Megxit: Called it!

I-told-you-so alert

For nearly 17 years I wrote a weekly column. It was my first — and quite possibly last — regular job, not that there was anything regular about it. Columnising is a weird skill. It requires a constant well-spring of hot takes, sharp angles and snappy lines. You need to know a little about a lot of things and a lot about little things, and so long you don’t get it completely wrong no one much cares if you’re right.

Columnists fulfil various functions — some pontificate, others snark or crack wise — but one thing the vast majority of us do not excel at is predictions and forecasts. Not that it stops us from making them, few opinion writers are ever held to account for the legion of stuff we miss or ignore. However by the same token, there’s no credit later on the rare occasion we call something right. I would like to take this opportunity to do just that. Yes, I stand before you giving myself a great big self-indulgent pat on the back.

I promised myself I wouldn't write about Meghan and Harry. The documentary, the book, the whole sordid miserable heart-sinking tale, it’s so inescapable there really is virtually nothing left to say at this point. One of the best things about not writing a regular column is being able to ignore depressingly ubiquitous “celebrity feud” stories — the kind that involve ludicrously rich and famous people taking unnecessary pot-shots at each other and in the process destroying destroying their own sanity and lives.

So I was going to leave it alone. However *audibly clears throat* recently, a handful kindly folks on Twitter (yes, they exist!) of all places recently DM’ed to remind me of a column I’d written about Megtrance (the opposite of Megxit— get it?) way way back in December 2017.