Meghan’s Buzzkill and a Murder Mystery Solved After 48 Years
With Love, Meghan never really recovers from its preposterous opening scene of Meghan, dressed in a veiled beekeeper’s space suit, whispering with her apiarist about the wonder of bees. (But is the apiarist really hers? The house where the show is shot isn’t. Perhaps he was found on Air Bee and Bee.) Much of the rest of the episode is devoted to preparing the banquet of perfection and fragrant bath potions that will be showered on Daniel Martin, her makeup artist, dear dear friend, and bemused hostage. He was probably found in a coma the next morning, overpowered by the fumes of grated lemon zest.
With her unerring instinct for getting it wrong, Meghan has come out with a show about fake perfection just when the zeitgeist has turned raucously against it. Trump's America is a foulmouthed and disheveled cultural place where podcasters in sweaty T-shirts, crotch-rot jeans, and headphones achieve world domination on YouTube. The real person of the moment is Pamela Anderson with her proudly wan bare face. As early as 2015, the lifestyle OG Martha Stewart understood the tide was turning against over-produced flawlessness when, as she put it, she dug herself out of “a fucking hole” of Martha hate by trash-talking her own mistakes at a Comedy Central roast of Justin Bieber. Meghan, on the other hand, has never figured out a convincing persona. Masquerading as an influencer, she's the ultimate follower, which inevitably means she is behind the curve.
Reality Show
The series Meghan should have made is the story of what a flaming flop the last five years have been. Candor at last. If she had shown us that truth, with door-slamming scenes of her shrieking “find me an effing project” at the multiple “brand consultants” revolving through her Montecito manse, and Harry conked out on a sofa in his earbuds, the British public would be clamoring to have her back.
Instead, With Love, Meghan is a testament to how far the beleaguered Duchess of Sussex has rowed herself backward in time since she first burst into the public consciousness more than eight years ago. How on point with the era she seemed then, the biracial beauty who, despite bringing out the worst misogyny in the tabloid press, became a feminist influencer the world – and Prince Harry – could rush to defend. To sign on as a royal, she had to close down her successful blog The Tig, a lifestyle/female empowerment mash-up that was a strenuous knockoff of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop ethos. It presented a Diptyque candle-scented world sprinkled with celebrity girlfriend crushes, humanitarian shout-outs for fashionable liberal causes, and bath products made by women survivors of domestic abuse. Wreathed in social justice umbrage and posing barelegged in daring strapless Ralph & Russo haute couture for Vanity Fair, she was the great youth and diversity connector the House of Windsor sorely needed.
It’s worth remembering that during that blazing year of her courtship and engagement to Harry, she even eclipsed beloved, relentlessly appropriate royal icon Kate Middleton, who had succumbed without a murmur to royal pantyhose and taken five years to appear on the cover of Vogue muffled in a brown suede Burberry coat. To the discomfort of the then Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the New York Times proclaimed the newest royal couple “young, diverse and exuding cool.”
There was one pivotal what-might-have–been moment for Meghan in 2018, before everything went sideways, when her culinary and lifestyle interests fused with an authentic charitable initiative. Remember her recipe collaboration with immigrant women displaced by the tragic inferno of the Grenfell Tower? Together: Our Community Cookbook raised £500,000 for the fire victims and was an instant Amazon bestseller. Photographs of a charmingly absorbed, apron-clad Meghan stirring a stove-top sauce at the Almanaar Islamic Centre in west London alongside grateful moms was a PR slam dunk for both her and a monarchy seeking to modernize.
Chill Out
The trouble with Meghan is, she’s just too damn impatient. Who announces a new lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard, and hounds celebrity friends to talk up her strawberry jam on social media, without doing due diligence on the availability of the trademark?
Her ravenous quest for prestige and a supersized Hollywood halo means she is in an endless boot camp for reputation rehab. Dial back to the original epically misconceived blunder, when the palace was blindsided by the Megxit emancipation proclamation (fully spelled out on a website called Sussex Royal, a title they had not sought the necessary permission from Queen Elizabeth to use). It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that, at age 94, the monarch clearly had only a few years more to live, at which point the family chess pieces would start to move around the royal power board. All Meghan had to do was shut up and wait. Go quiet for a couple of years, start a family, keep her eyes trained on the splendid royal real estate that would soon come up for grabs. (As it is, King Charles is so overhoused, he could sleep in a different palace every night.)
The moment William ascended to his role as Prince of Wales, there would have been new global gigs and red carpet roll-outs raining down on the Sussexes’ heads. But no. Offered the Commonwealth or Netflix, the Sussexes, with naïve avarice, chose Netflix— AND a three-book deal, AND a Spotify podcast contract— forgetting the dread obligation to grind out successful “deliverables” they mostly failed to deliver. The commercial blockbusters of the Harry & Meghan documentary and Harry’s explosive memoir Spare were Pyrrhic victories that alienated the House of Windsor for good and burned the Sussexes’London Bridge to the ground.
What Harry and Meghan forgot was that the great thing about being royal is you can be as boring as fuck for as long as you live and still be treated as the most important person in the room. The only reason any of these deals were signed was for low-down dish on the royals, and Meghan, in another fit of vainglorious yearning – this time for a sit-down with TV’s ultimate deity–gave that away to Oprah for free, infuriating Netflix, whose multi-million dollar deal got them sloppy seconds.
Four years later, the Sussexes' life is now all about pretending: showing up at B-list charity galas that would have been tossed into a palace private secretary’s reject pile, making uninvited disaster tourism appearances, or going on mock royal tours that only serve to remind us they could have done the real ones with more sizzle than anyone else in the depleted House of Windsor.
Before the first season of her new show dropped, Netflix had renewed it for a second. In a video on Instagram, Meghan explained about her nascent business, “As Ever essentially means as it’s always been. And if you’ve followed me since 2014 with The Tig, you know I’ve always loved cooking and crafting and gardening. This is what I do and I haven’t been able to share it with you in the same way for the past few years, but now I can.”
Yes, let time run backward. Let’s expunge all the botched recent history and return to the airbrushed days of The Tig. That's what Meghan wants: Back to the Future That Never Was. The Future That Was Supposed To Be. No mess. No controversy. And perfect table settings.
(In case you missed it, check out my gab session about Meghan Markle and more with the always entertaining entertainment industry guru Janice Min, founder of
)The Story that Got Away
For the last five years, since my husband Sir Harry Evans died at the age of 92, I have spent multiple weekends in the basement of our house in Quogue sorting through the hundreds of boxes of his papers and books that catalog the six decades of his epic life as a newspaperman, reporter, author, photojournalism aficionado, and historian. Harry, whose guiding mantra was “Let's just find out what the bloody facts are!" (Who knew that would ever become a controversial phrase?), was best known for his legendary editorship of the Sunday Times, where his Insight investigative team broke the story of the Foreign Office cover-up of Kim Philby as a Soviet spy and unmasked the corporate deception at the heart of the DC-10 Paris air crash in 1974. His greatest triumph was a 10-year campaign to win compensation for the victims of the morning sickness drug thalidomide, which had inflicted birth deformities on thousands of babies. Earlier in his career, as editor of The Northern Echo, he secured a posthumous pardon for a young Welshman wrongly convicted and executed for the murder of his wife and daughter, a campaign that was critical to the end of the death penalty in the UK. In 2002, when Harry was voted best British newspaper editor of all time by his peers, he asked with his customary cockiness, “What took them so long?”
A story that always obsessed Harry was the one that got away. Well into his 80s, he was still trying to answer the question of who killed David Holden, one of his star foreign correspondents, who was murdered in Cairo on assignment to cover the peace talks between Israel and Egypt, ten years after the Six-Day War, in 1977. In his memoir My Paper Chase, Harry recalls how he first heard the news of Holden’s violent end.
“Late on a Saturday, December 10, the dreaded call came to our office in Gray's Inn Road. The British embassy had heard that the body of ‘an unknown European male’ was in Cairo's Kasr el Ainy mortuary. Bob Jobbins, the BBC Cairo correspondent, who went to the mortuary and at once identified Holden, was struck by the lack of any obvious injury, save a small exit wound in his chest. ‘An apparent execution,’ he presciently observed.
Holden's body had been found at 8am on Wednesday, nine hours after his arrival in Cairo. He lay on a sandy patch, littered with old newspapers, by the highway that ran beside the walls of Al-Azhar University. He was on his back, his feet neatly together, his arms folded across his chest in a mocking parody of repose. His expression was calm, his hair as sleek as ever. All marks that might suggest his identity or nationality had been removed, down to the maker's label in his jacket.”
Within hours, Harry dispatched six reporters to the Middle East, peppering them with questions to answer about who knew what and when about Holden’s assignment, and what he was doing for every hour of his final days. Fascinating clues did emerge. Holden turned out to have a hidden gay life and many connections to the underworld of spies. And back at the Sunday Times office, there were unsettling mysteries. Eight telexes about Holden's changing travel plans had gone missing. Was there a mole inside the paper itself ? The regretful conclusion Harry eventually reached was that Holden himself had been working in intelligence–but for whom, and why he was liquidated, the Insight team could never solve.
Now, 48 years later, two reporters, Peter Gillman, who led the original investigation, and the brilliant young Sunday Times reporter Emanuele Midolo, have joined forces to solve the mystery and published their conclusions in a gripping book, Murder in Cairo, just extracted in the Sunday Times. It is an astonishing tale in which even former Sunday Times foreign manager and James Bond creator Ian Fleming appears as a mysterious deus ex machina.
The documents behind that story and many others in Harry’s career are sealed in a container currently being sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. Though every time I descended the basement stairs in Quogue I cursed the fact that my husband was a lifelong compulsive hoarder of every detail of every investigation, I also felt the haphazard towers of overflowing boxes were a form of consolation, the uplifting proof to me of his relentless industry in the service of getting at the truth. Trawling through his rigorous reporting notes, legal fights, often hilarious correspondence, and illegible jottings from off-the-record calls about potential news bombs was a way of keeping him with me, urging me to never surrender to the myth of a “post-truth world,” a phrase that made him explode with contempt.
But I knew that eventually these remarkable archives of a golden period in British journalism needed a permanent home. Now they have one at the prestigious and gloriously neo-Gothic John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester, where Harry started his career as a reporter at the Manchester Evening News. Last week, a representative from the Rylands library came to Quogue, and Harry’s treasured boxes were at last loaded onto a truck to be shipped to the UK. Descending to the now empty basement, I felt, I must confess, terribly bereft– but was comforted by how thrilled Harry would have been to see the David Holden mystery solved at last.
Enjoyed critique, Megan’s mis-stepping to - B- list social gatherings for me recalls that King Edward VIII abdicated the British throne in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson, and their subsequent decline to the B-list. Your comments regarding your husband are beautiful. Thank you.
One thing that really fires up the anti-Sussex lobby in the UK is their abnegation of 'duty'. But despite having burnt their monarchical boats they could make up lost ground by assuming another kind of duty. Ditch the donut-glazing and the desperate socialising and take up some form of out-of-the-limelight service. He's got a good rep with military vets. She knows how to get behind a cause. Perhaps they could build on that. Atonement always plays well.