Grab your truffled popcorn, pour yourself a honey tea spiced with cayenne pepper and crack open the personally monogrammed sick bags. With Love, Meghan, the much-anticipated lifestyle show from the Duchess of Sussex, has finally arrived on Netflix – and the eight-episode series has exceeded even my wildest expectations.

For it is delicious in a way that has nothing to do with Meghan’s laughably lite’n’trite recipes and occasionally insulting kitchen and home-making tips.

‘You don’t need to sift sugar,’ she advises, pouring some caster into a cake mix. Who knew? Absolutely everyone who’s ever baked a single scone, that’s who.

Elsewhere she advises viewers to cut sandwiches into ‘interesting shapes’ such as stars or hearts to ‘create a whole world’; to roast a dish of vine tomatoes with salt to ‘bring out the sweetness’; and – here’s a new idea – to put a little vase of flowers in your spare room to make guests feel welcome.

One more thing. ‘Don’t tie a knot without a bow,’ she says, but at least this is one tip that is just as useful for the domestic gift-wrapper as for someone lacing up their boots before tackling the north face of the Eiger.

What is so fascinating about With Love, Meghan is not her recipe for one-pan spaghetti nor her touching belief that children will love her party bags filled with herb seeds to help put them in touch with nature.

It is that the show is so inadvertently revealing. For once, I feel, we get a glimpse of the many facets of the real Meghan; of the yummy mummy jampreneur in the £300 Jenni Kayne cashmere sweater who wants to humblebrag that she was once a ‘latchkey kid’ who ate fast food and TV dinners.

Of the ridiculous Marie Antoinette character who hopes that people living in a ‘little flat in London’ can have ‘some small piece’ of her Californian lifestyle by watching this show. And of the flinty control-freak with the clenched jaw who just wants to spread love and sprinkle edible flowers over everything while having her royal status and celebrity position fully respected at all times, or else.

‘What is so fascinating about With Love, Meghan is not her recipe for one-pan spaghetti,’ writes Jan Moir…

…’but that the show is so inadvertently revealing. For once, I feel, we get a glimpse of the many facets of the real Meghan’

Sussex fans will enjoy the few glimpses into Meghan’s life with husband Prince Harry (he likes bacon) and children Prince Archie, five, and three-year-old Princess Lilibet (they like vegetables)

There is a telling moment in episode two when celebrity guest Mindy Kaling makes the mistake of referring to her hostess as Meghan Markle. Big mistake. A sudden frost descends like sifted sugar into a kitchen where moments earlier the two women had been bonding over courgette frittatas and cookware.

‘It’s so funny,’ the Duchess begins, rather menacingly. ‘You keep saying, Meghan Markle. You know, I’m Sussex now.

‘You have kids and you go, “Now I share my name with my children.” I didn’t know how meaningful it would be to me, but it just means so much to go “This is our family name, our little family name”.’

You have to wonder what kind of hostess with the mostess would risk humiliating a guest by ticking her off in front of the watching world, but the admonished Kaling recovers graciously. ‘Well, now I know, and I love it,’ she replies, but is that enough? It seems unlikely that Mindy will be invited back for more Ladybug Caprese Bruschettas – the decorative bread-based snack that Meghan prepared for her – any time soon.

The format of With Love, Meghan finds our heroine inviting friends and demi-famous guests to a beautiful California estate, where she shares cooking, gardening and hosting tips from a glamorous kitchen that is not her own.

From the get-go, Meghan chirps on about the ‘joy of hostessing’ and makes a big deal out of making a cameraman a cup of coffee. Yet this is entry-level entertaining for people who find TikTok’s food content challenging and need a recipe to make an ice cube.

Truly, it is hard to imagine who the Duchess thinks her core audience for this guff might be, unless they are lonely aliens from planet stupid who don’t know one end of a knife from another.

Read More

EXCLUSIVE

AMANDA PLATELL: Look closely at Meghan’s Miss Perfect act and you’ll see what’s REALLY going on

Enter her dear friend the make-up artist Daniel Martin, who nearly cuts his finger open in episode one when attempting to slice vegetables. Never mind, Daniel is the kind of obliging patsy who shrieks with joy when Meghan scales the heights of molecular gastronomy to produce a crudités platter for their lunch.

‘How long did it take to make this?’ he gasps, as if she had just produced a dodo turducken, or split an atom instead of a radish. He’s good at the flattering leading question, too.

‘You have always shown your love through food, right?’ he asks Meghan, in one glutinous aside.

‘Mmhmm, a big love language,’ agrees this veritable Carême of the carrot stick.

Meghan and Daniel are keen to tell us that they have been best friends for 15 years. ‘He has been in the life for the before, the during and the after, shall we say,’ giggles Meghan, with the kind of wry, eye-rolling smile that suggests she was forced at the point of a musket to marry a dim red-haired prince from a land far away and verily steal him across thy seas to the land of the kale salad and raised consciousness.

She says she cooks for Daniel a lot, he says he ‘puts on 10 lb’ every time he visits, but is any of this like, for real?

Celebrity guest Mindy Kaling makes the mistake of referring to her hostess as Meghan Markle. ‘You know, I’m Sussex now,’ replies the Duchess

‘The tense Duchess, swathed in her expensive neutrals, has none of the easy charm, expert know-how or kitchen skills that characterise the compelling and successful TV cook, while she even admits that she doesn’t much like baking’

‘Do you like tomatoes?’ she asks him at one point, surely something she should know if she’d been whipping him up delicious snacks for over a decade. ‘I feel like this is all fake,’ says Daniel, and I know what he means.

With Love, Meghan is the Duchess of Sussex’s last-ditch bid to launch herself upon the world as a lifestyle guru; as Montecito’s answer to Martha Stewart – but most importantly as a woman of substance and taste, an adorable domestic goddess whose tips and tricks for elegant entertaining will elevate the lives of viewers.

There is little here that is original or interesting, but perhaps Sussex fans will enjoy the few glimpses into her life with husband Prince Harry (he likes bacon) and children Prince Archie, five, and three-year-old Princess Lilibet (they like vegetables). Yet even as Meghan bustles around the rented location kitchen, trying to exude happiness and hostessy bonhomie, it all seems rather like a bowl of consommé – strained and thin. Does she even enjoy it herself?

The tense Duchess, swathed in her expensive neutrals, has none of the easy charm, expert know-how or kitchen skills that characterise the compelling and successful TV cook, while she even admits that she doesn’t much like baking.

This was noticeable in one scene where she took a batch of pale and dodgy-looking cakes out of the oven – yet it did provide a rare moment in royal circles where the expression ‘underdone sponges’ was not referring to the Yorks.

Along with the carved strawberries and kimchi comes a side order of half-baked, homespun philosophising, perhaps the part of the entire, doomed exercise that is hardest to stomach. ‘This is also that reminder to do something that scares you a little bit,’ says Meghan, harvesting some honey from her beehives.

‘With Love, Meghan is the Duchess of Sussex’s last-ditch bid to launch herself upon the world as a lifestyle guru; as Montecito’s answer to Martha Stewart’

‘There is something really satisfying about a cake that is bare on the outside, but she is just so beautiful on the inside, and you just don’t know how good she is until you go deep,’ she whispers about a honey and lemon sponge, but is she really talking about herself?

‘If you break something that is precious and valuable, it is not broken, but that fracture makes it more beautiful,’ says this wise old quack of a duchess, a woman who, ironically, has been known to break a family bond or two in her time.

Prince Harry only has a tiny walk-on part towards the end of the series, while some of the concepts produced and paraded here seem to have been included purely because they might sell well in a gift shop selling Meghan’s reworked As Ever brand. These include the truffled popcorn, the honey and cayenne tea, the candles and the scented bath salts that feature in some of the earlier episodes.

One has to admire the vision, if not the execution, and wonder if another series of this banal yet oddly uneasy lifestyle show will ever be made, but who knows what the future holds for a duchess who is determined to matter.

‘You know, I’m Sussex now,’ as she says herself, this woman who knows never to tie a knot without a bow.