TELL me what you hate, and I’ll tell you what you are. So tell me, what do you think it was about black divorcee Meghan Markle which the British press first took against?

It is easy to see the royal family as a harmless frippery or trivial sideshow. But as the hysterical wall-to-wall publicity this week has shown, it isn’t a sideshow. Monarchy puts the clowns centre-stage, surrounded by whispering mandarins and gossipy royal reporters. To hell with the lot of them.

Monarchy is like knotweed, coiling around the bones of Britain’s political culture. It is a corrupting force in British public life. Monarchy corrupts our politics. It justifies all manner of abuses, empowers the executive, justifying gongs for the talentless, doling out peerages for political expedience and preferment. The class system, of which it is the capstone, corrupts public manners.

This week has shown monarchy also corrupts public feeling. The vehemence of the discussion is completely out of whack with the objective importance of “the Sussexes’” – boak – relationship with the rest of their talentless and discredited family. So why so interested, why so sore?

Monarchy entirely misdirects our emotional and political energies. The function of the modern monarchy is to misdirect it in a way to ensure its survival. The things people feel emotional about are not accidental or spontaneous. The things people are interested in aren’t innate or unprompted either.

Whether it is a daily hate or daily grovel, it matters who we’re taught to love and despise in a political culture. It is eloquent. Who we hate tells us who we are.

When you’re telling royal stories, you’re dealing with deep archetypes. This week has everything except a Wicked Stepmother. (Camilla is, presumably, too busy mucking out the stables and graduating to a breakfast gin to be an effective persecutor.)

In the right light, this could read like a rags to riches story. There’s the beautiful outsider and her prince charming, and their unlikely romance. The parvenu and the prince discover the disapproving establishment and its prejudices standing in their way, but they persevere together.

This struggle culminates in the apparent triumph of the couple’s wedding in the third act, their enemies apparently overcome. But once the church is emptied, the bridesmaids pass out, and the footmen snaffle the last of the canapes – the tensions seemingly overcome in acts one and two reassert themselves all the more strongly. Cinderella turns into Alice in Wonderland.

The Fairytale Gazette publishes unflattering exposes from former friends revealing her royal carriage was really a pumpkin. Royal fashion experts denounce her slippers as counterfeit diamante. Read our royal columnist for 1200 words on why Cinderella is no Snow White. More from the Land of Make Believe when we get it.

The days turn sour as dark forces mobilise to vilify and disparage the couple. This tension culminates in the final act when the subversive logic implicit in their relationship reaches a reckoning with the strange world of the royal court. The wedding didn’t – as it first appeared – represent a deep acceptance of their love, but the illusion that a compromise was possible between their two worlds.

Finally confronting this fact, the couple realise they must choose between the path of duty and being entirely themselves. They bravely embrace the logic of their position, spurning the fixtures and fittings of a royal life, upsetting and injuring the prince’s more traditional relatives in the process. Love doesn’t conquer all. Love entails hard choices and hard losses. And scene.

I’ve left out the unflattering details. Reality is always more compromised and ambivalent than drama. But as stories go, this is dramatically perfect, a symmetrical five-act plot structure, full of drama, jeopardy, disappointment and spiritual growth. Peter Morgan would love it. Coming soon to a Netflix stream near you.

But in most Cinderella stories – you’re meant to empathise with the parvenu and identify with their improbable relationship. In modern Britain, by contrast, our Cinderella story concludes with the unlikely princess being pilloried as “shallow, manipulative and vain”. The right-wing media invites us to identify with her detractors. The Daily Mail is written entirely in the Wicked Stepmother’s voice.

Instead of the sympathetic protagonist, Britons have been systematically encouraged to see Markle as the villain of the piece, artificial and conniving, manipulating her love-struck and gormless husband into betraying the anally-retentive traditions his granny wasted over 90 years of her life on. The young doughball Harry has been largely insulated from responsibility.

She may or may not be half the things she is accused of being. Like her accusers, I’ve no idea whether the public character she has been given bears any relationship to the person behind the persona. But it is no accident it is a black women who “came over here and took one of our princes” who has ended up the lightning rod for these displaced negative emotions.

The racism implicit in the British press’s exaggerated suspicion of and hostility towards Markle hardly bears describing. The weird house rules of the House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha may be happily alien to most of us. The royal family may seem to sit on a different social plane. But the blinding hatred which most of the British media has expressed towards Markle betrays the universal – uniformly unattractive – impulses and themes hiding in this story, if you read it bitterly.

It’s a story which unconsciously appeals to every mother-in-law who doesn’t much care for her son’s choice of mate, and a story recruiting every bitter father who thinks his daughter has made a poor match. This story appeals to every resentful parent who thinks their offspring has gone down a path – professionally or romantically – which pulls them away from the traditional values their family espoused and live by.

GIVEN how much writing in the UK press these days goes into parents and grandparents telling us how ghastly they think their millennial kids and grandkids are.

You might also detect a background tingle of intergenerational antipathy here, contrasting the emotionally clamped Queen, who seems to have sacrificed every kind of pleasure and autonomy to duty, with the bratty kids of the 1980s, who mix their royal gewgaws with right-on politics, unseemly confessions about their mental health, and the selfish desire to be free from the stultifying atmosphere of court protocol.

One person’s autonomy is another betrayal. Where your sympathies land is all a matter of perspective.

With Markle as the handy stand-in for all this loathing, dolts like Eamonn

Holmes and Piers Morgan can vomit out every scrap of their antipathy roiling in their hearts, without a spasms of restraint, without a sense of perspective.

It is classic projection. If you’re the kind of person who is inclined to hate people you do not know, if you’re the kind of person to pretend to have psychological insight into people you’ve never met, seizing the opportunity to slag them off on telly must seem rather fulfilling.

But it’s all distraction, hatred spun into candyfloss, bullshit. Take just one example. This week, Lady Smith published the third battery of findings from the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry. She found that in homes ran by Quarriers, Aberlour Child Care Trust and Barnados, children suffered physical, emotional and sexual abuse. In this jurisdiction, over decades, children were raped, beaten and tortured at care homes run like prison camps. But no, let me tell you everything that’s wrong with Meghan Markle. Story continues on pages 2, 3, 4, 8, and 20.

It is easy to blame the media for this, shovelling junk news down our thrapples, neglecting the serious stuff, making us dumb as bricks. But it is the public’s voracious appetite for this kind of high-calorie, low-vitamin guff – and comparative indifference to the real sorrows and sufferings which take place – which helps drive this pernicious cycle. I’m struck again that one of the strange and disturbing qualities of contemporary politics is that all too many folk are prepared get outraged by paperweight scandals, but show no real evidence of caring about the major and systematic ones.

The fact that supposedly caring institutions were – for decades – a production line systematically producing and abusing broken-hearted children in this country gets a public shrug, while every fiery adjective and outraged description, however disproportionate, applies to this game of trivial pursuit in the Windsor Household.

Enjoying the misery of the rich and famous might feel like escapism. But it isn’t. Our political culture encourages people to be outraged by nothings, and to turn dry eyes from real suffering. It is the real suffering which is forgotten.

As Meghan Markle is discovering to her cost, monarchy isn’t just a droll game of jaggy bunnet. It is just one of the ways we’re kept dumb, deferential and compliant. And – above all – pointlessly distracted.