Who wants to be a billionaire? Meghan!

And she reckons she can do it, too (according to sources)… But does this make her an aspirational, entrepreneurial feminist mega force? Or a greed-addled hustler?

According to a DPS (double page spread, bbz) in The Sun, Meghan not-Markle intends to make a billion dollars from her lifestyle empire, the jam, podcast (Confessions of a Female Founder - sounds a smidge like Diary of a CEO, non?), etc . “She wants a private jet. She wants to live a certain life,” The Sun’s sources say.

She appears to have launched this phase of her campaign to be absolutely f**king minted with a shopping page, using a portal which means she gets affiliates – a cut - on sales of the clothes she features. Which is something influencers do. Though she says she’s not an influencer. She’s a “female founder”, an “entrepreneur,”.

Anyway.

I had a look at the shopping.

It’s… alright?

Supremely neutral (in both vibe and colourway), nowt to scare the horses (where horses = maximised potential customer base). She seems to like Uniqlo as much as me – there’s a £99 trench coat up there (NB let it be noted, I myself do not like a trench. Can’t get on with them) – and some Rayban sunnies and a £120 shirt from another one of my faves, With Nothing Underneath. There was one off-white maxi gown I liked enough to click through on, but it turned out it cost £1072, so that was the end of that. Until I noticed the style was called “Windsor”, which obvi made me Windsor, sorry, wonder, if it was less a shopping suggestion, more a coded message.

I mean, it IS nice…

Question is: why does this wind us up so terribly? Not the edit. As I say, that’s so extraordinarily inoffensive, it’s not even offensively inoffensive. It’s exactly the right level of inoffensive - really not an easy a thing to pull off.

But not that.

It’s Meghan’s alleged desire to be absolutely insanely loaded, just drowning in filthy filthy lucre, which is winding us - her not-exactly adoring public - right up. It’s a thing we’d suspected burned within her, which is now… not “confirmed” precisely, anonymous sources aren’t exactly a smoking gun, (though in my experience of them, they are more reliable, more informed than one might first assume). But it’s definitely more out there than it used to be.

And we do not like her for it.

Which might say more about us, than her.

Although, then again, maybe not.

How do I feel about Meghan It’s Really Definitely Sussex Actually (maybe) wanting to be stinking rich? Well, first of all, I would very much need to extricate that, from how I feel about her generally, which is…

Well. I haven’t mentioned her to this point for a reason, have I?

Partly because everyone else got stuck into Meghan, With Love, and… I don’t love a pile-on. Plus I barely watched 10 minutes of the show. Hostessing is really not my style - hey: have you guys heard of “restaurants”? And “hotels”? They’re great - so even assuming this was the best ever, most genius, creative, informed, revelatory hostessing show In The World Of All Time, it wouldn't work for me. Which means I have zero right to judge her show, or her ability, or character, on those grounds.

It’s also because it just is quite hard to feel fondness towards an individual who rubbishes your entire profession at every opportunity, which would mean I probably ended up being mean, because I feel tangentially attacked, which isn’t noble.

But mostly? I suspect she’s just not my kind of gal. I don’t know for sure because I haven’t met her, but on the face of things, from a massive distance, one which will, in all likelihood, never be breached, so I’m never gonna know if I’m wrong… She does seem like one of those people who cares more about how things seem, than how they actually are.

More concerned with how things look, to everyone else - over how they feel, to herself, to those closest to her.

She is, I sense, an appearances and optics over experiences and truth person.

And I don’t get on with them, as a rule. They’re quite exhausting and they always want selfies with you which they’ll digitally doctor so they look amazing and you look unrecognisable/ awful / alien before posting so that everyone knows they know you although they always want to talk to someone more important and useful than you anyway, but when they do talk to you, they’ll go ON and ON about how they’re “terrible people pleasers”, and you always find yourself thinking: “I’m a person, and you’re not pleasing me…'“

But I don’t know for sure she’s one of those. And even if she is, so what? It’s a bit like her TV show innit. If you don’t like the show, don’t watch the show.

Plus I might just think I don’t like her, because I’m a racist who’s internalised her misogyny AND ANYWAY… Why should any of that, have anything to do, with whether or not Meghan I’m Sussex Now How Funny You Keep Saying Markle makes a billion dollars?

I am definitely very much of the opinion women should earn cash as and how they wish, and make no apology for it. I love Katherine Ryan for approx 172 different reasons, but one of them is how unqueasy she is about making money with the kind of ventures traditionally perceived as “selling out”.

“Why wouldn’t I want money?” she told me, when I interviewed her last year. “There might be a day when people stop offering me money. I’m like a child with a biscuit. ‘Do you want a biscuit?’ ‘Yes, of course I do!’… “

Like Ryan, I am not at all embarrassed about needing to earn money, or liking earning money. I do. And I do. I’ve written here about how I nearly went broke because of the decline in journalism, but even before then: I always needed/ wanted/ liked earning money. I’ve never had loads and loads, so I’ve always embraced opportunities to make it. If you’re not from money - which Ryan isn’t and I’m not, and Meghan isn’t, though her husband obviously is… I wonder if it’s always there. The fear of it going, the related thrill, of making just a bit more.

And I’ve always found pride and power in the earning of it. I don’t know what to do with it, when it’s given to me; it never quite feels like mine. But if I’ve flirted it out of some punter from the other side of a bar, or turned in a nice bit of copy for it: magnificent! Lovely LOVELY money!

While there are plenty out there who suspect Meghan married for money… this? This is all about her, making her own.

And there is nothing wrong with that. Meghan Gets Ridic Rich could conceivably be considered an act of feminist defiance, given that women have only really been in a position to make money at all for the last 50ish years. We only got access to our own bank accounts and mortgages in ‘75, bitches!

Although equally, Meghan recently insisted in an interview with People magazine that she is “not an influencer:", but rather “a female founder… an entrepreneur”, which rather suggests she herself is prone to a little light snobbery re: which women should make money, and how. Can we be expected to (morally, if not financially) support Meghan’s money-making efforts, if she is tacitly deriding the money making efforts of others?

ALSO: greed is a thing. There’s a point when an honest desire to earn a little bit more money (this, of course, is how I view my own) gets warped into a manic, mindless, polluting and corrupting compulsion. How can we tell when we hit it, and who else has? I’d say Just Wanting A Billion might qualify. Just Wanting A Billion, as opposed to: hoping to earn a living by putting beautiful stuff out into the world, or, wanting to be decently paid for a job you love and are good at. That could explain our collective ick, here.

And there is such a thing as mindless ambition. There really is. I know, I know; ambition in women has been - is, still - frowned upon. Considered unfeminine and ugly. Reframed as “ruthlessness”. But that doesn’t mean that no woman is capable of totally losing it to her desire to just Win and Get More, and Show Them All They Never Should Have Doubted Me. It doesn’t mean that female ambition can’t, on occasion, corrupt, as surely as male ambition can.

And also, I was rather taken with Tina Fey’s recent conversation with Amy Poehler. Poehler had asked her why Fey - a famous wearer of specs - hadn't launched an eyewear line, and Fey replied: “I have a problem with rich people having a side hustle,” (her eg: launching rosé wine lines) “if you already have like $200 million…” And Meghan can seem a bit… all side hustle, no main; no actual purpose? Can’t she? Which is maybe just my outdated Gen X work-addict perspective playing up, or maybe my racist internalised misogyny again BUT… a bit?

Yet at the same time, I have no issue with Gwyneth Paltrow being worth an estimated $200 million because of her side hustle, Goop, which looks an awful lot like Meghan’s if you squint, though it’s unarguably better bedded down. I just think: '“Good on ya, living your best, richest life”. And I have no problem with Rihanna’s Fenty (the concealer is really good). And The Olsen twins’ The Row is insanely overpriced fire, but fire nonetheless, and VB’s side hustle has, I think we can all agree, turned out to be the thing to which she was born to do (THE EYELINER)…

So maybe I do just have a problem with Meghan.

And yet…