Meghan markle

America was born of revolution, a republic forged in defiance of monarchy. Yet despite our founding mythology of liberty and self-determination, we can’t seem to resist the allure of royalty – so long as it is authentic and dutiful. That is why, even in a land that rejected monarchy, public sentiment favours hands down the Prince and Princess of Wales over the rogue runaways who swapped Buckingham for Beverly Hills.A recent YouGov poll confirms what intuition already tells us. Prince William enjoys a 63 percent favorability rating among Americans, well ahead of Harry’s 56 percent and miles beyond Meghan’s dismal 41 percent (with 25 percent viewing her unfavorably). In the UK, the Sussexes fare even worse: Harry’s approval languishes at 27 percent, Meghan’s at just 20 percent.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been troubled by two verbal peculiarities in a week. The Duchess corrected a friend who called her ‘Meghan Markle’ on television. ‘It’s so funny, too, that you keep saying Meghan Markle. You know I’m Sussex now,’ she said. ‘This is our family name, our little family name.’ Well, yes and no. Her children were registered as Mountbatten-Windsor at birth. That was a name invented by a declaration in the Privy Council in 1960. But Archie and Lilibet are prince and princess now and need not have a surname. The trouble is that other descendants of the late Queen made up surnames for their children. In the army, for example, the Duke of Sussex was Captain Wales.

“Has anyone in the world ever been so tickled by the sight of lettuces?” Meghan titters to chef Alice Waters, on the final episode of her new “lifestyle television series,” With Love, Meghan. Meghan’s latest venture is an exercise in how many inspirational quotes you can simper out in five hours. She’s less duchess, more Instagram influencer. She doesn’t have the pissed-off husband half-arsedly holding the camera while she explains, in excruciating detail, how to make a balloon arch. Instead, she has a plentiful Netflix crew and reported $100 million budget.  I’m trying my hardest to find something nice to say and, well, the guests aren’t too awful and the food looks alright.

I am not, nor ever have been, a friend of Jeffrey Epstein. Yet, after I wrote a piece earlier this week commenting on Meghan Markle’s peculiar decision to change the name of her lifestyle brand America Riviera Orchard to As Ever, this was merely one of the things I was accused of being. Within hours of the story being published, I was inundated with a level of online abuse that swiftly went from the intimidating to the unintentionally hilarious, so vitriolic and overblown was its content.

Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, is not a MAGA groupie, but a believer in the Nato alliance. He knows about working with allies. Yet he says that the Americans should go right ahead with Russia, the murderous aggressor, without bringing Ukraine, ally and victim, or the Nato member states, into the talks. This is President Trump’s will, he says. Compare with the Middle East. Would Rubio – or Trump – say that Hamas, the murderous aggressor, was the key player, and should therefore have bilateral talks with the US whereas Israel, ally and victim, should just sit and wait to be told later what is happening? Trump helped bring Hamas to heel by announcing, before his inauguration, that they would have all hell to pay if they did not release the hostages.

Looking back on the Queen’s 1992 ‘annus horribilis’, the events involved – though surprising at the time – seem almost staid now. The wife of her favourite son was photographed canoodling with an American. Her daughter divorced. Her daughter-in-law was the co-creator of a frank book about the sorrows of her marriage to the Queen’s eldest son, and to top it off, Windsor Castle burnt down. There’s a whiff of Sunset Boulevard about the isolated pair as they flail around wondering where to go next Three decades on, there’s a marked difference between the Queen’s awful year and that of her grandson, Prince Harry. The Queen’s year might have happened to anyone who had a bit of bad luck and a lot of castles.

There is no possibility, if you consume any kind of media, that you will not be aware of Kate Middleton’s absence from public view over the past couple of months. For a time, it was possible to put the various rumors and speculation down to over-excited people on the internet with too much time on their hands and over-vivid imaginations. Then, in an apparent attempt to quell speculation, Kensington Palace released a strangely Photoshopped image of the princess on Britain's Mother’s Day, and all hell broke loose. Even those who would normally have sighed at the increasingly prurient stories found themselves saying things like, “I’m not a conspiracy theorist but...