Louis Wise on celebrity baby names

I’ve been thinking a lot about Psalm West recently, and not just because Kimye’s latest baby and I share a birthday, 9 May, with other showbiz aristocracy such as Alan Bennett and Jack from Love Island.

Kanye and Kim’s son joins the glorious pantheon of Kardashian-West kid names, after North, Saint and Chicago. A small part of me is bothered that the boys get holy names, weighted with biblical meaning, and the girls get basically postcodes. But then maybe this is just a frank reminder that when you’re struggling through the endgame of capitalist celebrity culture, real estate is just as vital as religion.

So, it’s Psalm, as in the holy song. By now this is boring. The madness of celebrity child names is nothing new, from Chastity Bono onwards. I remember my surprise as a child when I read an interview with Paula Yates, and went over her brood’s names. ‘Fi… fi… Trixi… belle…?’ I gasped, as though decoding a modern-day Rosetta Stone. Anyway, I don’t mind; in fact I endorse it. This is very much what I want from the 0.01 per cent. I want dreams, I want desires. Which, by the same token, means I don’t want ‘Archie Harrison’.

Now, okay. We’ve all said a lot about this, and I don’t want to get in on all the boring Meghan-bashing. But there’s no getting around it: the name is common. I don’t mean that snobbishly, it just literally is common. There’s a kid on every corner called Archie, or Harrison, although very few surnamed Mountbatten-Windsor. And that’s the thing. He is, however you cut it, born into unimaginable wealth and privilege, and pretending like he’s, say, the third child of a BBC producer is just not on. Also, Harrison! As I said, I want metaphor. I don’t want the shockingly literal.

In Britain we hate people being ‘pretentious’; acting beyond your class is unforgiveable. But what about acting under? It’s worse, surely — so coy and cringing. It pretends there’s such a thing as ‘normal’, when of course there isn’t. Which is why, every year, I’ll be singing the glories of Psalm, as a very fair reflection of Kim and Kanye’s stratospheric status. And, come to think of it, I suppose this is just the rearranged order. Compared with Kimye, poor Harry and Meghan look more and more like the squeezed middle.