Where are you really from?

The Prince and the American Actress

In 1992, I was sitting in the passenger seat of Danny John Jules’ Suzuki jeep fitted with almost comically wide wheels.

There was a large logo on the side of this vehicle which said, if I remember correctly, ‘The Cat is Phat’ or something along those lines.

Danny was giving me a lift from Shepperton Studios in Middlesex to the centre of London after a long days rehearsal on the BBC television series, Red Dwarf.

Danny John Jules, Craig Charles, Chris Barrie, Robert Llewellyn

For those of you who have never heard of this fine comedy series, it features four main characters who are stuck on a mining ship (the space kind) 3 million light years from earth, heading out into the vastness of space and none of them know how to turn it around.

I played a pompous toilet droid and Danny played a creature that had evolved from a cat into a ‘felix sapien,’ a selfish biped with six nipples.

Trying to explain Red Dwarf in under a long paragraph has never been easy, it’s been on for decades, just search for Red Dwarf on YouTube and you’ll get the gist.

So anyway, there I am with Danny, in his car, and we are tootling along in quite heavy London traffic. I mention this only because there is no way Danny could have been speeding or even driving erratically due to the density of slow moving vehicles.

He’s in the middle of telling me some weird show biz fact, (Danny is a gold mine of show biz tittle tattle) when I notice blue flashing lights behind us. Danny does not miss a beat, he indicates, pulls over to the side of the road and stops without once pausing for breath in his show biz anecdote.

He leans over to the glove compartment and gets out a folder, which he holds up as a police officer walks up to the car. I feel it necessary to remind any possible American reader that this happened in London in 1992. The police officer wasn’t armed and there was not, despite everything else happening at that time and location, any suspicion that Danny or I might be armed.

Danny wound down the window and the officer, very politely asked, ‘Is this your car sir?’

Danny responded that it was his car and held out the folder he just retrieved from the glove compartment. I discovered later that it held his driving license, insurance certificate, proof of ownership documentation, MOT (vehicle safety) certificate, and a glossy coloured picture of Danny in his Red Dwarf ‘Cat’ costume.

It turned out that the officer was a Red Dwarf fan and was clearly a bit taken aback. He was very polite to Danny and soon we were on our way.

I was flabbergasted, even back then I would have been driving for 15+ years and I had never, once been stopped by the police. I asked Danny what it was about and he merely said ‘I was driving while black.’

Since that day I have been stopped by the police once. I was driving a car load of Italian and French architecture students around the City of London (that’s the financial district) very late at night.

My best friend is an architect and he was showing them various architectural landmarks. As the designated driver it is possible I was meandering across the empty streets a bit as we cruised along at 7 miles an hour.

A police van stopped us and an officer asked me if I’d been drinking. I said no, but he made me blow into a breathalyzer bag. The result was negative, he shouted to his police associates that I wasn’t drunk, I was just a terrible driver. He told me to obey the highway code and off they went.

And that’s it. But Danny has been stopped so many times that it was actually a time saver for him to have all his vehicle documentation in handy folder in the car.

I know of many other stories of black men who have had the same experience, especially if they are wealthy guys maybe from the music industry and they have flashy cars. It’s only when, as a white bloke, you see this in the raw that it really hits home.

The moral of this little tale is, if you’re white Anglo Saxon in the UK, you cannot know what it is really like to be born here, educated here, have lived here all your life and still be treated like an interloper because of the colour of your skin.

And so to the ‘Where are you from’ moment we have just witnessed in this battered land.

Quick explanation for those outside the UK. Okay, Buckingham Palace, the King’s London house, (used to be the Queen’s).

Last week a reception was held at the palace for people who work supporting victims of domestic abuse in the UK.

A really important gathering about a very serious subject. It would normally not have been in the press because it wasn’t a room full of vacuous ‘celebrities, but what took place shines a light on some very ugly aspects of posh folks in general and it has to be said, the British royal family.

One of the guests was a woman called Ngozi Fulani, she founded Sistah Space, the only domestic abuse charity in the UK that caters specifically for women and girls of African and Asian heritage.

She was born in the UK, she has lived here her whole life.

And then we meet Lady Hussey who has been a ‘Lady in Waiting’ in the Royal Household for many decades. She is 83 years old, posh as it gets and is also Prince William’s Godmother. Yes, hashtag awks.

This is how the conversation has been reported when Lady Hussey pushed Ngozi Fulani’s hair to one side to see her name badge. Yes, she did that, that simple action tells you all you need to know about centuries of privilege and arrogance.

Lady Hussey: “Where are you from?”

Ms Fulani: “Sistah Space.”

Lady Hussey: “No where do you come from?

Ms Fulani: “We’re based in Hackney.” (An area in east London)

Lady Hussey: “No, what part of Africa are YOU from?”

Ms Fulani: “I don’t know, they didn’t leave any records.”

Lady Hussey: “Well, you must know where you’re from, I spent time in France. Where are you from?”

Ms Fulani: “Here, UK”

Lady Hussey: “No, but what Nationality are you?”

Lady Hussey: “I am born here and am British.”

Lady Hussey: “No, but where do you really come from, where do your people come from?”

Ms Fulani: “‘My people’, lady, what is this?”

Lady Hussey: “Oh I can see I am going to have a challenge getting you to say where you’re from. When did you first come here?”

Ms Fulani: “Lady! I am a British national, my parents came here in the 50’s when…”

Lady Hussey: “Oh, I knew we’d get there in the end, you’re Caribbean!”

Ms Fulani: “No lady, I am of African heritage, Caribbean descent and British nationality.”

It’s such a shameful example.

This old racist, born into ridiculous privilege, with such inbred self confident snobbish superiority kept labouring her hate filled point without hesitation.

I admit I am very easily triggered by such snot nosed bullying, I’ve grown up with the misfortune of occasionally coming into contact with people like this lording it over us peasant scum, but the added layer of ignorant, hate filled racism makes it all the more painful.

And wait for it, there are people who are defending this behaviour.

Obviously there are the predictable reactionary racists on Twitter who spouted their bile with wild abandon but I’m talking about a long standing conservative magazine called ‘The Spectator.’

Instead of reading that interaction and accepting it’s just raw racist hatred, apparently Lady Hussey was only guilty of ‘misspeaking’ and of not using acceptable ‘woke’ language. And how can we all keep up and how hard it is for a super privileged old lady, and I quote from the magazine, “to be au fait with the ever-changing rules of correct-speak.”

I suppose by correct speak, he means not asking, again and again, where someone who isn’t white, rich, privileged, cosseted, comes from.

Why do you need to ask? The racism barks out of that interaction, it’s not a question, it’s an accusation, it’s not subtle, it’s hatred expressed with a knowing smile.

Apparently we shouldn’t criticise her because she’s 83 years old. And the Royal family are cruel to have got rid of her. (She ‘resigned’ when the story came out.)

The crawlers writing this tatty defence would excuse any behaviour if it has a cut glass accent, such is the damage 900 years of a ridiculous class system has done to our culture. So that means as I get older I can just wander around saying profoundly offensive things in a posh accent at anyone I meet, and it doesn’t count because I’m old.

There is plenty of racism in British society, from the very poorest and downtrodden to the very richest and most powerful.

We are all very capable of racism, it’s a universal weakness in humans, and it is also something we all need to consider carefully and be aware of in ourselves.

I grew up in a world where really shocking racist language was commonplace, I was aware of really horrible attitudes and yet strangely I haven’t found it hard to NOT use those terms and attitudes as an adult.

I’m definitely not perfect, I’ve made slip ups in language and attitude, we all have, but I know I have never been as determined to make someone feel as browbeaten and attacked as Ngozi Fulani must have done.

And this Lady Hussey was one of the late Queen’s ‘Ladies in Waiting’ for many decades, part of the Royal Establishment, Godmother to the future king.

So then of course, we come to a Prince who married . . . . a woman who isn’t really ‘one of us.’ Ahem. Clears throat and nods knowingly while wringing hands together behind my back and rocking up and down in my Lobb’s brogues.

I want to state right now that I spend my life trying to filter out any information about the Kardashians and the British royal family, but both of them have an insidious habit of leaking through my mental barriers.

I know the younger of Princess Diana’s sons married an American actress and they have done a bit of self pitying whining which is difficult to admire when you are literally at the top of any social pyramid of privilege you care to describe.

But, the American actress has some African heritage and this has been a bombshell for the super inbred European Royals who have basically been marrying cousins for the last 500 years.

Here’s a lovely example. Just before World War 1 and the Russian revolution, 3 cousins ruled Europe and Russia.

Tsar Nicholas 2nd of Russia, King George the 5th of Great Britain and Kaiser Wilhelm the 2nd of Germany were all very closely related. Okay, they were cousins.

That’s how Royal families operate, you don’t start marrying from outside the tribe for goodness sake.

So we are now seeing torrents of barely veiled race based vitriol about the actress, and the fact she’s ‘turned’ one of our princes into the sort of man who can express his feelings!

Yuk! That’s disgusting!

But at the end of the day, no matter how old her ladyship was, no matter what pathetic excuses members of the conservative press try to fabricate, a woman with typical old school British colonial views was an intimate member of the royal household, and that, apparently, was okay with all of them, except maybe one.

I flatly refuse to accept that this shot nosed behaviour was the first time anyone knew she hated black people, of course they all knew and it might have been awkward but you know, she’s old.

So yes, today a possibly hugely self indulgent TV series made by an incredibly privileged couple will be released on Netflix. I will do my best not to watch it, but no doubt I will fail again.