No, there's more. Like them, as the birth of my first child approached, there was speculation about what colour the babe would be.

Just to recap, the apparently most explosive moment of Oprah Winfrey's "bombshell" interview was Meghan's revelation that while she was pregnant with Archie a member of the royal family asked her what hue her baby's complexion would be.

Oprah was aghast at Meghan's revelation, insofar as a person of colour can be truly aghast. Meghan's telling of the story has stoked widespread horror among the excitable, with much accusing of the royal family of "racism".

But wait! Meghan didn't reveal who the royal racist was (although we since find it wasn't Prince Philip, everyone's first, prime suspect). Nor did Meghan, other than arranging her lovely features into the pained expression of victimhood (her default facial expression), give any detail of the manner or the circumstances of the inquiry.

"Whatever the truth," a Meghan-sceptical and scathing Joanna Williams probed for Spiked Online, "it is entirely possible this conversation [about Meghan's baby's colour] was not motivated by racism".

"Parents-to-be get used to being asked all kinds of silly questions. As mum to two young boys, I was frequently asked during pregnancy number three if I wanted a girl. I assumed curiosity, not sexism, lay behind the query," Williams said.

Yes, what if these sorts of inquiries of parents-to-be are sometimes only companionable and kindly?

I have some experience in this field.

Once upon a time your columnist, in complexion a luminously paper-pale, gingery, Anglo-Saxon thing like Harry, was married to a good woman of another race, her becomingly dark complexion quite like Meghan's.

When my then wife was pregnant with our first child inquiries about the impending babe's likely hue were quite common. Yet all of those inquiries were amiable and kindly and fun-filled. There was nothing racist about them.

There was at the time a deeply banal but highly popular song Melting Pot (recorded by Blue Mink) that contained the following silly hippy sentiments. We would warble along with the ditty together, at parties in aromatically smoke-filled rooms.

What we need is a great big melting pot

Big enough to take the world and all it's got

And keep it stirring for a hundred years or more

And turn out coffee-coloured people by the score.

It wasn't that, warbling, we thought those sentiments were at all profound, that they were some kind of creed. No, it was just racist thoughts never crossed our liberal minds and the song's naive, inclusive cheerfulness was rather fun. One doubts, at the height of its popularity (it was released in 1970) the Queen and Prince Philip found themselves spontaneously singing the song as they jived along the corridors of their various palaces. But then one cannot be entirely sure, either, that they have ever been consciously, demonically racist.

As usual the fine American newspaper The Onion has, with a powerful news story, offered a refreshing interpretation of this whole imbroglio:

"Revealing concerns within the British monarchy that a child in line to the throne might inherit a noticeably healthy glow, Meghan Markle said in a prime-time TV special Sunday that some of the royals had worried her son would be born without the family's sickly skin. 'When I was pregnant with Archie, Harry was approached by a member of his family who reminded Harry that it had taken centuries of intermarriage between the British peerage and other reigning families of northern Europe to produce a bloodline with remarkably pigment-free dermal layers,' Meghan Markle told Oprah Winfrey."

And yet, although I am feigning joviality about all these things, pretending to laugh along with The Onion, in reality my heart is heavy.

Shattered dreams! Dashed expectations! Some of us, passionate republicans, had dared to hope Harry and Meghan, telling all, would reveal to those hitherto unable to see it, the sheer awfulness of The Firm.

We dared to dream that Australians, Meghan-enlightened now, would clamour for a referendum to give us a republican wriggle-on.

Alas, what may have dashed this dream to smithereens is the increasing realisation, accelerated by the grotesque event of Harry and Meghan's interview with Oprah Winfrey, that they, Harry and Meghan, are especially awful in their own right. We cannot rely upon the assistance of this pair of privileged narcissists to help make our republican dreams come true.

The whole occasion of their interview with Oprah was soul-bruising in the extreme. Whenever I try to describe it my keyboard begins to weep - so here (endorsed by me) is a little of what Brendan O'Neill fumed in Spiked Online.

"It was ... a grotesque spectacle - emotionally manipulative, self-obsessed, and a clear attempt by Harry and Meghan to position themselves as the king and queen of victim politics. The set-up bordered on nauseating. Here was a duke and duchess in the unimaginably luxurious surrounds of a Californian mansion talking about how difficult their lives have been.

"And in a country where 40 million people lost their jobs as a result of lockdowns, this pair who get paid millions for making naff podcasts, moaned to billionaire Oprah Winfrey about their oppression by the establishment. Meghan was wearing a $4500 dress. She'll probably never wear it again. It's perverse."

Yes it is. My thoughts exactly. Thank you, seething Brendan.

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