Suzanne Harrington: Privilege no longer offers automatic protection
Privilege has been having a tough time lately. It’s not quite what it used to be.
Chinks have been appearing in traditionally impenetrable walls of wealth, power, status.
Traditional deference and distance, and the ringfencing of elites by hand-picked members of the media drip-feeding the public carefully chosen morsels in return for their own self-serving access, has been blown open by social media.
For better or worse, we all have a voice — and a video link — now. Privilege no longer offers automatic protection to those inside its moneyed, well-connected walls.
This is not just about the non-sweating sons of monarchs, damply awaiting legal decisions and hoping mummy will continue to pay the lawyers, or people formerly known as socialites now jailed as sex traffickers, but also sports stars being deported at airports because, from a public health, as well as sporting prowess, perspective, they have deemed themselves special and different.
The stories of these individuals, although compelling in a rubber-neck kind of way (who, apart from their actual victims, doesn’t love a scandal involving royalty and dead billionaire paedophiles?), is not the main focus here. The interesting bit is what happened next.
The most straightforward outcome was that of the tennis star, who tried to blag his way into a country, and is in the process of being returned home, like a dodgy Amazon parcel, because he had not complied with entry requirements. This is not about vaccination — pro or anti, let’s not go there — but about the fact that even the privilege of being the world’s number one men’s tennis player could not override his personal health decision clashing with public health requirements. Ciao, Novak.
Further up the social ladder was the woman who went to the same Oxford college as Boris Johnson, who counted presidents and royalty as personal friends, and who is now facing life in prison for crimes against minors. Had her trial happened in the UK rather than the US, would she have been convicted, or would they — her peers — have closed ranks around her? Had she been a nobody from a council estate, would the BBC have invited her various supporters on air to give their opinion of her innocence, the day after she was convicted by a jury? It’s a bit like those men who murder their entire families, only to be feted by the local priest or sporting association as great family men.
Privilege stopped working for her. Will it continue to work for the prince accused of sex crimes with an underage girl? Princes tend to get away with murder — literally, when it comes to inconvenient Saudi journalists — and metaphorically, as the one currently in the spotlight tries to extricate himself via a dubious legal loophole. How far does his privilege extend? Will his mother call up the head of the US and have a quiet word? Awkward, right? It will be interesting to see exactly where justice and privilege intersect. And just how much one can get away with, by dint of birth.
