So Channel 5 has aired ninety whole minutes titled Harry & Meghan: Has America Had Enough?, and the Daily Mail has concluded, with the gravity of a coroner, that nobody cares about Harry and Meghan. Stop the presses. Hold the front page. Clear the next eleven front pages, actually, because they’re going to need them.

Ninety minutes, by the way. An hour and a half of premium telly assembled to inform you that two people are of no interest whatsoever. They booked a documentary slot, a brand expert, the late Queen’s former press secretary and a Daily Mail man to tell you not to think about someone. If you have to schedule it, light it and run subtitles in forty countries, the thesis that nobody’s looking might want a lawyer.

Let’s talk about who delivered this bombshell. The Mail’s headline rests on the wisdom of “royal experts,” and the expert quoted at greatest length is one Richard Kay. Richard Kay is the Daily Mail’s Editor at Large. So to recap: a Mail man goes on telly, says a Mail thing, the Mail writes it up as breaking news, and we’re all meant to gasp at the independent verdict of the experts. It’s a man whispering into one end of a drainpipe and running to the other end to act surprised at what he hears. Genuinely, give the drainpipe a byline.

They padded the panel out, to be fair. A “brand expert.” A couple of royal authors. And Ailsa Anderson, the late Queen’s press secretary, wheeled on to gently mourn Meghan’s “gradual erosion of credibility,” which is a marvellous phrase to deploy about a woman whose every grocery item makes global news. Eroded right off the front page, she has. Again. Today.

And the homework. The Mail ran its verdict two days BEFORE the thing aired, reaction pre-written, conclusions filed before a single viewer had watched a frame. That’s not a review, that’s a horoscope. The show then aired and, surprise, said exactly what the Mail had already decided it said. Astonishing. It’s almost as if the same handful of people write the prophecy AND fulfil it.

Now to the juicy bit, the part they want you to chew on: the “insider” claims. Harry, we’re told by absolutely nobody with a name, once pitched a podcast where he’d review hot chocolate every week. Every week. Imagine the meeting. Imagine the silence after. We’re also told he wanted to interview Putin and Trump about being sociopaths, which, in fairness, I would pay actual money to hear, but I digress. None of these gems come attached to a human being. They float in on a breeze of “sources say,” which is tabloid for “we made it nicer to read.”

Here’s the trick, and once you see it you can’t unsee it. The named experts only ever say the big vague stuff. “The tide has turned.” “A brand that doesn’t exist.” Lovely. Unprovable. Safe to sign your name to, because how do you fact-check a tide. Meanwhile every actual specific, the stuff that would get you sued, arrives anonymous. Names for the fluff, no names for the knives. That’s the whole magic trick and it’s not even a good one.

Watch them try to have it both ways on the Netflix split, too. One sentence: Meghan walked, dramatic, erratic, throwing away a deal others would die for. Two paragraphs later: Netflix dumped her, nobody cared, the jam didn’t fit between Bridgerton and Squid Game. So which is it, lads? Did she flounce or did she get binned? Pick a lane. Oh, but they won’t, because they don’t need it to be true, they need it to be mean, and both versions are mean, so both go in.

And then, the chef’s kiss, the comment section. A thousand of them. Plus an entire Reddit forum, SaintMeghanMarkle, no less, with the word Saint in it, ironically, which descended on the article like seagulls on a dropped chip. And bless them, because in their rush to agree they accidentally demolished the whole story.

Because the article’s big idea is that America LOVED them once and has only now turned. And the haters, the most motivated audience on the entire internet, will not have it. “I am still so freaking tired of the narrative that we all loved them SO MUCH,” snaps one. “Most Americans did not care either way,” says another. “We’d had enough like 8 years ago.” Sweethearts. You’re supposed to be agreeing. You’ve just stood up at the wedding to announce the bride was never pretty. The “tide has turned” can’t turn if your own choir is screaming there was never any water.

Best of all, one of them lets slip that Channel 5 used to be quite NICE about the pair. So this isn’t America waking up. This is one telly channel changing its mind and a tabloid dressing it up as the dawn of human consciousness.

My favourite genre in that thread is the people solemnly explaining that the real punishment is being ignored. “Ignore the Sussexes. They’d hate that.” Says the person. On the Sussexes forum. Replying to the Sussexes article. On day five of a Sussexes thread. Under a username about the Sussexes. You first, babe. You go first.

And that’s the joke that runs through all of it. They’ve printed “the brand that doesn’t exist” in massive letters above a documentary, a thousand comments, an entire subreddit, and a paper that files Sussex content like clockwork seven days a week. You don’t build a cathedral to nobody. You don’t assemble a screaming mob to announce that nobody’s watching. The fuss IS the brand. They’re so busy proving she’s irrelevant they’ve given her the week’s best PR for free.

Anyway. Nobody cares about Harry and Meghan. That’s why this is the only thing anyone’s written about all week. Tide’s well and truly out, darling. Mind you don’t drown in it.