Is your irritation with Meghan Markle actually a "you" problem?

The Times Radio recently posted a clip to social media featuring TV critic Charlotte Ivers, who declares she’s become intensely bored of… not Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, but the way she, herself, keeps finding Meghan annoying.

I guess that penning endless columns and reviews about a Duchess, while simultaneously needing to write her off as irrelevant, will do that to a person.

Ivers asks, after a rambling diatribe about not knowing whether the Duchess of Sussex is actually a good cook (??), “Is it a problem with Meghan or a problem with me that I find her annoying? Is it that I’m just cynical?”

Ooh, I can take this one! It’s a problem with you!

We should take Ivers at her word, though, because she's done what most of her colleagues never will: admitted that she is feeling a professional-grade level of annoyance with Meghan…and that arrives before she sits down to do her actual job. That is, ahead of any actual reason for it.

She isn't bored of Meghan; she's bored of herself finding Meghan annoying, which means the “finding” has already hardened into a reflex. And because this is a paid position for Ivers, the columns she files also happen to rely on it.

Irritation with Meghan Markle has been professionalized, and editors keep publishing these columns because no one fact-checks it. Of course [insert Meghan-related topic here] is aggravating—no need to cite your sources. And this is a totally reasonable take for not only a professional writer to spend time writing, but also for another grown adult higher up the food chain to approve. Can I get 250 more words?

Ivers, by her own admission, is also bored. I daresay that’s because she’s drained the well. And what she's been drawing on was never spring-fed to begin with. She’s channeling runoff from the mass hysteria that decided, without anything concrete to point to, that there was simply something about the Duchess that got under people's skin—and that feeling, obviously, was justified and very much not a racist impulse.

Did Meghan ever have to do anything to earn her reputation, which I think we can characterize as “somewhat cringe” at best, “straight-up villainous” at worst?

Or has her reputation been back-dated, in a way, to fit the conclusions that were reached about her long before people like Ivers put pen to paper?

In my mind, the years of bullying allegations against Meghan are the sharpest place to test this theory. You would think that if, as her critics insist, her behavior was so egregious, her attitude so sour, and the pattern so well-documented, then there’s no way she would still be getting away with her “grift” of… (checks notes) raising her family in Montecito and producing sticky, engaging content on the side.

Stay tuned, because in next week’s Friday newsletter, we’ll do what virtually no royal coverage has ever dared to do: walk back all of the bullying claims involving Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, in chronological order. We’ll look not only at what has been contended regarding Meghan’s alleged behavior, but also when those claims emerged, to whom they were presented, and where they appeared.

But you don’t really need the whole timeline to watch the pre-empted irritation unfold. Just take the very first thing in the record that people reach for—the very first arrow in the “Duchess Difficult” quiver, or, perhaps, patient zero in the approaching pandemic-level hysteria over Meghan. This, though an oft-cited anecdote in the narrative that Meghan was always poised to become a horrible, demanding diva, is said to have taken place before she ever oversaw any palace staff at all.

The late Queen’s dresser, Angela Kelly, was reportedly screamed at1 by Prince Harry during “Tiaragate”—the saga in which Meghan reportedly wanted to wear an emerald tiara rather than the bandeau piece that Queen Elizabeth had chosen for her. In the harshest retellings of the alleged event, Harry is said to have yelled at Kelly: “What Meghan wants, Meghan gets!”