DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Queen’s kindness is met with treachery

When Harry and Meghan decided they were unsuited to royal life, the Queen fashioned an elegant escape hatch to help them find happiness.

Yesterday, barely three months since she died, the narcissistic pair repaid that love and compassion with a treacherous attack.

In a vicious finale to their documentary, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex cruelly portrayed her as a voiceless, passive puppet of scheming family members and courtiers.

As the Queen said after their malicious Oprah Winfrey interview: ‘Recollections may vary.’ Whereas Elizabeth II was a woman of great wisdom, Harry and Meghan interpret events through the paranoid prism of embittered victimhood.

When Harry and Meghan decided they were unsuited to royal life, the Queen fashioned an elegant escape hatch to help them find happiness

The only saving grace is that Her Majesty was spared seeing this tawdry exercise in self-promotion. The sensible majority in this country will find their vengeful onslaught distasteful and disrespectful.

Like adolescents lacking any scintilla of self-awareness, the pampered duo whinge about being pilloried – then ruthlessly pillory King Charles, Prince William and the rest of the royals.

They drone on about wanting to be left in peace while hypocritically selling their attention-seeking souls to Netflix.

At the end of the series, Harry says with self-regarding benevolence that he and his wife are ‘moving on’.

If it’s true that we’re to be spared any more of their vituperative rantings, Britain will breathe a huge sigh of relief.

A time for healing

Pictured: General Secretary of the Royal College of Nurses Pat Cullen speaks to the media during a nurses picket outside St Thomas’ Hospital in London on December 15, 2022

Who did nursing union chief Pat Cullen think she was fooling when she said her members would never turn their backs on their patients? Yesterday’s historic strike proved that was a cynical lie.

The NHS was forced to cancel as many as 70,000 appointments as nurses walked off hospital wards and on to the picket line.

More disruption is planned if ministers don’t cave in to the Royal College of Nursing’s unrealistic 19 per cent pay claim.

Of course, the Government should not be bullied. But perhaps asking the independent pay body, which has recommended a rise of around 5 per cent, to revisit its advice is a neat solution to this damaging dispute.

Yes, nurses feel underpaid. But both sides must remain constructive. Another strike would be wrong and counter-productive.

Going off the rails

Mick Lynch has made no secret of his desire to be seen as a modern-day Arthur Scargill – a Marxist rabble-rouser determined to overthrow an elected Tory government.

But support for the RMT hardliner’s chaotic Christmas train strikes appears to be hitting the buffers. A third of his union members, losing thousands of pounds each due to the walkouts, want to accept Network Rail’s decent 9 per cent pay offer.

The railways are in a financial mess, with fare revenue well below pre-Covid levels as commuters work from home or, sick of disruption, switch to cars and buses.

Unless he sees sense and calls off the strikes, he will emulate miners’ leader Scargill – by destroying his industry and his own workers’ jobs.

÷ Smart motorway technology is failing to detect countless broken-down vehicles, leaving drivers stranded as traffic thunders around them. Yet Transport Secretary Mark Harper mystifyingly insists these roads are safe. Perhaps he should try conking out in a live lane in the dark. How safe would he feel then?

÷ The Mail applauds the Home Office for wasting no time in deporting Boris Becker after the ex-Wimbledon champion finished his jail sentence for fraud. But now it’s got rid of an old tennis player, might the hapless ministry also start booting out the thousands of killers, rapists and other dangerous foreign criminals prowling our streets?