Last year, the Daily Mail’s Richard Eden wanted credit for ruining the Duchess of Sussex’s American Riviera Orchard launch. Because the Mail tries to stalk every move the Sussexes make, they had gotten wind of some trademark application or something involving ARO. Before Eden could spoil it, Meghan went ahead and announced ARO and sent out some ARO-branded jam to her friends. Nothing was ever put on sale, and it was clear (to me) that the original intention was for Meghan to launch her brand concurrently when the Netflix show aired (she was filming it at the time). Now that the show will come out in a few weeks, Meghan is clearly readying her brand. Internet sleuths/stalkers discovered the trail of As Ever over the weekend, and so Meghan once again came out and announced it before the Derangers “ruined” the story.

So, it’s clear that there are a lot of moving parts – because of the trademark filings and legal issues involved with a brand launch, Meghan can’t move like a shark, which is her preference. She has a lot of people watching her every move and there is literally a huge Meghan-hate industry built on trying to disrupt her life, her family and her business. She has to do some things out of PR concerns, but then it ends up making her look sort of half-assed, because she had to announce something unfinished or still in the planning stages. All of which to say, Eden has a new column in which “palace sources” are bashing her for trying to get ahead of the British media’s obsession with everything she does. Some highlights from Eden’s column:

The ARO backstory: In March last year, I contacted the Duchess of Sussex to inform her I had obtained the name of the lifestyle company she was then planning to launch, American Riviera Orchard. As part of our Code of Practice, journalists in Britain are expected to take care over the accuracy of our stories, which often means we notify the subjects of our articles before publication. This gives them the opportunity to comment and to contest anything they feel is inaccurate. Meghan failed to respond. Instead, she posted a video on a new Instagram account the following day, launching the new brand and confirming its name: American Riviera Orchard.

ARO never launched! Yet despite the heady excitement of those early days, the company has still to sell a single product. And yesterday, almost a year after its launch, Meghan took to Instagram again to announce that American Riviera Orchard was no more.

Meghan’s dig at the Windsors: Typically, Meghan justified the new name, As Ever, with what some have seen as a subtle dig at the Royal Family. King Charles’s daughter-in-law said she had not been able to share her passion for food and home for ‘years’, after she shut her lifestyle blog ‘The Tig’ in 2017. She married Prince Harry the following year.

Royal officials are following Meghan’s moves: This week’s embarrassing U-turn over the duchess’s hastily named lifestyle brand has come as little surprise to some of the royal officials who had to work with her after she became engaged to Harry in 2017. One told me this week: ‘This is further evidence of what we’ve seen time and again with Meghan. She doesn’t like to take advice. I’m sure she would have been advised that it was better not to launch her company until everything had been thought through carefully.’ The source added: ‘Meghan was offered so much advice and support after she moved to Britain, including from the late Queen, but most of it she ignored.’

The Sussexes should have stayed in the UK! When Harry and Meghan were still working royals, they were surrounded by a talented and experienced group of courtiers who could always be blamed if things didn’t turn out to the couple’s liking. And that’s exactly what Harry went on to do in his reproachful memoir, Spare. But now the Sussexes are on their own and will have to own their mistakes, however embarrassing.

[From The Daily Mail]

This is very funny: “They were surrounded by a talented and experienced group of courtiers who could always be blamed if things didn’t turn out to the couple’s liking.” Remember the Mother’s Day frankenphoto fiasco last year? Remember how Prince William AND THE COURTIERS made Kate take the blame for it publicly, then the courtiers patted themselves on the back and leaked to the Times that they had a really rough week, making “a princess with cancer” take the blame for a manipulated frankenphoto which caused a global photo agency kill order. The courtiers tossed their favorite white princess right under the wheels of the bus, what do you think those people would have been doing to Meghan this whole time?

As for the royal official sniffing about Meghan refusing to take advice… as I said, there are so many moving parts, and the whole situation is exacerbated by the huge, monetized industry of hate towards Meghan. I get Meghan’s calculations here and why she’s announced certain things in certain ways.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.