"I don't want to sit around in Windsor. But I generally don't like England that much and, you know, it's nice to be away from all the press and the papers."
So says Prince Harry, who in the process has struck the only dissonant note to come out of the masses of positive coverage of his service in Afghanistan.
For all I know, Harry probably meant the atmosphere as he experiences it here; even so, it's not great to hear that from the third in line to the throne.
Poor England. It's been open season on the country and its people for so long now that we hardly even notice it anymore.
Of course, it's to be expected from the soi-dissant intelligentsia. Orwell famously wrote that this country's intellectuals were unique in the world for their hatred of their own nationality.
Only this week the writer Hanif Kureishi said in an interview: 'The good thing about London is it's not England....The Germans say, How are you getting on with the English? and you think, I've never met any bloody English.' He went on to explain how London was an example of how multiculturalism can work.
There you have it, really: boosting multiculturalism is usually twinned with a throwaway contempt for England and the English. It's an admission too, that in order to work, multiculturalism has to define itself in opposition to something else.
