Prince Harry

Last month I wrote that while I’d like to visit certain cities – Tokyo, Mumbai and Havana among them – before I die, I’d rather go on a biking tour of Sunderland than visit Dubai. There was a lively response. The correspondence included:

a) two separate invitations to take biking holidays in or around Sunderland;

b) an offer of an all-expenses-paid trip to Dubai, which I declined as I really would rather go to Sunderland, and because the e-mail invitation included the phrases “you prick” and “I’ll make you eat your words”;

c) a dossier of evidence from an investigative journalist asserting that, if anything, I should have been more forthright in complaining about the exploitation of Asian workers in the city;

d) a 900-word article in The National, a Dubai newspaper, which rather flatteringly remarked that I had the air of a young V.S. Naipaul, but rather unflatteringly pronounced me “the most fatuous columnist in the world”;

And e), an e-mail from a reader that began with the complaint that The Times of London used to be a great newspaper until it started paying lip service to political correctness by employing useless ethnics in the name of positive discrimination, and if I liked Mumbai so much, I should jolly well get back to where I came from … etc.

At the time I deleted this last message without thinking: racist e-mails are rare, a tiny proportion of the bewildering barrage of abuse and praise that is an unavoidable part of this weird job, and life is too short to converse with lunatics. But I found myself dwelling on it this weekend in the light of Prince Harry’s video diary in which he calls one of his Sandhurst colleagues a “Paki”, and the broader question it ultimately raised, namely: is Britain a racist hellhole?...

Read atTimes Online