My 16-year-old son, lucky enough to sport a US passport alongside his British one, returned from his Washington DC high school on Friday night in a state of some concern.
During his class on Women’s History, talk had naturally turned to the death of the Queen. What, the teacher asked, did the assembled 11th-graders know of Elizabeth II, and how did they view her?
What reportedly followed was a slew of hostility rooted in the misinformation now commonplace on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and the other social media platforms where so many young Americans now access their “news”.
One student said he loathed the Queen due to the fact that “she wrote Harry out of her will because he married a black woman”.
Another insisted the Queen was a racist who had promoted discrimination against non-whites in Britain’s colonies.
“I didn’t know how to stop them”, said my lad after concluding that he was facing the same kind of tidal wave that faced Henry Fonda’s character in Twelve Angry Men.
Misinformation about the UK has been prolific even on more-usually reliable American media platforms over the last seven days.
When the week began, The New York Times was publishing an opinion piece comparing Prime Minister Liz Truss to Enoch Powell.
By the time Friday night rolled around, many of the newspaper’s readers will have been listening to National Public Radio, whose reporter in London – based on a handful of interactions with some patrons of a London pub – intoned that the King’s first speech “kind of fell flat… the words seemed kind of stilted… and didn’t really speak to the concern of ordinary Britons”.
On MSNBC, further damage was being done to Brand Britain. A studio guest, former Obama administration official Richard Stengel, chided Americans even for being interested in the events taking place on the other side of the Atlantic.
He called it a “weakness in the American character”, and claimed his fellow countrymen still “yearn for that era of hereditary privilege, which is the very thing that we escaped from”.
That, of course, overlooks the effect the Queen’s four separate state visits to the US had on the American people over the course of her reign.
She met 13 of the 14 sitting US presidents during her time on the throne, and in a country currently facing unprecedented modern instability in its own governing institutions, for many here, she remained a much-beloved symbol of continuity.
As King Charles assumes the throne, he will face complex challenges in establishing a similar standing with Americans.
He is, of course, no stranger to the corridors of power in Washington. As Prince of Wales, he visited the US capital more than 20 times.
He has met every single sitting US president since Jimmy Carter and was warning American lawmakers – among others – about the perils of climate change decades before most of them were willing to listen.
At COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021, he held face-to-face talks with Joe Biden, the first president to prioritise the issue across all branches of government.
The King’s tasks now include forging a relationship with a US in which misinformation about the monarchy is rife.
“King Charles Is Too Political for the USA” thundered the Washington-based news organisation Politico in a magazine piece over the weekend.
Readers were told that the Queen had “bewitched the American public” through “her apolitical marshmallow diplomacy”, whereas her “septuagenarian activist” son “may stand to forfeit not only approval among the American public – already dented by memories of his 90s affair – but also American interest in the monarchy as a whole”.
That reference to the breakdown of the King’s marriage to Princess Diana reflects the complexity of circumstances in which millions of Americans also view the Duke and Duchess of Sussex as maligned by the Royal Family.
The recent launch of Meghan’s podcast on Spotify has already gathered considerable interest, and recent media interviews included the claim that “just by existing” she and Harry “were upsetting the dynamic of the hierarchy”.
Fence mending between Buckingham Palace and Montecito, California is likely to be a complicated endeavour.
For now, America’s eyes remain firmly on Britain with the country’s television networks preparing wall-to-wall coverage of the Queen’s funeral, and then immediately making plans for their star anchors to return to the UK for the Coronation, whenever it occurs.
Some may consider that a “weakness” in the American character, but the news organisations here know a money maker when they see one.
All rights reserved. © 2021 Associated Newspapers Limited.