At first I thought it was a joke when the video popped up on Instagram. It looked like Meghan, heavily pregnant, dancing around a hospital room and grabbing her huge baby bump while twerking her bottom for the camera. A hooded Prince Harry was rap-dancing in the foreground.
Meghan, dressed in a black smock shaking her booty, while beaming and joking as she and Harry dance – she with far more ability than him – to the tune of Starrkeisha’s Baby Mama song. All, apparently, in an effort to induce the arrival of their overdue second child Lilibet.
It must been a spoof devised by one of the couple’s many detractors, I thought. Maybe even a new offering by the satirical TV show South Park poking fun at the Sussexes as they did with their hilarious World Wide Privacy Tour episode after his memoir Spare came out.
But no, it appears this extraordinary video of a deeply personal nature – reportedly taken in her hospital maternity room – is real, as confirmed by ‘Mom’ posting on her Instagram account: ‘Four years ago today this happened!’
Astonishingly, she’s released the video to celebrate Lilibet’s fourth birthday.
‘Both of our children were a week past their due dates…’ she wrote. ‘So when spicy food, all that walking and acupuncture didn’t work – there was only one thing left to do!’
Which leaves us observers not only utterly gobsmacked but asking whether the Sussexes have completely lost the plot.
What parents actually video the final moments before going into labour and giving birth then share them with the world? Did Harry and Meghan have a Netflix camera crew in tow to catch every intimate moment so they could monetise it in the future?
Meghan dances and twerks in a video posted on Instagram to mark Princess Lilibet’s birthday
Surely this is one of the most sacred and private times in a couple’s relationship? What possibly made them think it a good idea to blaze it across social media?
And having set the pattern, how many more such moments do they have stocked away to release in the days and months to come, in a pathetic, desperate bid for attention?
Well, I’m sorry to break this to you but the video just made this couple who purport to be fiercely private a laughing stock across the world. Again.
Maybe the motivation was desperation, following the apparent failure of Meghan’s As Ever ambitions. Only this week, she said will not restock the jam and herbal teas it sells so as not to annoy customers should supplies run out.
Are the Sussexes really so desperate to maintain their media profile that they would stoop to this level?
Maybe it is a crass attempt to make them more likeable, more human. An attempt to say we’re just like the rest of you, a couple who do daft things and have fun. And yet I don’t know many couples who’d think it appropriate to post a video of themselves prancing around a maternity room moments before the birth of a child.
Whatever the case, it makes a mockery of their claims to be a deeply private couple who just want to get on with their lives away from prying eyes.
A couple so protective of their children Archie and Lilibet that we have rarely seen a proper picture of either of them, even though they are now respectively six and four.
The Duchess of Sussex holding the now-four-year-old Lilibet. The photo was also posted online
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Moment Meghan Markle twerks and dances with Harry in hospital room to bring on Lilibet's labour
So fiercely private are Megs and Harry, so fearful for their kids’ safety, that we only saw a tiny glimpse of Archie’s forehead in the late Queen’s arms as a newborn. Until this week, most pictures of their children have been taken from behind, from a great distance or in profile.
It is reported the Sussexes have employed a vast new team of experts to help counter the negativity surrounding them and improve their personal ratings.
Indeed, perhaps this was the brainchild of their new Director of Communications Emily Robinson, who’s been brought in to jazz up the Sussex brand? After all, Harry and Meghan now track only just above gruesome Prince Andrew in the popularity stakes both here and in the US.
Who knows? But if this tawdry video is any example of what’s to come, they already need a new team of experts.
On the other hand, it could be down to the Sussexes themselves – a couple so desperate with their reputations in freefall, they now believe the old dictum that any publicity is good publicity. However humiliating it is for them.