All of us here on this blog have watched the British media’s ten-year obsession with Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. It will be ten years exactly this coming autumn, that’s when Meghan and Prince Harry’s relationship was outed in the press. Since that moment, ALL of Britain’s print outlets have been obsessed with Meghan, obsessed with talking about her race, her clothes, her background, her jewelry and everything else. Their coverage turned blatantly racist, sexist and anti-American immediately and it’s never stopped. She exited that island more than six years ago, and the tabloids especially still treat her like she’s their #1 royal. The most fixated outlet is, without a doubt, the Daily Mail. On average, the Mail publishes at least three critical stories about Meghan every single day, but the number vastly increases if she’s out and about and there are new photos. Well, The New World had some interesting analysis about the Daily Mail’s “dangerous obsession with Meghan.” You can read the full piece here, and here are some highlights:
Meghan still makes money for the Mail: If you apply Occam’s Razor to the Daily Mail’s enduring obsession with Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, the simplest explanation is an economic one. It pumps out so many stories focused on her because its readership keeps clicking on them, with an angry hunger for more. If their interest in her evaporated, so would the Mail’s prodigious output about her. But that won’t happen any time soon. The avalanche of stories creates more interest, which fuels the creation of even more stories.
A constant stream of invective, online and in print. Over the course of one day during the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s recent trip to Australia – April 16 – the Daily Mail website pushed out a story on the couple roughly every two hours between 5 am and 3 pm. The following day, it published three stories with a focus on Meghan in 12 minutes: one about the couple attending a rugby match (11.23 am), one about her posing for pictures at a paid event (11.35 am), and one focused on an oversized shirt that she’d worn on the trip (11.37 am). It gives fresh meaning to the phrase up-to-the-minute news.
The Mail’s contradiction: There’s a contradiction at the heart of all of the Mail’s Meghan coverage. It consistently argues that no one is interested in her while expending considerable energy on ensuring that her every move is reported. While its news pages keep up a constant drumbeat of derision, its fashion pages pore over her outfits to tell their readers exactly where to find those specific clothes, as well as more affordable versions of them.
The Sydney retreat: The reporting on her appearance at the Her Best Life retreat in Sydney was a masterclass in the use of slight distortions. In story after story, the Mail implied that the event was created by the Duchess rather than one at which she was simply being paid to appear. It sounded awful enough without the heavy spin applied by the Mail: women being charged £1,700 or more for a weekend of “coaching, yoga, sound healing”, and other expensive forms of empowerment. But those women were not, as the Mail insisted over and over again, paying all that money simply to get a photo with Meghan. This wasn’t a hostage situation. No one made the attendees pay up at gunpoint. They were there willingly and wanted to see the Duchess of Sussex. Let’s take a closer look at how the Mail framed it: “Meghan Markle spent just two hours with female fans who paid up to £1,700 to ask her questions and pose for pictures at a money-spinning ‘ultimate girls’ weekend’ in Sydney, where she bemoaned her ‘very hard’ life. The Duchess of Sussex will reportedly net up to £130,000 for turning up to the women-only Her Best Life retreat on the final day of her Australian tour with Prince Harry.”
The Mail’s attacks prove Meghan’s statements: If she were someone the Mail supports, she would have been praised for spending two hours answering questions and posing for pictures. But as it’s her, it was “just” two hours. That line about her “bemoaning” her existence came second-hand. The Mail’s reports rehashed words from The Sydney Daily Telegraph, which managed to get a reporter into the event. While the Mail’s headline and copy suggested Meghan had complained about her “very hard life”, she was, in fact, talking about how hard life in the public eye can be and saying that she has “endured” constant attacks for a decade. A quick look through the Mail’s online archives shows that’s unquestionably true.
The “Meghan’s glare” fiction: A lack of anything new to say about Meghan doesn’t stop the Mail. Three days after Harry and Meghan toured a hospital in Melbourne, it managed to create a story based on a few seconds of footage from the visit. The paper treated the clip as if it were a section of the Zapruder film capturing the assassination of JFK. The Mail’s story stretches to 564 words, most of them taken from posts lifted from X. It’s nothing but projection, nasty jokes and smears from a social network, all turned into a grotesque parody of analysis. The only thing that separates the Mail from those social media obsessives poring over a clip to create a narrative that has very little relation to reality is the size of its megaphone. It can turn a brief expression in a video into proof of a “tense moment”, a story that will hang around and be referred to as evidence to support even more elaborate theories.
Toxic fascination: You don’t have to like Meghan or find anything she does remotely interesting to recognise the extent of the Mail’s toxic fascination with her. When she suggested on that Australian trip that she might be the “most trolled” woman in the world, those words enraged the Mail’s commentators… Could it be that the paper is so angry about the Duchess talking about her online treatment because it has spent so many years monetising bullying?
Ten years of bad-faith reporting: Over just 19 days in April 2026, the Mail published 70 news stories using Meghan as a hook. That is an obsession on an industrial scale. That’s not to say that she should be beyond criticism; she’s a public figure whose business relies on selling a story about herself, her husband, and her children. But the level of scrutiny applied to her goes way beyond what other comparable figures receive. There is no move she can take, no choice she can make for which the Mail won’t find the most bad-faith explanation possible. If the paper truly believed Meghan was a woman of no interest, it wouldn’t expend so much time and so many resources on observing her every move. It knows there’s money in that malice, so the machine rumbles on.
There was genuinely a moment in 2020 when I hoped that the British media’s collective psychosis around Meghan would break when they realized that she escaped their toxic clutch and she was no longer “theirs” to abuse and defame at will. How naive of me, right? While I think Meghan is in a much better place in general, the Mail – and other British outlets – still exercise what looks like “ownership” of Meghan. They genuinely feel that, despite her escape, she’s still “theirs,” they still “own” her story, they still “own” her life. What’s sick is that no one, not the readers, not the editors, not the advertisers, not the reporters and columnists, none of them ever has a moment of honesty with themselves and acknowledges the insanity and toxicity of their lopsided fixation.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.
