If Rushdie deserves free speech, why not Harry?

Salil Tripathi says that the Prince’s remarks were ill chosen and regrettable but the deeper principle concerns freedom of expression and ever greater encroachments upon it

First Prince Harry, and then his father, Prince Charles, discovered that last week was their septimana horribilis and that they had both made the kind of gaffes for which the Duke of Edinburgh has gained notoriety. First, a three-year-old home video surfaced in which Harry called a Pakistani cadet ‘our little Paki friend’. And then it was discovered that the heir to the throne routinely calls a polo-playing Asian friend ‘Sooty’.

In the multiculturally appropriate times we live in, nothing else matters: not the fact that Ahmed Raza Khan, the Pakistani cadet, or Kolin Dhillon, Charles’s polo-playing friend, may not have minded the remarks; or, that Harry’s was a private video that was shot three years ago; nor, indeed, that Harry says he did not mean it as a racist or religious slur and has apologised.