Meghan Markle is not content to simply live a quiet life as the Duchess of Sussex and wife to Prince Harry.
She has real ambitions — a fact that she’s never concealed but one that is often treated as somehow shameful by the British press.
These days, Meghan is focused on her Netflix series and her As Ever line of high-end food products.
The brand has found remarkable success in its first months, but like any new business owner, Meghan has encountered the occasional snafu.
Most recently, a glitch on the company’s website enabled users to view As Ever’s inventory numbers.
Yes, every rando who visited the site could see exactly how many jars of artisinal jam Meghan had sold.
That type of breach is no big deal in the long run — its not like the site was exposing people’s credit card numbers or anything — but it did provide fresh ammo for Meghan’s many haters.
You see, the British tabloid press was quick to determine that Meghan had already sold one million jars of jam, at $27 per unit.
And one guy flew into a rage at the idea of Meghan bringing in $27 million just by selling jam.
Writing for The Telegraph, columnist William Sitwell essentially argued that Meghan’s jam sales are a sign that society is in a state of freefall.
He began by laying out for young entrepreneurs what lessons they can take from Meghan’s success:
“Have an absolutely razor-sharp vision of how to become famous and powerful and enact the plan via a blog, TV game shows, a snazzy Netflix drama, snagging a prince and positioning yourself as a helpless princess in a realm of beastly and backward strictures and rigmarole,” Sitwell wrote, adding:
“Then, flee that house of racism and colonial brutality, move to LA, publicise your private agonies in documentaries and drawn-out interviews – painting yourself as an unfairly maligned Messiah-like icon – and, finally, star in a syrupy TV homecraft series before flogging jam.”
Sitwell went on to argue that Meghan’s success is a sign of a much larger problem.
“We all know that there is actually something very, horribly, agonisingly, disturbingly wrong about this,” he wrote.
“Society is surely going wrong, fracturing to pieces, when an influencer of Meghan’s kind, a creature perfectly cast for the modern age, can persuade hundreds of thousands of people to part with their hard-earned money for this type of product,” he continued adding:
“While many talk of the importance of small-time producers – of the fruits of the labour of those who endure a daily grind, hammered by tax and red tape … is that society is now nothing but a hollow vessel of vanity worshippers.”
The irony, of course, is that like so many other anti-Meghan screeds, this one just serves to bolster the argument that millions of Brits hated her for no reason, and she made the right call by relocating to California.
If the haters get this angry over jam sales, imagine how they would react when Meghan stood up for herself.