I opened Angela Levin’s column of 3 November braced for a scandal. The headline promised a tone-deaf fruit platter that ordinary families couldn’t afford, and I’ll admit I was intrigued. Gold-leaf mangoes? Kiwifruit flown in by private jet? Strawberries with their own security detail, billed to the Australian taxpayer?

Readers had to be patient, because the fruit doesn’t show up until nearly the end. It arrives at its own column like a guest who turns up after the plates have been cleared. Before we get there, Ms Levin has other business to settle: Meghan’s manners, Meghan’s trousers, Meghan’s hand-holding, and a jam that doesn’t exist yet.

Let’s start with the jam. Ms Levin warns that the Duchess is bound to scheme her way back into the spotlight, possibly with nothing more than a new flavour of preserve. Britain has survived a great deal, but a marmalade-led coup may be a step too far.

Then the manners. The evidence comes from Nigeria in 2024, on a trip Ms Levin dismisses as a sham, though it was made at the invitation of Nigeria’s military. There, the Duchess was seen taking her husband’s hand. Readers, she held his hand. We’re also told she taps his back and steers him away from conversations. In most marriages this is known as “come on, the car’s waiting.” In Ms Levin’s world, it’s grounds for a royal commission.

She complains that Meghan rarely lets Harry finish a conversation. This comes in a column where barely a paragraph is allowed to reach a second sentence. At one point a lone line announces that Harry sometimes looks ridiculous. No elaboration, no evidence, just a sentence standing on its own like a man waiting for a bus. It’s a brave editorial choice from the author of Harry: Conversations with the Prince. One gathers the conversations have dried up.

Next, the Claridge’s tea with Malala Yousafzai. It was held for International Day of the Girl, and Meghan pledged the proceeds from her jams and teas to the Malala Fund’s work on girls’ education. You might think that worth a paragraph. Ms Levin gives it a sentence and saves her real energy for the trousers, which she says were “wide enough to let two other people in each leg.”

I have read that line many times and still can’t picture it. Four extra guests at afternoon tea, stowed in a pair of Ralph Lauren slacks, quietly working through the cucumber sandwiches. The outfit was estimated at $37,000, though we’re never told by whom. Perhaps by the same expert who studied a worried-looking man inside the doorway and concluded he was probably a protection officer. In fairness to him, he may have just read the column.

That is the method throughout. Meghan lingered outside the hotel, so Ms Levin assumes it was to be seen. Unnamed royal commentators have alleged she was difficult with staff, and royal commentators are a profession best known for quoting other royal commentators. In this column, guesswork does more heavy lifting than the trousers.

At last, the fruit. In her Netflix series, Meghan suggested a rainbow fruit plate as a fun breakfast for children. Ms Levin has costed this at £34–40, helpfully converted to AUD $64–76 so Australians can be outraged in their own currency. Where is she shopping? Most parents can make a rainbow out of a banana, an orange, a handful of grapes and whatever is going soft in the crisper drawer.

She also worries that children are too tired in the morning to sit through a creative lecture. It’s a plate of fruit, Angela. Nobody is lecturing anyone. Arranging grapes in a curve is not a TED talk.

From this, we’re asked to conclude that the Duchess is unfit to judge Junior MasterChef. If the case against her is that she once encouraged children to eat fruit, I suspect the kids will cope.

By the end, the couple are damned in every direction:

• Meghan swore she’d never return to England. Scandal.
• She returned. Shock.
• They promised to keep out of the way. Obviously plotting.
• They gave the King short notice. Rude.

One begins to suspect there is no version of Meghan Markle that Ms Levin couldn’t fill a column with.

Ms Levin closes by hoping Archie and Lilibet aren’t pulled out of school again. My hopes are humbler: a column with one sourced fact in it. Until then, may I prescribe her a healthy breakfast? A rainbow plate of fruit, and a long, quiet morning without the Duchess of Sussex in it. It may cost $64. It will be worth every cent.