With love and hypocrisy ... Can Meghan and Harry make Christmas any more sickening?
In her latest assault on television screens, her Netflix show With Love, Meghan: Holiday Celebration, (note the “woke” title without any mention of Christmas, lest it trigger, oh I don’t know … something?), her perfect life is, of course, perfect.
But it lands on the week that her estranged father is fighting for his life on life support in a Philippines hospital after emergency surgery.
Everyone knows Meghan hasn’t seen her father Thomas Markle, 81, since the time of her 2018 wedding. Harry hadn’t even met him before the nuptials. Mr Markle’s big fear, that he will not get to cuddle his grandchildren, looks like being realised. For Megs is too busy hand making Christmas crackers, writing schmaltzy love notes to hubby and putting lavender roll-on scent inside one cracker for her four-year-old daughter.
(Is this wellness vibe for real? What happened to some stickers, a small furry key ring, coloured pencils or a vegan carrot stick?)
The children, Archie and Lilibet are nowhere to be seen in this Netflix special, and may be doing what all kids prefer – riding their bikes or playing with a teddy bear – than watching their try-too-hard mother trill about curated family meals, the exemplary wreath or making cringeworthy hand-painted plates with her new bestie, the tennis player whom she has never met before, Naomi Osaka.
The wreath is quite something: raw asparagus, raw broccolini and snap peas – opened for that “extra detail” shaped in a circle. In my house the said wreath would remain inedible, and quite possibly intact to drag out next year.
Ditto the beetroot, pickled vegetable, black olive, anchovy and fennel salad.
Prince Harry turns up at the end, and Meghan even thanks him for coming, as if perhaps he may have been agnostic on the idea. Harry contributes one of the few bright lines in the show, describing the beetroot concoction as “an anti-salad”. Otherwise we learn such festive essentials from Meghan as: “Once a year, you get to do the tree thing”, and that ” ’tis the season to wrap gifts.”
We now know Harry also has his own questionable Christmas moment, playing a cringeworthy pantomime prince in a sketch on the US show, The Late Show, and making several jokes about US president Donald Trump.
Harry mocked Mr Trump claiming the US had elected a “king”, in an apparent reference to left wing protests in October called “No Kings”.
And just why he was camping it up, in a mock attempt to audition as a prince for a made-up Hallmark movie Gingerbread Christmas Prince saves Christmas in Nebraska, may have resonated with Stephen Colbert’s audience, but in Britain it was viewed as embarrassing, uncouth and painful.
And amid all this cringe, don’t forget this is the family who left their royal positions for “privacy” – yet by every measure they are so, so desperate not to be ignored.
If the cloying nauseousness of Meghan’s show doesn’t get you, the fakery most certainly will.
Archie and Lili haven’t met their cousins in the line of succession, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, and may never will.
King Charles has only met Archie a handful of times, and Lili only once back in 2022 when she was a baby.
But Meghan tells us all that we can “really encapsulate your family story” and feel the passage of time and different life chapters “through the ornaments” on the festive tree.
Oh dear, we can all picture that poor pine loaded with her fantasy and “my truths”.
So much for that special family time of the season. Merry Christmas.
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The concept could not have been worse. Here we have Meghan Markle, the hostess with the mostest, and the queen of tweeness and rewrapping, opining about the specialness of Christmas and family.