At this very moment, somewhere deep in the Cotswolds, the Duchess of Sussex is eyeing up a fruit bush and fondling trees on her new estate.
She is wondering if she can bottle their bounty to make a buck and thinking fondly of the plaudits she’d get for rescuing those damsons in distress.
To date, on the As Ever preserves aisle in Meghan’s little shop of horrors, there is the new spiced apple spread alongside her previous apricot, raspberry, strawberry and blackberry jams of middling quality but high price.
Is there room for more? A niche UK edit, a heritage range of British jams? For it seems there is nothing this Lady of Marmalade can’t do with a soft fruit, a fancy label and a brass neck; one on the glass jar, the other the metaphysical manifestation of her boil, seal and label audacity.
Stop going on about the jam, Jan, I hear you cry! By Jove, your jammy judginess doth jar. Yet I cannot stop. Meghan’s jam has cast a spell on me; it is the hocus poultice on my scone of scorn, the fruit paste that lays waste to any semblance of detachment I might have left. It is everything and it is nothing. It is both spread thin and piled high, if we are to believe the rumours of unsold stock clogging up warehouses across America.
Jam! Of all the things for the duchess to do when she left the UK for a fresh start in the USA, selling jam was perhaps last on her personally-curated list of career possibilities; way behind winning an Oscar, running for president and being the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize while simultaneously eradicating world poverty and showing everyone how to fold a napkin.
Even now, there is no proper reason for Meghan to be selling jam, except that she needed to flog something that connected to and reflected the bounty of her new home in California.
‘Of all the things for the duchess to do when she left the UK for a fresh start in the USA, selling jam was perhaps last on her personally-curated list of career possibilities,’ writes Jan Moir
The duchess’s As Ever brand has a new spiced apple spread alongside her previous apricot, raspberry, strawberry and blackberry jams of ‘middling quality but high price’
She needed a product that was cheap to manufacture but had a sense of place and a commercial resonance. Something wholesome, something sweet, something that didn’t look like she was just another desperate moneygrubber on the hustle, perish the thought.
So, jam it was, jam it remains and, the more I think about it, the more bizarre and utterly incredible it seems.
If the Sussexes had relocated to the state of Georgia instead of California, Meghan would be selling peanuts instead of making peanuts. Perhaps the latter is the real reason why we are where we are, which is somewhere much nearer Cirencester than Sacramento.
This is what concerns me. Where is the duchess on the current Cotswold raspberry jam map? Should she want to sell her jam here, does she pitch herself against Lady Bamford’s ultra-posh brand Daylesford Organic, based at Kingham and sold at £5.50 for 227g – or dare she compare with King Charles’ Highgrove range over at Tetbury, sold at £7.95 for 340g?
Sadly, As Ever comes a poor second on all counts.
For a start it is not organic (like Daylesford), nor do all As Ever proceeds go to charity (like Highgrove) and hers is more expensive than both, coming in a £8.85 for a 215g jar. But the duchess is braving the raspberries and hanging on in there, because what other options does she have?
Apparently, Prince Harry is now going to be a stay-at-home dad and that is marvellous news, although there is another word to describe his situation –unemployed. For, despite his
thousand-year lineage and impeccable connections, it is becoming clear that Harry didn’t really make much of an impact in America. We learned this week that after workshopping ideas with Spotify for 12 months the only plans as he came up with were taste testing hot chocolate and interviewing world leaders such as Vladimir Putin about their broken childhoods. Perhaps over a cup of cocoa, which would have killed two dead dodos with one stone of stupid.
Poor Harry. Nothing came of anything that wasn’t connected to the fact of his royal bearing.
Meanwhile, much has been written about the possible resurrection of Meghan’s acting career as a valuable income stream, but let’s be realistic. Yes, the duchess has a certain novelty value and will certainly attract headlines, but she cannot command a top Hollywood salary nor sustain the dramatic gravitas or presence needed for a major role or appearing in a long-running series.
Where does it go beyond a cameo role or a guest appearance as herself? Nowhere – and she must know this, for she is not stupid, far from.
Of course, there is always room for a walk-on part on Casualty, especially one who brings along her own jam to daub on injuries and wounds in place of fake blood. I knew her strawberry spread would come in useful one day.
In the meantime, one wishes the Sussexes well in their new life in England, where they will still strive to matter and Make A Difference at every opportunity.
This week the couple have sailed into the headlines yet again by condemning Meta for using its data-extraction business model on children and accused the tech giant of settling a £13billion lawsuit to avoid accountability.
You have to laugh. It’s like Mickey and Minnie Mouse firing a peashooter at King Kong.
The case has got nothing to do with the Sussexes, but they remain imbued with a mutual god complex and are secure in their own sense of importance. Their mission is nothing less than delivering us all from evil and making the world a better place, chiefly for themselves.
Indeed, the Sussexes have spent the past six years campaigning for a fairer, greener world, a nirvana free from racism and snobbery.
Harry has been vocal in his criticism of a British society he perceives to be broken and institutionally racist. Yet the first chance they get, the Sussexes are back, flying across the world on a private jet, enrolling their Cali-kids in private, elite schools in one of the richest pockets of the country.
There’s not much diversity in the Cotswolds, where 96 per cent of the population is white and comes complete with one of the biggest concentrations of high-net-worth individuals in the entire UK. What about their own accountability? How does this any of this square with Prince Harry’s concern over rising social divisions, climate change and the underclass?
One supposes this is great and grand hypocrisy of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in all its hard-boiled glory. They want it all, they want it now – with jam on.
Goodbye Dolly… you were class all the way
Dolly Parton died on Tuesday at the age of 80 following a brief battle with cancer
R.I.P. Dolly Parton, who died at the age of 80. I like to think the Queen of Country would have chuckled at some of the cringe OTT tributes celebrities and fans posted about her passing.
Dolly was ‘the voluptuous embodiment of empathy’ wrote Jane Fonda.
Katy Perry went with: ‘She was such a light. Her light ripples and will forever ripple, and I think will shine even brighter now.’
Beyonce got philosophical; ‘Dolly, you were the barometer. The north star. Bold and brilliant. Talented and tenacious. You taught so many lessons on how to be uniquely oneself. I am grateful for your art, your heart, your generosity, your humour, your entrepreneurship.’ Emphasis on the latter.
Poor Ivanka Trump faced a backlash after sharing a quote from Parton about loving and accepting others. Trolls screeched at this, arguing that her father Donald Trump’s insults were in marked contrast to the singer’s famous empathy.
Do not blame the child for the sins of the father, as Dolly herself would no doubt say.
My favourite tribute was the simple one from the Band of the Coldstream Guards, who performed Dolly’s 9 To 5 hit during Changing the Guard at Buckingham Palace. Class all the way.
Gigi’s made it, so why the sob story?
Gigi Hadid walking the runway during the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show 2025 at Steiner Studios in New York City
Gigi Hadid claims she was body-shamed early in her career. That must have been difficult, but it does seem that every beautiful model trots out this same old sob story sooner or later.
We need to know how these glamazons suffered, just like ordinary women.
I suspect it is much harder to be a pimply, overlooked teen with no chance of modelling for Gucci or going out with a film star than it ever was being Gigi.
To be honest, it is hard to sympathise with someone who has gone on to endure such a tremendous amount of success, money and fame.
Gigi is bequeathed by the gift of utter loveliness, is worth about £23million and is dating – possibly even secretly married to – actor Bradley Cooper.
Pass me a hankie, I can’t cope with her ordeal. Blub!
Albashir case proves protecting women on the streets isn’t a priority
The case of Ibrahim Albashir should be shocking, but nothing is surprising any more. In 2024 he spotted a lone woman at a bus stop in Headingley, Leeds, and decided to pounce. He crept up behind her, then slashed her with a broken bottle more than 30 times.
This week the Sudanese asylum seeker of no fixed abode was found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison with an indefinite hospital order.
He stood before the courts as an abject failure of the system, of public security, of basic humanity.
By grim and terrible coincidence, the attack happened barely 400 yards from where Jacqueline Hill’s body was found in 1980, the last known victim of the Yorkshire Ripper.
Both Peter Sutcliffe and Albashir were diagnosed with different forms of schizophrenia, but united in their hatred of women. And what this coincidence suggests to me is that women are less safe on the streets now that they were in the Ripper’s heyday.
Earlier this month, Andy Burnham promised he would be ‘relentless’ on the small boats issue but, like leaders before him, when it comes to hard actions such as process and removal, he doesn’t want to know.
No one is saying that every migrant is a violent psychopath, nor that every critic of asylum policy is a foaming racist. But you have to wonder why Albashir was allowed to wander free at will – and why do we have to pay for his care for the next quarter of a century? Paying the bill for the Yorkshire Ripper was bad enough – can’t this violent misfit be sent back for his own country to deal with him? One hopes there is some legal mechanism that means criminals are deported after committing violent crimes – but don’t hold your breath. If France managed to get rid of him, why can’t we?
This case forces us to think about many important issues. Inaction, supervision and who is and is not released. Such a terrifying, unprovoked attack suggests that protecting women on the street is not, after all, the priority that leaders in Westminster so piously claim it to be.
As I write, the jury is out in the Lindsay Clancy trial and will soon begin its deliberations. What an enormous task it has.
The Massachusetts mother is charged with murdering her three young children at their home in suburban Boston in 2023.
Clancy has not disputed that she killed them, but her lawyers argue she should not be held legally responsible because she was suffering from severe mental illness. Afterwards, she cut her wrists and threw herself out of a first-floor window. She will be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
Some argue that a woman blaming a crime on postpartum psychosis is like a man blaming his testosterone for rape. Others that medication and being wrongly diagnosed were factors. One thing everyone agrees on – this must be one of the saddest cases ever brought before a judge.
