Piers Morgan has a problem with Meghan Markle’s recent visit to Bristol on Friday.
On a “Good Morning Britain” roundtable, the TV show pundit accused the Duchess of Sussex of leaving “patronizing” messages on bananas as she made lunch baskets for sex workers during her and Prince Harry’s visit to the charity One25 last week. The organization gives support and resources to former and current sex workers in the city.
Morgan pretended to mimic the duchess, saying “hand me my Sharpie, my moment has come to empower sex workers,” in a high voice while grabbing a Sharpie and a banana.
The TV show host also said that royal advisers should’ve stopped the former “Suits” actress before she wrote the messages.
“Giving a sex worker a banana is clearly exposing her to potential mockery. I’m sorry,” he said to the roundtable, with some members agreeing with him.
“If you had been advising Meghan Markle before this and she said, ‘I’ve got a great idea, I’m going to give a load of sex workers who are really struggling at the moment signed bananas’, would you have said maybe not the bananas?” Morgan added.
Meghan came up with the idea when she and Harry were touring One25 and she was packing snacks for the women working the streets.
“Oh actually do you have a Sharpie marker? I have an idea,” Meghan said at the time. “I saw this project this woman had started somewhere in the States on a school lunch program. On each of the bananas, she wrote an affirmation, to make the kids feel really, like, empowered. It was the most incredible idea — this small gesture.”
Though some, like Morgan, panned the gesture, a former sex worker and volunteer at the charity told reporters at the time that the women would appreciate the messages.
“I can imagine being on the van, and ‘Meghan wrote this thing, and what?’ I think they might not eat it. I think that banana would be at home until it is rotten. Because I would do the same,” the volunteer said, according to People.
“It sounds really cheesy, but little things like that when you are out – especially tonight, we can see the weather – just to get that little thing,” the volunteer added. “Meghan took her time out to write that one. It’s lush.”
Others on social media disagreed with Morgan and critics of Markle, saying the duchess is setting an example by continuing to do charity work.
Morgan isn’t entirely impartial to the Duchess of Sussex, as he’s previously accused the actress of being a “ruthless” social climber and ditching their friendship after she first reached out via Twitter.
“I knew her for about a year and a half, got on really well with her,” Morgan wrote in a column for the Daily Mail in December 2018.
“When someone more important and influential came along, in the shape of Prince Harry, I was instantly dumped like a sack of spuds,” he added.
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