No, I don’t want to be that person who comments every time the Duchess of Sussex posts on Instagram. Not me, no siree.
Yet here I am again, unable to resist the siren call of her irresistible absurdity, drawn to this cyber porthole into Meghan’s psyche like a ghoul slowing down to feast on the gory specifics of a motorway pile-up.
On Wednesday, the Marie Antoinette of Montecito took to Instagram for the fourth time since she relaunched herself on the social media site at the start of the year.
The themes of the previous three posts could be summed up as Hey, I’m Great; Hey, I’m A Great Cook; and Hey, I’m Still Great But My Dog is Dead.
This time around Meghan was in a strange mood; excited, breathless, exhilarated; patting her heart and her head with the thrill of it all. Clearly, she had big news to impart, but what?
Had she and Harry discovered a cure for cancer? Did Disney finally get in touch and offer her a voiceover role as Dawn the Prawn in Finding Nemo 3?
Apparently not. This is what we learned. In the aftermath of 38,000 acres of California being burnt to ash, 29 deaths, 10,000 made homeless, countless lives and businesses ruined, Meghan gave a little girl a free T-shirt, so everything is OK.
In a protocol which would be unfamiliar to our dear departed Queen Elizabeth II, the Duchess told her 1.6 million Insta followers of how ‘my husband and I visited Altadena’, one of the areas devastated by the wildfires.
Meghan posted her latest video to her 1.6 million followers on Instagram earlier this week following the Los Angeles wildfires in which 10,000 people were made homeless
She met a mother and her daughter (‘Oh my gosh, how old are you?’) and learned how the 15-year-old was devastated by the loss of her home and her favourite Billie Eilish T-shirt, which she had bought at a recent concert by the global pop star. It had been incinerated in the fire that engulfed their house.
‘I don’t know Billie Eilish, but I am going to figure out how to get this T-shirt,’ declared the Duchess, as determined as Captain Ahab at the start of his voyage to hunt down Moby Dick. Or indeed, just like Dawn the Imaginary Prawn searching the sewers for little lost Nemo.
Meghan, can I just say something? It’s actually quite easy to find a Billie Eilish T-shirt. You can simply click onto Amazon or – here’s a crazy idea – visit the singer’s official online store.
This is frontloaded with Billie-tastic merchandise, along with dozens of different T-shirts and hoodies which you can pay for yourself.
Instead, Meghan ‘reached out’ to all her A-list friends, asking if they could pass on the message to Eilish herself.
Celebrity Montecito neighbours Adam Levine (Maroon 5 rock star) and his supermodel wife Behati obliged with the connections and a pile of autographed merchandise duly arrived.
‘It’s signed for her! Huge thank you Billie Eilish. And to Adam Levine and Behati, you guys helped get this over the line,’ Meghan gushed on Instagram, in a way that suggested they’d all just raised a billion dollars to combat fire poverty, which is now a Californian thing, although everyone wishes it were not.
Look, I am not denying that this was a lovely effort from Meghan; a humane and kindly response to ease the distress of a traumatised teenager.
She revealed how she’d enlisted the help of her Montecito neighbours to get replacement Billie Eilish merchandise for a teenager who’d lost a treasured T-shirt when her home burnt down
The merch included a lunch box – a favourite of Billie Eilish fans and a reference to a recent hit by the US star – which seemed to puzzle Meghan in her Instagram video
And it is not the only thing she has done behind the scenes in the aftershock of the most devastating series of fires to ever lay waste to her homeland of southern California.
At a time like this, every little drop of comfort helps and an autograph from a pop heroine, even if it is not personalised, would surely bring cheer to any young victim.
The Duchess also expressed her big, blowsy duchessy thanks ‘to everyone who is showing up for people in big and small ways’.
Yes, the implicit royal status Meghan often assumes for herself in her republican exile can be galling, but at least she is doing something at this moment of crisis. As opposed to doing absolutely nothing, like the majority of her critics.
Yet despite these noble intentions, Meghan – and Harry, too – has an unerring ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Just when you think this ever-so kindly cake-baking, tiara-snaffling, banana-messaging, big-hearted, dog-loving, dad-hating dame is not so bad after all, she ruins everything by insisting upon public acknowledgement of her every charitable act, no matter how trivial.
A lunch box, a T-shirt, a hoodie? In Meghan’s world of showy philanthropy, no good deed can go unpublicised.
Every benefaction must be trumpeted from the rooftops, usually by Megz herself – and in this instance on her Instagram account.
A still from the trailer of With Love, Meghan – the Duchess’s forthcoming Netflix lifestyle series
In the brand of performative activism favoured by the Sussexes, one can’t help but be occasionally nauseated by how their support for a good cause is always sublimated by the panting pursuit of an elevated public image – their own.
All the money and effort the Sussexes spend on advisers and image consultants and yet they still blunder into one PR own goal after another; a daisy chain of disasters with no one to stop them scampering around the post-catastrophe landscape like entitled fools looking for an image boost and a photo op.
From Covid to Uvalde to the California wildfires and beyond, some have accused the Sussexes of being little more than tragedy tourists sponging off the tears of others – and not in a handkerchief mopping way.
Perhaps they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. But if the Duchess of Sussex can get so excited about gifting a pile of merch to a single teenager, it makes you wonder what Meghan and Harry’s Archewell Foundation is actually achieving in the philanthropy domain.
Meanwhile, in the history of Sussex cringe, this has to be the cringiest cringe in their eternal land of cringe.
