MICK HUME: When even the Palace is in thrall to cancel culture, we really are in trouble 

Even those of us who know little about and care less about royal ‘ladies in the bedroom’ affairs should worry about the downfall of Susan Hussey.

It confirms that the wake-and-cancel culture is now so ubiquitous that it has penetrated the hallowed halls of Buckingham Palace. If Prince William’s godmother can be thrown under a carriage for unknowingly offending, what chance do we commoners have?

Needless to say, the timing of this dispute, in which Lady Hussey repeatedly asked the head of black charity Ngozi Fulani where she “really” came from, couldn’t have been worse.

The story broke Wednesday, hours before Netflix released the trailer for Harry and Meghan, its hit documentary that is expected to portray the two Montecito saints as martyrs to one royal cruelty after another.

Next week, to add insult to injury, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex will collect an award in New York for their ‘heroic’ stance against the ‘structural racism’ of the Royal Family.

To be sure, the timing is a mere coincidence, but conspiracy theorists will be quick to suggest that dark forces somehow conspired to generate the right controversy at the right time.

The uproar is about much more than what a former 83-year-old lady-in-waiting to our late Queen told a guest at a Buckingham Palace reception.

Indeed, the Wake Bush Twitter telegraph soon asked the question: if the royal family, which is supposed to symbolize the nation, is institutionally racist, doesn’t that show that Britain as a whole is too?

Prince William’s spokesman only fueled this fire, with an (in my opinion) hasty statement insisting that it was ‘correct’ that Lady Hussey had been forced out of her voluntary role after 62 years without fault to send a message that ‘ racism has no place in our society’.

The implication seemed to be that society, meaning the rest of us, somehow needed to be reminded that racism was wrong.

If Lady Hussey is baffled by the speed with which her life in the Palace has come to an end, with just five hours from the tweet to the end, it wouldn’t be surprising.

Because the alacrity with which the Palace collapsed is a salutary example of how the Awakened are winning the culture war.

Lady Hussey resigned (presumably after persuasion) immediately, not allowing a moment for reinstatement or resolution. Her apology for any ‘harm caused’ made no difference.

Cancel culture has reached the heart of the Establishment. The new order of speech codes and language police, where you can be instantly deleted for using the wrong word, is no longer limited to student unions or social media reaches.

To many, what unfolded last Tuesday seemed more like a diplomatic misunderstanding. Let me recap briefly: Miss Fulani, who runs the London domestic violence charity Sistah Space, was wearing an extravagant African-style outfit. Lady Hussey asked him repeatedly: ‘Where do you really come from, where do your people come from?’

An exasperated Fulani lady finally retorted: ‘No ma’am, I am of African descent, Caribbean descent and British nationality!’

In her tweets and subsequent media interviews, Ms Fulani said she felt this exchange was “traumatic” and “abuse” that left her feeling “violated”.

That’s a great position, since her day job involves dealing with victims of domestic violence.

Other observers suggested that Lady Hussey’s line of questioning was not all that surprising, given how Miss Fulani was dressed at the time. “If I knew Ngozi Fulani,” commenter Chris Rose (who happens to be black) tweeted, “I’d be intrigued to ask her about her ancestry, mostly because she’s gone the extra mile to get noticed.”

On the other hand, Rose identifies himself as a Conservative who “likes the Union and Brexit”, so in the eyes of the kind of leftists who described former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng as only “superficially black”, his points of view would probably carry little weight. . Miss Fulani herself also told a television interviewer that she was “very proud” of her African heritage. However, for Lady Hussey to ask him to speak about this source of pride was apparently “abuse”.

Lady Hussey’s abrupt questioning might well seem tactless, naive and condescending. But context and intent should matter. Her clumsy style does not suggest that she is a bigot, but simply an old aristocrat.

And you don’t have to be the octogenarian wife of a baron to easily get lost in today’s complex and ever-changing language codes. Many on the left, however, actively search for any evidence of racism, and often find it where none exists. They are obsessed with racial identity, but they assume that anyone else who speaks out on these issues, especially white elders, must be motivated by malice.

That was the background to much of the reverential ‘platform’ given to Miss Fulani following the incident at the Palace, and especially on the BBC.

In this worldview, Lady Hussey’s actual motives are irrelevant. All that matters is how she made Miss Fulani feel. It is, as Meghan would say, ‘her truth of hers’ of hers. If Miss Fulani feels that she was racist, that should be it: end of discussion.

What is extraordinary is that this subjective view of racism is supported in part by UK law. Police and the Crown Prosecution Service define racist hate crime as any crime ‘perceived by the victim or any other person as motivated by hostility or prejudice… based on a person’s race or race perceived’.

So if someone says that someone’s behavior is racist, that seems to be good enough for Her Majesty’s police when it comes to charging the suspects. Given the circumstances, it is not surprising that Lady Hussey was found guilty without trial.

Even that was not enough for some. Cheerleaders for the Sussexes, such as political commentator and activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, further raised the stakes by declaring that the dispute proved that Meghan had been “vilified, abused and raped for speaking the truth” about racism in the Buckingham Palace, adding significantly: ‘You can’t reform this.’ Now the awakened want to clean the Palace as a symbolic beginning of the disinfection of British society. Miss Fulani rather gave away the game in her television interviews, when she said of Lady Hussey: “Why don’t we re-educate [her]keep her out of public-facing roles?’

The language is downright chilling: straight out of Chairman Mao’s playbook.

Amidst all the outrage concocted by this ‘racial edge’ is the fact that Britain is a much less prejudiced country than ever.

I was born just before Lady Hussey began her role at the Palace. I grew up in suburban Surrey in the 1970s, when overt racism was considered acceptable.

Contrary to what the insatiable hunters of racism claim, Britain is today incomparably more tolerant: one of the least racist nations on Earth. As mixed-race writer Clive Davis observes: “That we’re distraught over Hussey’s slip-up is a bit depressing, but it’s also a measure of how much things have changed.”

Lady Hussey’s privileged life means she may not be an obvious candidate for public sympathy. But the Palace’s callous treatment of her is important because she shows the extent to which the lack of guts by our political and cultural elites is contributing to the transfer of power to a handful of awakened fanatics.