It is a story so eye-catching, so bizarre yet so strangely in keeping with the age, that even if you have never shown any interest in the royal family, it is transfixing. Trolls on the internet are saying that Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s pregnancy is fake. It is a little bit more advanced than that: one has made a video describing how you can tell that her bump is prosthetic, and opining that this is why she is always holding it, to keep it in place. You can scoff, but that particular YouTuber has 30,000 followers.
This is a heady cocktail: there is a hardcore of Meghan-haters, who will critique her for everything, from using vegan paint to failing to consult the Queen about her birth plan. There are people, genuinely, who resent and despise anyone who is pregnant, and you can hear chimes of them in the tabloids accusing Meghan of “flaunting” her bump, as if the sheer visibility of the prospect of a baby is an act of female self-aggrandising. And then there is a dose of plain racism. Don’t forget that the last high-profile pregnant woman to be accused of faking the baby was Beyoncé.
And, troublingly, there seems to me to be a high crossover between hard-Brexiters and enemies of Meghan. Crikey, if we had seen this coming, that unprecedented nativism (what is a foreigner doing in our royal family?), new alt-right misogyny and a sly white supremacy would all align to strike down this one woman, castigate her every choice, discredit her every motive, disbelieve her every truth, even this really obvious, unarguable bump, we would have done something, surely? It would have been like the film, Get Out: we would have spoken to her with our eyes: save yourself; the UK is bad enough when we are normal; in these tempers, you would not wish us on your worst enemy.
