“Woke Royals”

Years ago when she was an actress, Meghan Markle often wrote in her blog The Tig about the group she called her ‘closest friends’. Some were soulmates, others were celebrities she met at showbiz events and parties. Gradually, that circle of chums broadened to include clothes designers, socialites and charity campaigners.

Among them were David and Victoria Beckham, who were guests at her wedding to Prince Harry at Windsor in 2018. However, their friendship seems to have died. Reciprocally, Meghan and Harry were not guests at the wedding of the Beckhams’ son Brooklyn to US heiress Nicola Peltz in April last year.

I think the in thing is to be Markled.

Even the Hollywood elites are tired of the Sussexes’ tales of woe.

When Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, first appeared on the world stage, she felt to many of us like a bi-racial breath of fresh air, beloved by all but the most stuffy among us. That was until ‘Megxit’ in 2020, when she left the royal family at a trot, dragging the hapless Harry behind her, to spend the rest of her days in a gated community in California. Deals with Netflix, Spotify and book publishers flooded in soon after. Apparently, there was a huge, lucrative market for Harry and Meghan’s ‘insights’.

Snitches don’t make friends in Tinseltown, as Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are finding out.

Celebrities, including their high-profile neighbors Steven Spielberg, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Rob Lowe, are staying away from the exiled royals in fear that they will spill their secrets — and alienate them from Prince William and Kate Middleton.

I bet Harry get’s knifed to death.

The Duke of York had dinner with Jeffrey Epstein at a time when Prince Andrew has suggested they were no longer in contact, according to an email the billionaire financier sent to a friend.

The Duke, 62, indicated during his 2019 Newsnight interview that he had only met the billionaire financier once following his June 2008 conviction for soliciting and procuring an underage girl for prostitution.

Prince Harry is said to be worried about his and Meghan Markle’s future in America.

The couple moved to California three years ago after stepping back from the Royal Family, but it seems they could be set to make their return to the UK.

A source has claimed Harry is “panicking” about their finances following the collapse of their $25million (£20million) partnership with Spotify. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex also missed out on receiving an Emmy Award nomination for their Netflix docuseries.

I see Harry going back to GB, but solo.

The king’s confab with Joe Biden was an outrageous political intervention.

After chatting to British PM Rishi Sunak today, US president Joe Biden headed over to Windsor Castle for the main event of his UK visit – a chinwag with King Charles III.

The duchess craves fame but walked away from her perfect casting

Has anyone ever squandered more goodwill and more quickly than the Duchess of Sussex? It’s hard to remember — now that her UK popularity rating, according to YouGov, is minus 47, her and Prince Harry’s eight-figure deals with Netflix and Spotify are in the bin and she was publicly trashed last week by the chief executive of a Hollywood agency as “not a great audio talent, or necessarily any talent” — but not very long ago most people really, really, really liked Meghan. And it seems to be difficult for her to recall this, given her apparent antipathy to Britain, but people really, really, really liked her here.

You can’t pretend to be Cinderella when you’re really Morgan Le Fay.

By and large, if there is one thing that the world absolutely does not need any more of, it’s podcasts. And yet the death of Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex’s Spotify deal – as public and messy as it was – has by all accounts deprived us of an absolute corker.

Last week, Bloomberg reported that one podcast idea seriously mooted by Harry was to make an entire series about childhood trauma. Not just his own trauma, because he has obviously got enough mileage out of that elsewhere, but the trauma of a group best described as “world baddies”. As Bloomberg wrote, the concept of the show was as follows: “Harry would interview a procession of controversial guests, such as Vladimir Putin, Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump, about their early formative years and how those experiences resulted in the adults they are today.”

I hope they have been ridiculed enough to cause them to disappear from the public eye.

Few falls from grace have been quite so swift

Even for those of us who are not well disposed towards the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, it is hard not to wish — occasionally — that they might catch a break. Yet apart from Harry’s well-judged and unostentatious appearance at the coronation, things have gone from bad to worse over the past six months for the couple. Tetchy High Court appearances; continuing estrangement with the British royal family; and now the apparently total collapse of their wider media ambitions. Few falls from grace have been quite so swift.

They arrived three years ago with royal star power amid a streaming boom, but have notched more cancellations and rejections than produced shows

LOS ANGELES— Prince Harry and Meghan Markle had been out of the U.K. for nearly two years when they began work on a project they believed could transform them from former royals to Hollywood power players.

The subject of endless rumors and gossip, the couple felt qualified to tackle the thorny topic of misinformation. A documentary would cement Harry and Meghan as serious creative types and help shed their reputation as exiles from the House of Windsor trading family dirt for eyeballs.

In early 2021, after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle sat for a bombshell Oprah interview on the heels of their megawatt deals with Netflix and Spotify, the spitball-attracting royals seemed poised to become media machers in their own right. “They reached a whole new audience who now can’t wait to see what happens next,” the veteran royal chronicler Tina Brown told me at the time. Media analyst Rich Greenfield echoed that sentiment, saying, “I think this clearly shows, whatever their profile was beforehand in the US and globally, it’s clearly that much larger now.” A Hollywood source concurred: “I think the crossover appeal—Black Lives Matter meets The Crown—is a fever pitch opportunity.”

Meghan Markle’s public image has taken another hit as polling out of the U.K. suggests she is now more unpopular among Britons than ever.

A survey by global public opinion and data company YouGov in Britain between June 7 and June 8 found that the duchess’ net positivity rating currently stands at -47 percent. This is down six points from data compiled by the company in April.

So even Spotify is sick of Harry and Meghan. They’re ‘fucking grifters’, said an executive there after their multimillion-dollar deal to make saccharine, sub-Oprah pods for the platform came to an end. It was Bill Simmons, founder of the Ringer podcast network, which he sold to Spotify in 2020. On his own podcast – everyone has a podcast these days – Simmons said Spotify should have called their pod with H&M ‘The Fucking Grifters’. He also threatened to get drunk one day and blab about the time he tried to help witless Harry with a podcast idea – ‘It’s one of my best stories’. ‘Fuck them. The grifters’, he said.