How an unholy alliance of anti-royalists, hard Left activists and a fox-killing lawyer fuelled race row that

AS THE King and Queen Consort made their way to church on the sandringham estate last weekend, an unexpected figure could be seen walking behind them. Lady susan hussey was clearly back in favour. the lady-inwaiting had quit in disgrace last November, reportedly after asking a black British visitor to Buckingham Palace where she ‘ really came from’.

Many royal courtiers were delighted to see the loyal and discreet confidante of our late Queen being welcomed back into the fold. they consider that Lady susan was unfairly treated. Notoriously, she ‘chose to step aside’ — as the Palace insists on putting it — in the wake of the embarrassing race row that erupted on social media.

her return inevitably raises the question: why was the widow of a former chairman of the BBC, who has devoted her life to the royals, summarily dispatched without any thorough investigation of who said what to whom and when?

the sorry affair had its roots in a tweet posted by Ngozi Fulani. the British- born charity boss of Caribbean heritage is the founder of sistah space in hackney, east London, which helps women of African and Caribbean heritage who have been victims of domestic abuse.

the morning after her encounter at the Palace last year, Fulani tweeted that Lady hussey — whom she referred to as ‘Lady sh’ — ‘approached me, moved my hair to see my name badge’ and then insisted on asking her ‘what part of Africa are you from’. Within hours, the encounter was dominating the news bulletins and the taint of racism yet again appeared to be swirling around the royal palaces.

But a close analysis of how the episode played out online reveals that there may be more to the episode than is apparent at first sight. An investigation by the Mail into the tweets supporting Ms Fulani reveals how an impromptu alliance of anti-royal forces appeared to gather in order to exploit the controversy.

there appears to have been a concerted effort to throw fuel on the fire by a network of accounts run by socialist and Labour- leaning users — including backers of the far-Left former leader Jeremy Corbyn. A second significant network consisted of a group of accounts actively engaged in conversations about royal controversies — and all overwhelmingly supportive of the Duke and Duchess of sussex, who themselves have proved staunch critics of the royals.

BETWEEN them, these networks included nine accounts with more than 100,000 followers, and 129 accounts with more than 10,000 followers apiece. that means a potential audience of millions if the accounts all chose to pursue the same story.

to understand precisely how everything unfolded that morning, it’s instructive to rehearse the sequence of events in some detail.

On November 29, Camilla hosted a reception in a Buckingham Palace state room to raise awareness of domestic abuse: an issue of special interest to her. Ms Fulani attended the event dressed in a red, gold and green headband, and what looked like a leopard-print dress, with a cowrie- shell necklace. Lady susan mistakenly took this to be a national costume.

this is significant. It helps explain why she repeatedly asked Ms Fulani where she was ‘really from’. At 7.25am the next day, Ms Fulani tweeted about her experience, complete with what purported to be a verbatim account of the relevant part of her conversation with Lady susan.

On social media, this was described as a ‘transcript’. this is inaccurate, as there was no tape recording of the exchange between the two women. In the first tweet, which was posted on her sistah space account to its then 14,000 followers, Ms Fulani said: ‘Mixed feelings about yesterday’s visit to Buckingham Palace. 10 minutes after arriving, a member of staff, Lady sh, approached me, moved my hair to see my name badge. the conversation below took place. the rest of the event is a blur.’

Within an intriguingly prompt three minutes, Ms Fulani’s post had been retweeted by Monisha Rajesh, a loyal supporter of sistah space and author of the book Around India In 80 days, who has 22,000 followers.

Lest there be any doubt about where Ms Rajesh stands in relation to the Royal Family, it should be noted that she later retweeted a post by Omid scobie, author of a highly sympathetic biography of harry and Meghan called Finding Freedom, who now makes a living as the couple’s media attack-dog and criticin-chief of other royals.

scobie himself today has more than 120,000 followers. his furious tweet, which was posted at 10.10am, read: ‘Yesterday’s event should have been a moment to uplift and support. the fact that Fulani — a prominent figure providing the only safe space in Britain for black survivors of domestic violence — was made to feel this way by a senior Palace aide is unforgivable.’

By then, Ms Fulani had given still further details. At 7.35am — ten minutes after she first drew attention to the conversation with Lady susan — she tweeted: ‘there was nobody to report it to. I couldn’t report it to the Queen Consort, plus it was such a shock to me and the other two women, that we were stunned to temporary silence. I just stood at the edge of the room, smiled & engaged briefly, with those who spoke to me until I could leave.’

Crucially, her version of the conversation was corroborated on twitter minutes later by two women who said that they had heard everything. they were Mandu Reid, the leader of the Women’s equality Party, and Dr Iwi UgiagbeGreen, a researcher and lecturer on race, education and employability at Manchester Metropolitan University. Only a cynic, surely, would suspect that the speed of their responses suggested a degree of co-ordination.

At 7.36am, Dr UgiagbeGreen quoted Ms Fulani and alleged: ‘Ultimately, this is violence. sistah space I’m so sorry this happened to you. I’m also sadly unsurprised. to accept wilful erasure and be dignified in the face of continued violence is how we are expected to be.’

TEN minutes later Mandu Reid tweeted: ‘ I was right there. I witnessed this first hand. We were at an event that was supposed to celebrate our work. For people like Lady sh, people like us will never really belong here. Infinite solidarity.’

Reid’s message was picked up by her 20,000 twitter followers. Fulani then responded again: ‘ thank you so much. standing there in a room packed with people while this violation was taking place was so strange, especially as the event was about violence against women. that feeling of not knowing what to do, will NeVeR leave me.’

Other powerful voices then waded into the growing social media storm, including avowed supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. At 8.12am prominent author and activist Ash sarkar, who is part of Novara Media (a radical news website that is a fanatical cheerleader for Corbyn), tweeted: ‘there’s a difference between asking someone where their heritage is from, being gently rebuffed, and taking the hint — and doing this, which is basically making repeated demands for the explanation of your melanin.’

sarkar, a self-professed communist, has more than 400,000 devoted followers on social media. the hard-Left also engaged in the controversy in the form of ‘the Agitator’, the twitter handle of the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, which uses a clenched red fist as its profile picture.

Key figures in the anti-Brexit brigade also jumped on the bandwagon. they included Jolyon Maugham, director of the Good Law Project. the day after Ms Fulani posted her series of tweets, he piously tweeted to his 400,000 followers: ‘Can we talk about structural racism rather than whether Lady hussey is the true victim here?’

Maugham is best known for his bizarre announcement via twitter on Boxing Day 2019 that he had just bludgeoned a fox to death with a baseball bat while dressed in a satin kimono. he killed the animal after it became trapped while trying to get inside a hen house in his back garden in south-east London.

soon, it was supporters of the Duke and Duchess of sussex who were further fanning the flames. At 8.20am, less than an hour after Fulani first highlighted her experience, a certain ‘Prince Alex’, who often refers to his or her admiration for the sussexes, introduced the hashtag ‘#RacistRoyalFamily’ to the growing online maelstrom.

the account @ArchewellBaby joined in the attack on Lady susan also using the #RacistRoyalFamily hashtag.

Archewell, of course, is the name of the charitable foundation set up by Harry and Meghan, named after their son Archie.

As social media grew ever more frenzied, senior palace officials were in turmoil over the introduction of the ‘racist’ tag. They were still dealing with the repercussions of Meghan’s claim in her infamous 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview that an unnamed member of the Royal Family had voiced concerns about how dark Archie’s skin might be when he was born.

Little-noticed amid the brouhaha that followed the screening of that particular ‘truth bomb’ was a tweet from Sistah Space declaring that ‘according to clear definition, it seems Meghan is a survivor of DV [domestic violence] from her in-laws’.

Does this, one might wonder, suggest some kind of link between the Sussexes and Sistah Space?

The pressure on Lady Susan, affectionately nicknamed ‘No 1 head girl’ by royal insiders, intensified when Eliot Higgins, the founder of investigative journalism website Bellingcat, picked up on Fulani’s post.

He has 280,000 followers. As his audience included major media outlets, journalists and MPs, the one- sided version of the Hussey conversation was now gaining significant traction.

By 10.53am there had been 2,893 direct mentions on Twitter — including tweets, retweets, quote tweets and replies — and one minute later, at 10.54am, the first mainstream media story broke on commercial radio. Within an hour, 500 articles had been published in regional, national and international digital titles. The timing could hardly have been worse for the royals. Not only were Prince William and Kate in America preparing for the Earthshot Prize ceremony — the environmental award they founded. They had also recently completed a Caribbean tour that had been marred by calls for slavery reparations, protests over a land dispute involving a charity of which William is a patron, and an awkward meeting with the prime minister of Jamaica in which he said his country would be ‘moving on’ to become a republic.

To make matters worse, only a week later, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were due to receive a ‘Ripple Of Hope’ award from the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation in New York for their ‘heroic’ stand against ‘structural racism’ in the Royal Family.

The optics were dreadful, and just hours after the original tweet, the Palace confirmed that Lady Susan had gone.

Prince William’s spokesperson released a statement that read: ‘Racism has no place in our society, these comments were unacceptable and it is right that the individual concerned has stepped down.’

Lady Susan’s supporters remain furious to this day. Hugo Vickers, the royal biographer who has been friends with her for many years, says: ‘It is very sad the way she felt she had to go.

‘I’m afraid I don’t think Prince William’s office comes out of this very well . . . Lady Hussey clearly got in a muddle and might have been a little insensitive . . .

‘I think it’s sad that Ms Fulani never called for Susan Hussey to be reinstated to the job she loves and which she does so well. Lady Susan is a great friend of Charles and Camilla and I’m very glad they invited her to Sandringham for the weekend.’

Bringing Lady Susan back in from the cold is a very welcome first step on the road to her rehabilitation.

But given the controversy surrounding her departure — and the fact that it was brought about by a Twitter pile- on seemingly orchestrated by people with obvious political agendas — isn’t it time she was given her old job back?