By Daily Mail (U.S.) | Created at 2025-03-18 13:12:56 | Updated at 2025-03-20 15:58:45
2 days ago
Undaunted by the worldwide derision for her sickeningly honey-drizzled With Love, Meghan lifestyle series, Mrs Sussex was straight out of the blocks with not just a second series but the launch of two new ventures.
Her fledgling business As Ever, flogging jams, honey and other homely must-have items, was hotly followed by her reinvention as a podcast guru with Confessions Of A Female Founder, where she will interview other fabulous businesswomen.
Or as one US publication wrote: ‘It is all about ladies who launch, the equivalent of an L-plater yet to even contemplate a reverse park releasing a driving podcast.’
And yet here she is again, the Ferrari of fabulousness motoring on with yet another incarnation.
Which leaves us with one very obvious question. Where is Harry?
Why was he all but whitewashed out of her Netflix series, relegated to a walk-on part of him hugging his wonderful wife and uttering the immortal words: ‘Well done, you did a great job. I love it.’
Is the prince now surplus to Meghan’s media ambitions? Is he the irrelevant spare we have long predicted he would become, a distraction to her new narrative?
Or is the reason the fragrantly reinvented Meghan seems to have distanced herself from her husband because she knew that today a US court was planning to make public controversial files relating to the Duke of Sussex’s long-contested visa application - files that could once again raise the ugly spectre of his drug-taking past?
The Duchess of Sussex's Netflix show With Love, Meghan, showed her making jams, honey and other homely must-have items
The release of her lifestyle series was quickly followed with the announcement of her podcast
A past in which he confessed he took illegal drugs doesn’t exactly suit Megs’s new image of a home-spun, perfect mom in the kitchen, exuding competence and health-giving goodness.
And yet in his memoir Spare and interviews promoting it, 40-year-old Harry admitted that he’d been using illegal drugs since he was a young teenager, a habit that continued into his adult years.
He detailed for the first time his long-term use of cocaine, marijuana and magic mushrooms from his early days as a pupil at Eton.
He talked of psychedelics including ayahuasca, made from a plant in the Amazon basin and capable of inducing schizophrenia.
‘I was willing to drink,’ he said. ‘I was willing to take drugs. I was willing to do the things that made me feel less like I was feeling... I was a deeply unhappy 17-year-old boy willing to try almost anything.’
He added that his marijuana habit started at school and continued from his young teenage years. He went on to disclose, perhaps unwisely, that he had been a regular user of the drug throughout his life.
‘It wasn’t much fun [snorting lines of cocaine with his posh mates],’ Harry insisted, promoting his hateful memoir Spare, ‘and it didn’t make me particularly happy... but it did make me feel different and that was the main goal’.
Prince Harry takes a tumble as he leaves Boujis Nightclub in South Kensington, London in 2007
The prince, pictured drinking with friends at Windsor in 2004, has admitted to taking drugs in the past
Yup, snorting cocaine through £50 notes is enough to make anyone feel ‘different’.
Yet privileged Prince Harry was unrepentant as always. His friend, ITV’s Tom Bradby, asked Harry in an interview: ‘There’s a fair amount of drugs [in the book], marijuana, magic mushrooms, cocaine... are you really saying that, third in line to the throne or whatever you were, you taking a class A drug is not a matter of public interest?’
When Harry replied that his privacy was paramount, even the sympathetic Bradby appeared flabbergasted by Harry’s refusal to take any responsibility for his habit.
Harry’s drug-taking past has become a story because he has a visa to live in the US. And US Citizenship and Immigration Services state that visa applicants ‘who are found to be drug users or addicts’ are inadmissible candidates for permanent immigration into the USA.
Forms for visa applications specifically ask about current and past drug use. And one must not lie. So the question is whether Harry lied about his drug-taking past when applying for a visa.
A campaign to establish the truth was launched by the Washington-based conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation. And thanks to the foundation’s persistence, a judge has ordered the release today of some of the relevant files.
When questioned about his drug-taking by his friend, ITV's Tom Bradby, Harry said his privacy was paramount
Which is surely the last thing Meghan wants as she plays her home-spun new role in a TV show as sweet as apple pie.
Nor will she want Harry’s visa files to rake up her own links to drugs in the past. She may now be a 43-year-old mum of two who’s promoting herself as all things wholesome, but at her first wedding, when she married film producer Trevor Engelson in 2011, she served illegal marijuana in party bags according to guests at the nuptials.
So, the timing is hardly ideal.
Harry and Meghan’s popularity is tanking in America, with their $100million Netflix deal due to end this year.
This really is their last-chance saloon - and you have to ask whether Meghan, so dependent on the success of her new ventures, feels Harry has now become a liability to her rather than an asset.
Crikey, what if Harry had appeared on With Love, Meghan while she gleefully sieved the fine white flour for her honey-drivel cake and a got a bit of white powder on his nose? Imagine the headlines.
Better to leave him on the sidelines walking the dogs and feeding the chooks than tarnish her reputation.
One thing’s for sure. After the success of Meg’s one-pot tomato spaghetti, we shouldn’t expect With Love, Meghan Part Two to include a recipe for one-pot mushroom fettucine any time soon, however magic it is.
