Harry and Meghan were in Nottingham on Thursday (Image: Getty)

Meghan and Harry have conducted their first public engagement since arriving back in the UK. “Hang on,” you may say. “Are they back as working royals, then?” No. They aren’t. But clearly they still want to be and seem to be adopting a strategy of pretending to be working members of the Firm. The actual King also had an engagement today, the opening of the Senedd, but this has been completely overshadowed by the Sussexes. This was always going to happen. The monarch is making sure one of the largest cogs of the UK’s democracy is turning — doing his duty — while his son and his wife cosplay as important people. Was this deliberately timed? I would not put it past them.

The couple were in Nottingham, where they appeared in public together for the first time after their wedding in 2018, at the East Midlands city’s Community Recording Studio. School children assembled to greet them, but reports suggest there were fewer than 200 people in the crowd.

“She’s heard all the predictions that she’ll never be welcomed in England again, but she’s refusing to just roll over and accept that as the truth. There was a time when all the hostility she’s facing across the pond would have taken her down, but she’s stronger than she was six years ago, and she’s insisting that she’s ready to stand up and fight back.”

Framing Brits’ hostility as a “challenge to overcome” is a severe misunderstanding of the country’s public sentiment. Once we decide we don’t like you, it is very hard for us to change our minds, especially if you keep acting in the way that caused us to turn against you in the first place.

Meghan shows no sign of showing any humility or apologising for having a tantrum and trying to torpedo the Crown — an institution that has endured for thousands of years — from her seat in California. Trying to do the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is called insanity.