “The Workshop” in Oakes Field, where E.P. Roberts was the teacher.
I started this article by declaring that I am a huge fan of the British Royal Family; hence, the educational system the British left in place in The Bahamas is one of the reasons why I am still very comfortable declaring “God Save The Queen” at appropriate occasions.
So here’s my final admonition to Piers Morgan: Prince Harry and Meagan Markle represent the “new version” of British Royalty, so cease and desist from practicing gutter journalism with what I suspect is your racism-tinged criticism of my favourite members of the Royal Family.
