Political column – December 3

She departs having resigned in humiliation, expunged from public life after decades of service, with Buckingham Palace distancing itself from her.

Before she grabbed the headlines Lady SH was somebody you had probably never heard of and would not have recognised if she sat next to you on the Number 4 bus.

Her crime was repeatedly to ask a black charity worker at a Buckingham Palace reception where she was really from, and where "her people" were from. This flagged up the "elderly closet racist" alert.

Her victim – as that is how she considers herself – has compared her experience to abuse and violation.

It is with trepidation that I venture into such controversy. I imagine that the reason nobody piped up to raise questions while witches were being burned at the stake is that they feared that if they did so that they might be tossed on to the bonfire with them.

For all I know Lady SH, who has offered her profound apologies for any hurt caused, may have gone through a form of investigation in which she was asked by the Prince of Wales whether she is a racist and confessed her guilt.

But if that has not happened, even as she stands at the pillory with the final lumps of odure being hurled at her, I think there are some factors which should be taken into consideration before she is convicted beyond all reasonable doubt of impurity of thought.

M'lud, in mitigation may I point out that she is 83. Her victim says that that is no excuse. But surely it should be a relevant factor in a society tolerant of differences. If that old quote about the past being a foreign country is correct, then Lady SH is a foreigner in a modern Britain in which she does not know quite how things are now done and, in particular, how things are said.

In Britain in 2022 "where are you really from?" or even "how do you self-identify?" are thrown at us regularly in documents and questionnaires, although not couched in the clumsily direct terms used by Lady SH.

This week we were given a glimpse of the results of the 2021 census. In the census form you did not have the option to tick "British" (if that was the case, of course) and leave it at. There were a lot of further questions asking in effect where you were really from.

Multiple choice answers in the sections exploring ethnicity were detailed. You could, for instance, choose White and Black Caribbean, or White and Black African.

Among other options were Chinese, Caribbean, "African background, write in below" and "Any other Black, Black British or Caribbean background, write in." There was then a box to write in your exact self-description.

These where-are-you-really-from questions don't appear to have been controversial. I can't recall any protests about them.

But with Lady SH being posh, white, and 83, there seems to be an easy assumption that she was motivated by racism in her questioning.

This is an assumption which, unless there is supporting evidence or an admission of guilt, is necessarily based on a form of prejudice, a belief that older people have less noble ways of thinking which have been shaped by the bad old days before the new enlightenment.

Clearly you don't have to look too far to see that older people were brought up in a different world. Just look at the hot water the late Prince Philip used to get in to.

But we all have a choice of either thinking the best of people, or thinking the worst of people.

In the spirit of the former, and not having definitive information to the contrary, what I imagine Lady SH was trying to have a conversation about was culture, heritage, and self-identification, as being British means many things today, as those census form questions underline.

However as she made small talk she strayed onto a cultural battlefield without being armed with the correct and approved words and phrases for a modern discourse about such matters.