Boston Tea Party runs out of tea

Prince Harry’s book and a teabag shortage ruin Anglo-American links

Dominic Green

After nearly two decades in America, I am running out of teabags.

I am also running out of patience with Meghan and Harry’s incessant propaganda against Britain and its people. Americans, meanwhile, are running out of patience with one another.

Their country will in 2026 celebrate 250 years of independence from the British. Like me, it is disintegrating with age.

The teabags are Donald Trump’s fault, but I’ll get to that later. The Meghan-and-Harry part is my fault. My accent and prior convictions as a historian give the misleading impression that I, like all Brits, am deeply versed in the history of the Royal Family and may even know some of them personally.

Whenever America’s royals do something for the cameras – and it’s not clear if they do much else – I am asked to opinionate.

No one forces me to respond, but respond I do. Apart from my Harry-like impulse to disburden myself of my inner monologue whenever I spot a live mic, it has become a way of life, which in America means a living.

If someone had told me 20 years ago that I would be paid to review Harry’s memoir Spare, and even to read it first, I might have reconsidered moving to America. I might have considered moving to Antarctica.

This kind of individual transformation has always been the point of America. For all its troubles, it remains a place where anyone with chutzpah, pizzazz and moxie can become a royal correspondent. In the Land of Opportunism, even an unemployed prince can win a $100-million Netflix contract and land a mansion with 16 bathrooms: truly a royal flush. The price of Harry’s American transformation will, however, be paid by Britain.

The Anglo-American relationship is

‘special’ in a master-canine way, but it is also real. It exists at every level, from family ties to commercial and political ties, and ever-closer military and intelligence co-ordination.

It has been like this since the late-19th century. As no one who is around now was alive then, that’s like saying it’s been like this for ever. But it hasn’t, and it has changed in my time here.

There have been worse times. The sacking of the White House in 1812, for instance, or sending Burgess, Philby and Maclean to the Washington embassy, or allowing James Corden to rove the streets of LA in daylight. Usually, though, Britain sends talent. In settling in LA, Prince Harry flaps his flipflops in the footsteps of Hitchcock, Chaplin, Cary Grant, David Niven and Aldous Huxley. And Rod Stewart, who pined so furiously for the misty glens of Muswell Hill that he formed his own amateur soccer team, the LA Exiles.

Americans have a unique form of nostalgia. They cultivate an image of the past to remind themselves not how much better it was then, but how much better they are now. They believe George III was a tyrant, when in fact he was conscientious about his constitutional limits.

This origin myth explains why the villains in Hollywood have British accents. It is overlaid by a more recent mythology taking in the Blitz spirit, Winston Churchill and the Beatles.

All this gives the misleading impression that ‘England’, which is what Americans call the United Kingdom, is inhabited mostly by blue-blooded officer types in bespoke suits, with a small minority of chirpy songsmiths in the Liverpool area.

Further information about this strange people comes as a shock, especially if it’s President Obama saying the British imprisoned and tortured his Kenyan grandfather during the Mau Mau uprising.

Obama’s score-settling was a prelude to Meghan and Harry’s. In America, no accusation is more ‘toxic’, as everyone now says, than that of racism, and the worst kind of racism is, as we all now know, ‘institutional’.

Obama’s presidency brought wokeness out of the academy and into the institutions, the media included.

Little Britain was always a football in the culture war. Meghan and Harry’s denunciations elide the old image of bad Britain (a royal dictatorship) with the new, post-colonial image of the former evil empire. This appeals deeply to blue-state America, which, having lost its religion, has no other way to redeem the hereditary sins of slavery and massacre than by blaming the Brits.

Over in red-state America, it’s still the Blitz, Churchill and the Beatles. Meanwhile, blue-state media and schools teach that Britain is the root of all America’s evils. The revenge fantasies of the turncoat prince give this fiction a royal imprimatur.

Which brings me to the teabags. The Trump administration imposed tariffs on foreign imports, to support American workers. There is no sign of America’s domestic tea industry, but supplies of PG Tips at my local Stop ’n’ Shop are becoming erratic, their price eye-watering.

The teabag drought symbolises America’s drift from Britain. Americans are no longer steeped in the Old World’s ways. America began with a handful of angry Bostonians tipping imported tea into the harbour 250 years ago, in 1773.

The America we knew is ending with a handful of thirsty Bostonians – including me – waiting for their ship to come in.