I’m starting to think whatever higher power is floating around above us on a cumulus cloud, plucking a harp and annoying the seraphim, has a twisted sense of humour.
For one thing, this deity managed to put the woman formerly known as Meghan Markle on multiple occasions in the same room as Princess Anne, a figure who personifies the adjective ‘trooper’ and has been reusing the same pantyhose since the ’73 oil shock.
For another, this week this celestial power saw fit to engineer things such that some website, somewhere, is going to run the headline ‘‘Kate’ gets Dior contract over Meghan’.
See? A sense of humour.
This week the Daily Mail reported that the venerable French fashion house has picked a bright young thing to be one of their faces, specifically a gal called Meg Bellamy. Bellamy’s is a name you are going to be hearing a lot of from here on out with her having gotten the plum gig of playing Kate Middleton in the new series of The Crown.
The sting in the tail here is that in June this year the on dit out of Los Angeles was that it was Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, who was about to nab the Dior deal.
As a “prominent Beverly Hills socialite” told the Mail at the time, “Meghan is all anyone is talking about … There have been rumours for weeks that she’s about to sign a deal with Dior which has put the gossip mill into overdrive”.
While the duchess herself never commented on the claims and has never once shown any deep-seated hankering to be tapped by the horse-bit strewn brand, her devotion to Dior is no great secret. For last year’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations for the late Queen, Meghan chose Dior. For Her late Majesty’s funeral? Dior. Harry for King Charles’s coronation in May? Dior. (And bespoke too.)
However, now, this week, we know that the woman who will be draped in indecently priced couture frocks for Dior ad campaigns and plied with baubles will not be Meghan but ‘Kate’. (The Paris-based brand has yet to confirm this.)
As a Netflix insider told the Mail: “They have been queuing up for Meg … so many labels and brands want some of that … she is being treated like Kate, an A-list princess.”
Bellamy, the Netflix insider means, not Sussex.
Those gods, they do make sport of us.
And so have American TV writers, with the recent Family Guy episode that had a swipe at the duke and duchess being cited as a possible reason for the delay in Meghan launching her much speculated upon lifestyle and wellness website/platform/thingame.
According to the Telegraph’s Gordon Raynor, the unveiling has “now been put back to the other side of Christmas, at the earliest”.
Raynor reports: “The reason for the delay is unclear, but she has been given a rough ride by the US media of late (not least through a withering portrayal in the hit cartoon series Family Guy last month) and may want to wait until her approval ratings recover”.
You’ve got to wonder how long Team Montecito might have to wait.
This month marks four years since Meghan and husband Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex packed up their travel crystals, must-have shamanic gongs and Harry’s Nintendo Switch and put-putted off to Vancouver Island to take what the press heard was to be a six-week break.
Those six weeks gave rise to the sonic boom that was Megxit and thus here we are today, with one of King Charles’s sons living down the road from a Pirates of the Caribbean star and with Hollywood seemingly at a loss as to what to do with a stateless duke and duchess. The podcasting world doesn’t seem to want them, Netflix’s tendresse for the couple is up for debate and they have not done a paid speaking gig, as is known, since signing with the A+ list Harry Walker Agency in 2020.
Harry and Meghan walked away from the royal cage to set themselves free and indulge in as much navel-gazing as they could fit onto a vision board, but so far, it is not exactly taking.
The last year has has seen them publicly lambasted as “f**king grifters”, by a Spotify exec, and the duchess labelled as “not a great audio talent, or necessarily any kind of talent”, by Hollywood powerbroker and UTA CEO Jeremy Zimmer.
Now, former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who put Meghan on the legendary magazine’s cover back in 2017, has joined the Sussex-slag-off-a-thon.
This week Carter, who for 25 years presided over that entertainment and media bible, spoke to the Times and gave his verdict on the Sussexes circa 2023. (Look away now if you are a particularly ardent supporter of West Coast Windsors Lite.)
“Harry and Meghan have no point, no purpose at all,” Carter has said.
“I pay almost zero attention to them. Any time a famous couple is that public about their lives they have to accept the consequences. Americans may be fascinated by whingers at first but then they tire pretty quickly, and their whingeing is epic.”
But they’re happy, I hear you say. They have the lives they have always wanted, far, far away from the HP-sauce stained fingers of Fleet Street and Buckingham Palace’s leaky ways!
And yes, sure. I hope they are happy. Truly. I hope this life they have ended up with is exactly the one they wanted. A life where they are now papped more times a month than they were in an entire 12-month span back in Blighty. A life where the public merrily takes photos of them and their children, with no clear bounds, to be slapped up on Instagram. A life that just seems … a bit aimless.
Their Archewell Foundation chugs along doing great work but their philanthropic successes are positively Lilliputian compared to what the Prince and Princess of Wales are up to back in the UK.
The duke and duchess have not launched any game-changing charitable projects that they have seen through (vale 40x40) or taken up any causes and rallied the masses.
Nor have the Sussexes proven naturals in the content-creation department, with Meghan’s podcast Archetypes never making it past its first season, their Spotify contract having been binned without Harry ever once doing anything of his own and their three Netflix series quite the mixed ratings (and critical) bag.
How did Harry and Meghan end up like some sort of bad, postmodern reworking of Waiting for Godot, the months and years sliding by as they struggle to find real “purpose” and a “point” in their new American lives?
No image better sums up the quandary that the Sussexes find themselves in right now than those at an event for Veterans’ and Remembrance Days last week. The couple first spent time with military families at Camp Pendleton and then helped open a new facility for the Navy SEAL Foundation, complete with a ribbon cutting.
And it’s that moment in the video, when the duke and duchess are standing near a big red ribbon, that begs the question, they chucked in royal life to do exactly the same thing as Team HRH back in Britain? In the couple’s famed Megxit ‘Dear John’ Instagram post from 2020 they talked about wanting to carve out a “progressive new role” – and this is it?
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Harry and Meghan didn’t even get to use the giant scissors.
As the world binges the first half of the final season of The Crown this weekend, and Netflix shareholders and Dior’s marketing team rub their hands with glee, spare a thought for those still waiting, waiting, waiting for a “point”, a “purpose”, a goal.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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