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Meghan and Harry are the last thing LA needs right now

The Sussexes’ performative compassion is as unbearable as ever.

Lauren Smith

Topics USA

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Haven’t the poor people of Los Angeles suffered enough? Imagine losing everything in the incomprehensibly devastating wildfires, only to find yourself in the background of the latest photo-op by Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.

At the weekend, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex made a well-publicised visit to an evacuation centre in Pasadena, Los Angeles County. Photographers and a news crew captured them handing out meals and consoling residents who had fled their homes. In one video, Meghan – ever the actress – looks teary-eyed and embraces an evacuated resident in an awkward hug. As usual, her husband stands around looking gormless.

In what Meghan must have thought was a touching gesture of solidarity, she even decided to delay the release of her new Netflix lifestyle series, With Love, Meghan. Supposedly, this was in order to ‘focus on the needs of those impacted by the wildfires’.

The LA fires have so far destroyed as many as 5,000 buildings and killed 24 people since they began raging last week. It is hard to see how Harry and Meghan are really helping here. As one Babylon Bee headline sums it up, sarcastically: ‘Los Angeles saved after Meghan Markle arrives to stand around wearing baseball cap.’ Making sad faces at the cameras and handing out some sandwiches are not the heroic, selfless acts the Sussexes presumably think they are.

Filmmaker and former actress Justine Bateman went as far as to slam Harry and Meghan as ‘disaster tourists’, accusing them of staging a ‘repulsive “photo-op”’ in the rubble. Bateman also noted that the royal couple don’t even ‘live here’. Indeed, their Montecito mansion is 90 miles away from LA.

Even when disaster strikes, it seems The Harry and Meghan Show must go on. The Sussexes can apparently never pass up an opportunity for some performative compassion.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.

Picture from: YouTube.

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