The Duchess of Diva and the death of Diana
Tragically, Meghan replicates the most destructive characteristics of her late mother-in-law
The most unintentionally hilarious and revealing moment in the preposterous podcast remarks by Prince Harry’s wife, the Duchess of Sussex, came when her co-interviewee, the singer Mariah Carey, suggested that perhaps Meghan had on occasion behaved like a diva.
Meghan’s other observations in that podcast were so offensive and stupid that they have drawn widespread ridicule and criticism around the world.
Comparing herself to Nelson Mandela drew an all-too deserved rebuke from Mandela’s grandson. Having set out with unbridled arrogance and no small malice to destroy the Royal Family while exploiting her marriage for shedloads of money, she was now casting herself as a saintly character bursting with forgiveness. And she issued further menacing threats to the Royal Family about what she might say in future.
A remark by Mariah Carey, however, instantly punctured this grotesque balloon of delusional narcissism. Said Carey:
You give us diva moments sometimes, Meghan, don't even act like (you don’t).
The effects on Meghan of a remark that wasn’t “her truth” but the truth (if itself understated) appears to have been traumatic. She said later:
I started to sweat a little bit and started squirming in my chair in this quiet revolt, like ‘wait, no, what, how could you? That’s not true, why would you say that?’
And then she dug herself deeper into the hole of idiocy when she claimed that Carey had in fact meant this as a compliment. Said Meghan:
So, she must have felt my nervous laughter, and you would’ve all heard it too, and she jumped straight in to make sure I was crystal clear when she said diva, she was talking about the way that I dress, the posture, the clothing, the quote, unquote fabulousness, as she sees it. She meant diva as a compliment, but I heard it as a dig, I heard it as the word diva as I think of it, but in that moment as she explained to me, she meant it as chic, as aspirational, and how one very charged word can mean something different for each of us, it's mind-blowing to me.
Oh dear. Carey most definitely had not meant it as a compliment, regardless of how she tried to reframe her observation. A diva is someone who acts like the world revolves around her. Meghan is the very quintessence of divadom.
She is also the apogee of the victim culture she so noisily promotes, in which those who are considered to have been hurt by the powerful demand a free pass for their behaviour.
As such, her marriage to Prince Harry represents a desperately sad continuity with the mother-in-law she never knew, the late Diana, Princess of Wales. And today marks the 25th anniversary of Diana’s death in a Paris car crash.
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