Meghan Markle has been slammed by a royal commentator for sharing a “nauseatingly contrived” and “actressy” social media post on Instagram.

The Duchess of Sussex posted a new clip on Tuesday of her opening a special gift donated by singer Billie Eilish for a family whose home burnt down in the Los Angeles wildfires. Meghan visited the city back in January alongside Prince Harry to help with volunteering.

Author and literary editor of The Spectator Alexander Larman criticised the duchess and said that her latest video is “hard to stomach”.

He wrote: “The disaster has attracted a small but vocal number of people who ostensibly have offered their time and resources to provide much-needed assistance – but in reality seem more interested in creating #content to share on their social media. Meghan Markle, predictably enough, belongs to that category.’

“Yet there is something so nauseatingly contrived, so fake – so actressy – about the little smiles to camera, the faux-excitement, the casual name-dropping of famous friends and, finally, the idea that some signed trinkets can in some way compensate for a truly epochal disaster. It screams of consumerism and fakery: both things, by now, that the Duchess has intimately associated herself with.”

Meanwhile, while Meghan’s video received criticism from commentators and fans, some people praised her for her “authenticity”, including one user who wrote on Instagram: “I love how excited she is, so sweet to help this girl,” and another one who said: “I just love how she is choosing to be her authentic self. She is one strong woman. What a beautiful heart.”

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