Ruth Dudley Edwards: Unlike Meghan and Ngozi, I rejoice in the racially tolerant UK

She and a wannabe celebrity, Ngozi Fulani, who caused the resignation of the late Queen’s close friend Lady Susan Hussey by accusing her of racism, got me cross.

But first I dropped by memory lane.

It was the mid-1960s and I was teaching apprentices in a further education centre in Cambridge.

“His blood is the same colour as ours,” said the surprised teacher, whom I will call Dave, when he had finished tending in the Gents to a black, slightly injured, student.

The kid had the only black face in the college. Dave at least knew how to teach his subject, which was, if I remember rightly, brick-laying.

As a 21-year-old Irish rookie who had never had a day’s teacher training, I was completely at sea with my brief to teach Liberal Studies to English male adolescents.

Our head was woke before his time and wanted the emphasis to be on making them think like social workers, so mostly I played them improving documentaries which didn’t distract them much from the porn they were passing around.

It was early in this dispiriting period that I showed them a disturbing film about leprosy in Africa and first encountered monkey gestures and ape noises. It took me a while to grasp that unlike me, who had been at University College Dublin with black students, these kids, and, indeed Dave, had never met anyone who didn’t look like them. It’s all about familiarity, I came to realise.

Now as a long-term London resident with warm relationships over the years with among others Caribbeans, Pakistanis, Chinese and Kosovo Albanians, I rejoice in the astonishingly successful and racially tolerant United Kingdom that has flourished despite the pressures caused by unexpected influxes of people in trouble from the Kenya Asians in the 1960s to the Hong Kongers of today.

When the world looks at Britain as it is, said the mixed-race (British and Sierra Leone) Foreign Secretary, James Cleverley, in a recent interview, it sees the wonders that are our well-integrated, multi-ethnic communities and the diversity of our heritage.

The Conservative Cabinet in which he sits include a Home Secretary, Suella Braveman, with immigrant parents of Indian stock, a Secretary of State for International Trade, Kemi Badenoch, who was born Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke in England but largely raised in Nigeria, a Chairman of the Conservative Party, an Iraqi-born Kurd, Nadhim Zahawi, and, of course, a Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, whose Southeast African-born parents brought him up Hindu: he has a shrine in Number 10 Downing Street.

Unfortunately, the poison of identity politics, or wokery, that these days encourages people to see themselves as victims of sexism, racism and any other lens that awards them a high status in the grievance stakes has become a new religion spread throughout schools and universities and anywhere else dominated by the hard left and the gullible young and opportunists of colour like the Duchess of Sussex and Ngozi Fulani.

I have endured three hours of whingeing and boasting from the Duchess and will write about her when I’ve completed my sentence this week, but just a few facts about Fulani. She started out as Marlene Headley, with her changed name founded in 2015 a charity called Sistah Space to help domestic victims from African and Caribbean communities, she has a degree in African Studies from School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where she found being taught the topic by white middle-class lecturers “at times traumatic”, she says her identity and connection with Africa is her “lifelong” story, and donned African clothes and jewellery for her trip to Buckingham Palace.

Lady Susan Hussey, an unpaid Lady in Waiting for sixty years who is well-liked in her local church which has a 90% black congregation, had wanted to chat about Fulani’s obvious African links and was accused by her on Twitter of conducting a racist interrogation and sacrificed by the Palace on the altar of Woke.

Fulani claims threats on line have made her halt her charity’s work. However nosy people are suggesting the Charity Commission should investigate worrying reporting inadequacies in its financial records.

There’s a downside to celebrity.

Ruth Dudley Edwards is on Twitter at @RuthDE