Meghan’s bizarre Vogue stint: where’s the value in any of this?

Meghan can be in Vogue - it’s a royal rite of passage - but her awful opinions shouldn’t be.

Prince Harry is clearly unable to persuade Meghan that there is much enjoyment in being a royal. Picture: Getty Images

It is with a heavy heart and a fully clutched pearl that I must issue yet another dire weather warning. Please can Prince Harry and Meghan stop providing us with this absolute gale of nonstop content? It’s getting ridiculous now — it’s getting unroyal now — that last week alone Meghan announced she was launching a weird clothing line, writing a children’s book about dogs, and had guest-edited the September issue of Vogue, in which she offered advice beyond all kombucha-sniffing parody on “how to pivot from a perspective of frustration . . . to optimism” and “the power of the collective”.

Harry, for his part, travelled to Sicily where he gave a “barefoot” speech at a five-star “Google camp” on climate change. No one knows whether he could actually feel the humming of the guests’ 114 gas-guzzling private jets through the soles of his feet as he did this, but hopefully fellow climate messiahs Naomi Campbell and Leonardo DiCaprio clapped so hard they drowned it all out.

It wasn’t so much the things that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex did - it was the frequency and unrelenting madness with which they did them. Day after day of ludicrous coverage in which Meghan was called “vulgar” and “cheap” and Harry a hypocrite. How often do we hear from Kate and Prince William? Once a fortnight, probably, often less. Why do they need this much attention?

Personally, I didn’t even mind that Meghan did Vogue. Royals have always done Vogue - it’s what they do. In the 1930s and 1940s, you could barely stop them licking Vogue’s star photographer Cecil Beaton. In the 1990s, Diana was hardly off the cover. What’s weird isn’t that Meghan did Vogue, it’s that she did it in such a peculiar, grovelling, faux-humble manner, pretending she didn’t want to appear on the cover for fear of being “boastful” - I think she meant “presumptuous” - while coming across as exactly that (why do one page when you can do 300-plus?).

Behind the scenes footage of the Duchess of Sussex guest editing British Vogue. Picture: Vogue

Instead of doing a cover shoot like predictable old Kate, she’d offered what I’ve come to dread - her opinions. These include her thoughts on the “food-sharing app Olio”; and her belief that a magazine is “like a beautiful meal”. In her editor’s letter, she spoke about her “love of writing”, but it turns out that even in this her opinion isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. A favourite poem is a dreary child’s moo by the novelist Matt Haig. Harry’s interview with the ethologist Jane Goodall descends into an amorphous rant on how “kids are taught to hate”.

The duchess herself writes like Conrad Black in full memoir mode, in great, looping, lardy, turdy sentences that are at once embarrassing in their level of gushing homily ("gracious” Michelle Obama) as well as cringe-worthy in their self-regard and pomposity. “Why would we swim in the shallow end . . . when we could go to the deep end?” she warbled.

Someone who’s definitely in the deep end is Harry. How did he get here, conducting mad think-ins about fear in Vogue? The interview with Goodall felt more like a therapy session in which he offloaded some of his greatest worries including flooding and earthquakes. “If you don’t think that every day is a learning process,” he said darkly, “then life is going to be tricky for you.”

Harry and Meghan at the Lion King premiere

Where is Harry the soldier, the silent, dutiful hero? Of all the young royals, I always thought he was the one most dedicated to service. He was the only one who actually did the army, the only one, apart from the Queen, I’d class as truly brave. Ten years ago, he would have been nailed on as the next Princess Anne, only charming, visiting charities and hospitals, rather than swanning around and appearing in magazines that extol the virtues of Indonesian breathing retreats (Vogue says breathing is an “essential biological function” that should not be taken “for granted"). He’s gone from Anthony to Cleopatra.

He’s clearly unable to persuade Meghan that there is much enjoyment in being a royal. So far she has appeared at only a few occasions, one of them being her own wedding. Whereas Kate might do five charity visits, followed by one Bafta thing, Meghan’s life is solid parties and premieres. Even her appearance at the The Lion King premiere was less as a royal than as a “friend” of Beyonce. If she were performing a proper public role you could possibly excuse her magazine work, but where are the hours of service put in to justify the use of her position for personal gain? Where is the value in any of this for us - the people who pay her?

Meanwhile, we all have a great laugh, wondering why on earth Harry’s married someone who uses the appalling verb formation “meet with”.

The Sunday Times