Meghan Markle is Dame Edna without the laughs

The InterContinental Sydney Coogee Beach is a five-star hotel and doubtless very nice indeed. But the moment I heard the name of the place where Meghan Markle planned to hold her ‘girls’ weekend like no other’ – ‘a very small event for 300 women… a fireside chat with Meghan’, hosted by the podcast, Her Best Life – one great and much-missed shero came to mind: Dame Edna Everage.

Meghan may once have been reviled as a super-vamp whose sexual powers were so extreme that they could make a king give up his crown (or at least make a spare give up bi-weekly visits to Knockers nightclub), but now she increasingly resembles this paragon of passive-aggression, this sumptuous banquet of seething fury, all held together by sugar-sweet assurances that she means the mean-minded slurs she comes out with ‘in a caring way’.

The similarities between the real-life duchess and the late Barry Humphries’ legendary drag act are nothing less than spooky, to use a favourite word of the departed dame. Though Meghan has never written an autobiography called My Gorgeous Life, her lifestyle show might easily bear this title. With her stroppy pseudo-feminist podcast, Archetypes, now just a memory, she has become keen on presenting herself as a ‘housewife-superstar’, just as the late great dame did. Edna summed up her television talk shows as ‘an intimate conversation between two friends, one of whom is a lot more interesting than the other’, and we can be fairly sure that Meghan thinks of her retreat with the broads from Her Best Life this way. Indeed, ‘recollections may vary’ and just as Dame Edna spent a great deal of time jetting around the world involving herself in the burning social issues of the day, who’s to say that they both weren’t on very friendly terms with the late Queen Elizabeth II, as the dame always claimed of herself?

And of course, Harry is Meghan’s Madge, the mute wind beneath the high-flyer’s wings. The original Madge Allsop had been Edna’s bridesmaid, and when we look at footage of the Sussexes’ nuptials, this seems very much the secondary role that the habitual spare played once more that day. Appearing on Desert Island Discs, the dame was allowed to choose Madge as her luxury item, on the grounds that she was ‘an inanimate object’. Whenever Meghan and Harry are seen in public, one cannot escape this image – indeed, some unkind Aussie commentators have dubbed the prince ‘Meghan’s spare handbag’.

But the spookiest coincidence is that in 2000, Edna’s show was called The Royal Tour – and now we are seeing the same from Meghan, a parody of a royal tour, as she traipses around Australia. The difference is that while the dame was mocking herself, Meghan has no idea that she is now viewed as a little light comic relief. The days when she was seen as a threat are long gone, so we can now enjoy the full glory of her self-adoring self-image – and the vast gap between that and the reality viewed by the rest of us.

The four-day tour – stopping in Melbourne and Canberra and then in Sydney for the love-in – began on Tuesday and marks the couple’s first return to Australia since 2018. Though all seemed peachy on the surface then, with Meghan baking banana bread and bringing rain to a drought-hit outback, there were already whispers of tardy turn-ups by the duchess due to diva-strops over hair and wardrobe. It was also on this tour that Meghan allegedly uttered to an aide (according to biographer Valentine Low) what might be the most pivotal words of her public life as she saw the cheering crowds outside the Sydney Opera House: ‘I can’t believe I’m not getting paid for this.’

This time, it’s personal. Writing in Woman & Home, Emily Andrews noted that:

‘Initially, I was told by [the Sussexes’] people that this was not a tour; rather a series of “private business meetings”, looking at “potential supply partners and chains” for Meghan’s As Ever brand with “not much media”. So imagine my surprise when I was sent their four-day public itinerary last week, to see it looked like a carbon copy of the royal-tour playbook.’

She’s not kidding. A war memorial, a women’s refuge and a children’s hospital are hardly the kind of visits a hard-headed businesswoman seeking to further her brand in unconquered territory undertakes (though appearing as a guest judge on Masterchef Australia certainly is). It all makes sense when it was revealed that the pair will be accompanied by both a photographer and a reporter from the Press Association, which files to media all across the world.

As we saw when Meghan and Harry filmed themselves sniggering inside the late queen’s childhood playhouse in order to make their Netflix documentary look more ‘royal’ than it was for an American audience, with these charmers, there is no line drawn between public and private life, between public service and self-serving. That their security may be partially funded by Australian taxpayers has further muddied the waters on whether this trip is public or private. But whatever the occasion, it’s on the Sussex bingo card that Haz and Maz will be holding a pity-party at some point wherever they go – and Australia is no exception. Harry claimed during a speech in Melbourne that for a long time he never wanted to be a working royal as ‘it killed my mum’. On the contrary, according to Diana herself, it was her public service that gave her strength and purpose. We might add that she actually died while speeding around Paris with a playboy, after a summer sitting around on various yachts being bored.

Not letting anyone forget who’s the star in this act, Meghan has gone one better, saying she was bullied online ‘every day for 10 years’ and became ‘the most trolled person in the world’ while speaking in Melbourne about the hazards of social media, which she reviled as ‘that billion-dollar industry… completely anchored and predicated on cruelty to get clicks’. We’ve got something in common at last, as I had her unofficial ‘squad’ after me on X at one point after writing a critical column about her. It was the only time the suicide of my son had ever been used to attack me. As with so many people of their political stripe, the Sussexes seem to believe that if you identify as ‘kind’, you can be as nasty as you want, as she has been with her jibes at the princess of Wales, and he has been about everything from his brother’s hair loss to his stepmother’s ‘dangerous’ media connections.

But the proof of the petal-garnished pudding will come this weekend when we will find out how the ‘fireside chat’ at the Coogee Beach Hotel went. At the time of writing, all we know is that Meghan only spent two hours at the retreat, and she used that short time to bemoan her ‘hard life’. What was hopefully mooted as ‘Megstock’ sounds more like it was ‘Marklefyre’.

Surely, by the time her royal tour is over, this awful creature’s illusions about her international popularity will be revealed as completely jerry-built and the whole shoddy edifice will collapse. But unlike Dame Edna, I reckon that this housewife-superstar won’t be laughing all the way to the bank. Still, think of the private pity-party she can have.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, ‘Notes from the Naughty Step’, here.