The Duchess of Sussex is not, following the death of Dianne Feinstein, going to be the new senator for California. No, she was never in the frame, and no, her ultimate aim is not the White House. The ink was barely dry on the story in the MailOnline, and assorted rightwing titles globally, that Meghan was the “long shot”, before the real candidate, Laphonza Butler, was announced.
Butler, incidentally, is a politician with a hinterland, a former union leader, once adviser to Kamala Harris, and currently president of Emily’s List, a scheme to get more Democratic pro-choice women elected. What kind of mad hubris, outrageous self-regard, would lead an ersatz princess and failed podcaster to think she was better suited to the role? Well, none, necessarily. Meghan occupies a peculiar place in the international media imagination, where they can say almost anything about her, stick in a few “sources say” and “speculations”, and their evergreen story is ready to go, a tale of the prideful wokerati, oversharing, overprivileged, hypocritical. She is like an avatar for the ultimate, in-your-grill liberal.
Endless insinuations cluster around the kinds of thing that the worst kind of liberals do: they say they are progressive but they eat avocados and shout at servants; they say they are feminists but they can’t get on with their sister-in-law; nameless executives had a meeting with them once and said they wanted the world on a plate. They are probably the kind of person who would buy vagina candles on Goop and think it was cute if their toddler screamed for the duration of a transatlantic plane journey. They would take you to tribunal for saying their dress looked nice. If you put “everything that Piers Morgan objects to” into ChatGPT, you would get Meghan, and some of it would be true, and some of it would be embellishment, and some of it would be deliberately false, and some of it would be hallucination, but it would be bundled together in such a way that no sane person could distinguish, and the only choices would be to hate her with a passion, or back away from the entire spectacle.
I never thought a marriage to Prince Harry was quite the prize it was cracked up to be, but this: she could not possibly have foreseen it would be as bad as this.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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