WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

May 2018

After reluctantly agreeing that Barack Obama will not be invited to her wedding lest it upset President Trump, Markle arrives on the big day at St George’s Chapel in a sedan chair carried by Hillary Clinton, Colin Kaepernick, Sadiq Khan and Robert Mueller. Stepping out to stunned silence, her train is then taken up by Trump’s ex-wives, Marla Maples and Ivana Trump, before she is given away by a clearly giggling Kim Jong-un. Trump publishes a 140-tweet diatribe in response, but Markle doesn’t care. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Is he triggered?’ she asks Nicholas Witchell. ‘What a snowflake.’

December 2018

Six months into her marriage, Markle begins to miss her old acting career. Politely declining her grandfather-in-law’s offer of ‘the odd private performance in one’s chamber, if you like?’, she instead has the bright idea of coercing the Duchess of Cornwall, the Duchess of Cambridge and the Countess of Wessex into co-starring with her in a charity production of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. Sarah Ferguson gets wind of the project and threatens regicide if she isn’t included. ‘Great, we have the Windsor wives, now we just need somebody to play Falstaff – the fat, vain, cowardly knight living off other people’s money!’ Markle says. Philip Green is duly cast.

November 2020

Her love of acting now revived, Markle alarms palace officials when she asks to play herself in the sixth and final series of The Crown. Peter Morgan, the show’s creator, tells her it would be far too weird, but says he’d have no problem casting her as any other character. Markle takes him literally, deciding she will ‘do them all, like Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor!’ and uses elaborate prosthetics to play every senior Royal family member at once. It is a roaring failure, and she is not allowed out ever again. — Guy Kelly