Does anyone buy Meghan Markle’s sweet tooth?

Strange though this might seem to long-term Spectator readers, I am beginning to warm to Meghan Markle. Not because she has done something worth celebrating, or indeed anything that has shown her to be anything other than self-obsessed, hypocritical and a poseur, but because she is showing an indomitable strength of character that means that, whenever bitter and twisted journalists (guilty as charged) write something derogatory about her, she comes forward with some new act of hubris or attention-seeking that reduces us all to speechless disbelief.

I have, like many of you, been looking forward to the much-delayed launch of America Riviera Orchard, Meghan’s previously announced lifestyle brand. Not because I expected it to be any good, but because it seemed so riddled with arrogance and inconsistency, even down to its meaningless name, that it was surely ripe for mockery. Well, Meghan has second-guessed our expectations and has scrapped the company’s much-ridiculed moniker altogether. Now, the brand will be known as “As Ever,” which, in one of the Duchess’s trademark quirky-yet-insufferable Instagram videos and posts, she informs us means “’as it’s always been’ or some even say ‘in the same way as always.’” Clearly, she thinks of her followers as barely literate idiots, and she may be right. If we are exposed to her nonsense for much longer, I fear that our collective brain cells will swiftly rot away.

It would be a welcome relief to see Meghan fail, but for some reason we are to be denied this simple pleasure. Instead, she has now worked out an even more Faustian pact with Netflix than before. Not only are we to be subjected to her new series With Love, Meghan in a couple of weeks, which I await with the light joie de vivre with which I usually greet root canal surgery, but the streaming company has now made its first foray into groceries with its collaboration on her business. She states in her video that “the cat’s out of the bag” and “there has been a lot of curiosity about” her antics — perhaps, in the same way that people instinctively slow down on motorways to gawp at particularly horrendous accidents — and offers a typically bold explanation for its change of name.

If it is to be called America Riviera, a nickname for Santa Barbara that Meghan pronounced “such a great name,” that limits it, apparently, to produce manufactured in that area. So it now has the meaningless buzzword of “As Ever” — a name that she “secured” in 2022, in the apparent hope that she would find some gullible stooge to partner up with — and therefore has a global reach that will allow Meghan to indulge her well-known love of “crafting, and gardening,” to say nothing making smug, twee little videos of herself, complete with strange jump cuts, as if she had had to put the iPhone down to remonstrate with Prince Harry about his lack of enthusiasm for her great venture, before she resumed filming once again.

We are promised, or threatened, that there will be items for sale that the duchess likes to use in her own home, but “of course there will be fruit preserves.” Phew, for a minute, I was fearful at the potential absence of As Ever-branded strawberry jam. The no doubt lucrative tie-up with Netflix will give the product range a global push that will undoubtedly mean that a supermarket or convenience store near you will feature Meghan’s sure-to-be ubiquitous produce on its shelves, perhaps with a picture of her grinning away on the front. If such things strike you as the stuff of nightmare, then bad news. The insatiable one has managed to turn potential failure and disaster into yet another opportunity to torment us all, and the results will be — as ever, you might say — immensely challenging, all over again.