The Daily Mail’s dangerous obsession with Meghan

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. 

Looking just at those three stories illustrates the multiple personalities at work in the Mail’s attitude to Meghan. The first, filed by the Sports desk, was a pretty straight forward report on their appearance at a match between the NSW Waratahs and Moana Pasifika in Sydney. It was effectively a rewrite of a press release from Rugby Australia, using the couple’s attendance as a hook to promote the 2027 Rugby World Cup, which is taking place in the country. 

The second was a more obvious attack on Meghan, focused on a claim that she “spent just four hours with female fans who’d paid up to £1,700 to ask her questions and pose for pictures at a money-spinning ‘ultimate girls’ weekend’ in Sydney” and that she “bemoaned her ‘very hard’ life”. The third was a transparent attempt by the Mail to earn affiliate cash from linking out to retailers that sell shirts similar to one the Duchess wore. 

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 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. 

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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 loves to refer to the Duchess as “Meghan Markle”; all its stories about her are tagged with the name. It’s not actually what she’s called anymore, but it’s what she remains in the minds of Mail readers: an interloper, an irritant, the woman who Prince Phillip dismissively called “the American”. 

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. 

One way the Mail manages to produce so much material about Meghan is by writing multiple stories about the same thing. The day after its first regurgitated report on the retreat, another almost identical story appeared. The quotes about her “very hard life” were there again, but this time, there was a focus on another line she’d purportedly uttered during the get-together: “I’ve spent all my life investing in women, can I finally invest in me?” As before, the Mail’s report was a rewrite of another publication’s story, this time an account from an attendee given to The Times. 

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.

“[Harry] had patted and chatted to children and had just been embraced by a smiling woman when the Sussexes’ staffer, the couple’s long-term chief-of-staff, Sarah Fosmo, approached from behind and placed her hand on his right shoulder. She still had her hand on Harry’s back when Meghan fixed her with a stare, the duchess’s mouth tightening in its grin. The glare lasted for around two seconds as Meghan moved in closer to Ms Fosmo, batting her eyelashes as she grabbed her husband’s hand.” 

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. 

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. 

Its tame psychiatrist, Dr Max Pemberton, dedicated an entire column to raging about the remark (“tin-eared self-pity”) while in the Mail on Sunday, Sarah Vine, chuntered about Meghan “monetising her own misery”. 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?

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.