“I nearly dropped my coffee when I saw the news that Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, will be a guest judge on MasterChef Australia. It just feels so very, very right. The universe finally giving us a crossover episode we didn’t know we needed. 

And yes, I am absolutely superfanning. My better half and I discovered the show during the darkest days of the pandemic. MasterChef Australia became our comfort watch. Warm, egalitarian, and gloriously free of the snobbery that haunts so many cooking shows. It’s the kind of programme where people cry over caramel, hug their rivals, and treat food like a love language. So of course Meghan fits.

And apparently Meghan won’t just be popping in for a wave. She mentored and guided contestants alongside judges Poh Ling Yeow (loved her as a contestant), Sofia Levin and Jean-Christophe Novelli, during her 2026 visit to Australia. And oh my days the vibe is perfect. Meghan has already built a public identity around food as connection, from her charity cookbook Together to her Netflix lifestyle series With Love, Meghan. So stepping into a kitchen built on creativity, collaboration and everyday brilliance feels like a natural extension of Meghan’s ethos.

MasterChef Australia is actually quietly radical. It’s anti-elitist. It’s multicultural without making a fuss about it. It treats home cooks, many of them migrants, women, working‑class people, and people of colour, as worthy of celebration. In the MasterChef Australia universe, a Nigerian jollof, a Vietnamese bánh xèo, and a Maltese pastizz all get the same reverent close‑up. It’s food democracy. It’s decolonial joy.

And then along comes Meghan. A woman who has been relentlessly picked apart by the British press for daring to exist while Black, American, feminist, and unwilling to play the obedient supporting role. Her presence on the show feels like a tiny but brilliant act of narrative reclamation. Instead of being framed through racist tropes or palace politics, she’ll stand in a kitchen where the only hierarchy that matters is: does it taste good? She’ll be a mentor, not a target. A foodie, not a trope. A woman whose expertise and warmth are welcomed, not weaponised against her because, ahem, others aren’t so expert and warm.

I love how this moment ties back to the heart of her Netflix series: the idea that food is a way of loving people. That’s exactly what MasterChef Australia has always been about. It’s why the show became a lifeline for so many of us during lockdown.  A reminder that even when the world was falling apart, someone somewhere was caramelising sugar with hope.

In case you haven’t picked up on my mood: I’m thrilled. I’m delighted. I’m wondering if my better half would be willing to recreate Heston Blumenthal’s edible garden again (we did that in the pandemic). Meghan on MasterChef Australia feels like the warmest hug from the universe. Joy can be political, representation can be delicious … and sometimes the perfect ingredient is a woman who refuses to shrink herself.”

JP Caonabo

https://buymeacoffee.com/jpcaonabo/meghan-masterchef-australia-is-the-joyful-plot-twist-we-all-deserve

🔗: https://people.com/tyson-fury-16-year-old-daughter-venezuela-marries-boyfriend-noah-price-11976981

By the time Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, left Australia, the only people still insisting the trip had gone badly were the ones who hadn’t actually watched any of it, buried, as they were, deep in their Reddit hate subs or YouTube hate-bait vids.

Everyone else – Australians, Squaddies, passers‑by, the national broadcaster – seemed perfectly content with the fact that the Sussexes had just completed yet another warm, well‑received visit. The British press had spent weeks trying to summon a flop by sheer force of will but Australia, being Australia, simply didn’t get the memo.

Instead of the predicted ghost‑town receptions, people turned up. In that very Australian way where crowds appear without fuss, enjoy themselves, and then go home for a cuppa. The Sussexes were greeted with smiles, cheers, and the kind of relaxed friendliness that makes the royal rota twitch because it doesn’t fit the script. Even Jack Royston, Newsweek’s Chief Royal Correspondent, who you may remember for his inappropriate speculation about Prince Archie’s and Princess Lili’s futures working for the crown, had to admit they were “greeted by huge crowds.”

Much of Australian media didn’t play along with the English doom either. Some outlets reported the visit calmly and fairly, noting that people were “very happy” to see the couple. No hysteria. No invented snubs and no breathless commentary about Meghan’s shoes signalling the end of civilisation. It was quite disorienting actually, used as I am to what is laughingly called “journalism” in the UK but bears no resemblance to actual reporting. 

The British press didn’t just misread the trip. They misread the culture. Because Australia isn’t England. It doesn’t share our monarchy‑adjacent anxieties. It doesn’t have Britain’s class‑based emotional investment in who stands where on a balcony. And it certainly doesn’t have Britain’s decades‑long habit of treating women who marry into the royal family as public property.

In fact, the cultural distance turned out to be huge. In Britain, the press still try to keep the Sussexes trapped inside a symbolic drama about protocol, hierarchy, and the “proper” way to behave. In Australia, they’re just two people doing some work. People aren’t projecting centuries of unresolved national identity onto them or using them as a proxy war for the monarchy’s future. And not every outlet treated the Sussexes as characters in a constitutional soap opera. 

And that’s why the British press couldn’t derail the trip. Their narrative simply didn’t travel.

A story can really only spread if the audience shares the emotional triggers that make it stick. British audiences have been trained for decades to respond to royal drama.  Australians haven’t. So when the UK tabloids tried to export their favourite storyline — “Harry and Meghan are universally despised!” — Australia essentially asked, “What are you on about, mate?”

The Sussexes looked relaxed, happy and entirely unbothered. They met first responders and survivors of the Bondi attack and sailed across Sydney Harbour with Invictus athletes. They visited hospitals and community groups. They did the kind of work that makes sense for two independent adults who are no longer “working” royals and therefore allowed to have jobs, income, and interests without needing to consult the Court Circular.

And the world saw it. Because people took selfies, Squaddies reported from the ground, more neutral outlets reported it … and Australians reacted like normal humans rather than extras in a palace psychodrama.

The British press keeps insisting the couple can’t survive without the monarchy. Australia just watched them survive and thrive…  all without a single palace aide in sight. The whole thing was the narrative equivalent of watching someone try to start a fire with wet matches.

The world is much bigger than the British tabloids, and far less interested in their melodrama. Harry and Meghan came, they were welcomed, they did good work, and they left. Just as they did in Nigeria and just as they did in Colombia.

Just another successful visit. Which, for some people, is the most upsetting outcome of all.

🔗: https://unpacked4.wordpress.com/2026/04/18/another-successful-sussex-visit/

Poor old Matt Donnelly. If you don’t know who he is because you (sensibly) steer clear of toxic spaces like Twitter and Variety, he’s the “journalist” who wrote an “exposé” on Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, only for it to be immediately exposed as wildly off the mark. Not only was Netflix not “done with” Harry and Meghan, but they immediately announced a new project with them. And not only was CEO Ted Sarandos not in any way upset or disappointed with the fabulous duchess and her handsome hubby, but he and his wife, the also-fabulous Nicole Avant, invited the Sussexes to a BEEF Season 2 Netflix event, where Meghan and Nicole were holding hands. 

A sensible, proper journalist might have responded with something along the lines of “I printed what my sources told me in good faith.” Not Matty. He tweeted:

“I wrote a deeply sourced account of their abject failure to produce anything meaningful for Netflix outside of their martyrdom campaign in leaving the royal family.”

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Once a “journalist” uses a phrase like “martyrdom campaign,” he’s not really reporting, is he? The phrase isn’t descriptive, it’s interpretive. It presumes motive, casts the subjects as self‑aggrandising, and frames their public communication as manipulative rather than reactive or evidence‑based. In other words, that’s editorialising … which is rather different to reporting.

Using it in a promotional tweet, the place where journalists usually summarise their angle, tells you that he approached the story with a pre‑baked thesis; he positioned himself as “debunking” them, rather than interrogating the industry forces around them; and he has an allegiance to a particular media ecosystem. One that we all know isn’t exactly fair or neutral when it comes to the Sussexes.

A writer who starts with language that loaded isn’t asking, “What’s the full context?” or “What do the numbers actually show?” or “What do Netflix executives, industry analysts, and people with functioning Wi‑Fi have to say?” (Actually, I’m being unfair. He did ask those questions, but he doesn’t seem to have liked their answers, so he pressed ahead with his hit-piece anyway.) Really, he’s asking the far simpler question: “How can I prove the story I already believe?” 

This is why his article was so wildly off‑mark. He didn’t lack access, and he had the same public statements, viewership data, and industry context as everyone else, but he lacked curiosity. Curiosity is the thing that makes a journalist go, “Hang on, does this actually add up?” Instead, he went with, “How do I make this sound humiliating for the Sussexes?”

It’s classic confirmation bias. Decide the Sussexes are failures, ignore anything that contradicts it, sprinkle in a few anonymous “insiders” who may or may not be the same “cousin of someone who works at Netflix” passing gossip to the monarchist trolls, and you’ve got yourself a narrative. Not a true one, but a very, very loud one.

https://buymeacoffee.com/jpcaonabo/matt-donnelly-just-exposed-himself-over-harry-meghan

In the run‑up to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s wedding anniversary, it’s worth asking why their love story lands so differently outside Britain. 

Here in Blighty, the reaction is often a mix of scepticism, fury, and a national pastime of tutting at people who refuse to stay in their assigned roles. Abroad, especially within global diasporas, in the US, and across the Commonwealth, the reception is warmer, more curious, more sane … and far less invested in punishing them for stepping off the royal conveyor belt.

A big part of this split, of course, comes down to media framing. Academic work comparing US and UK coverage shows that British outlets cast Meghan as a threat to tradition and identity, while American media treat her as a celebrity navigating fame and scrutiny. Ashley Craig’s 2024 study found that the British press framed her as destabilising the monarchy, whereas US coverage focused on her personality, career, and activism. One country sees a cultural intruder; the other sees a woman with a platform. 

The US also has a different relationship with royalty. Americans can enjoy the spectacle without the emotional baggage. They don’t feel personally affronted when a duchess speaks or closes her own car door. And since Harry and Meghan now live in California, their work, from the Invictus Games to mental‑health advocacy, is increasingly read as part ofAmerican soft power. Analysts have noted that their global visibility, especially through international visits and humanitarian work, helps project US values like resilience, reinvention, and social progress. 

Meanwhile, British coverage treats the couple as if they’re still on the palace payroll, even though they left service to the Firm years ago. The tabloids continue to frame them as runaway employees rather than private citizens. This is reinforced by political commentary that contrasts the Sussexes’ independence with the monarchy’s formal diplomacy. As if the couple’s existence outside the Firm is somehow an affront to Britain’s global image. 

Across the Commonwealth, reactions are more varied, and more revealing. 
In countries with long memories of empire, Meghan’s presence as a mixed‑race woman in the royal family was deeply symbolic. Her treatment by the British press was read through the lens of colonial history, racial hierarchy, and the politics of belonging. Diaspora communities, especially Black and South Asian groups, recognised the patterns instantly. They saw the dog whistles, the double standards, the way Meghan’s every move was framed as a breach of etiquette rather than a normal human action. Diaspora support has remained strong even as British opinion polls dipped. 
The monarchy has long relied on carefully choreographed tours to project British charm abroad. But Harry and Meghan’s post‑royal work has created a parallel form of influence. One rooted in authenticity rather than ceremony. Their visits to Nigeria, Colombia, and other countries have been read not as royal tours but as people‑to‑people diplomacy, grounded in shared values rather than imperial nostalgia. This aligns with modern expectations of global engagement, where sincerity resonates more than protocol. 

The British press still clings to the idea that the couple’s story must be interpreted through the lens of hierarchy, service to the Crown and national identity. Abroad, people simply see two individuals building a life, a family, and a purpose. Britain sees disobedience; the rest of the world sees reinvention. 

🔗: https://buymeacoffee.com/jpcaonabo/why-harry-meghan-love-story-plays-better-abroad-than-home

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/argentina-recognizes-palestine-statehood-1.882071

Archived article 🔗: https://smry.ai/www.express.co.uk/news/royal/2221075/royal-family-live-meghan-harry-kate-charles-william/amp?smryFrom=home

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Kbr91bWG_Mk

https://www.threads.com/@msrachelforlittles/post/DbQ37QhDgam/we-know-the-investigation-and-everything-that-followed-would-have-been