Meghan Markle’s new Netflix show is unconscious self-parody - David Behrens

Meghan has launched her own ‘lifestyle brand’ with a show on Netflix and a web shop of products at yet-to-be announced prices. These include ‘shortbread cookies with flower sprinkles’ and ‘raspberry spread in keepsake packaging’. Jam in a box, in other words, for people who like to keep old food packets as mementoes. By my estimation that would be approximately no-one.

There are only nine products in Meghan’s range so far and they’re so ridiculously puffed-up they make her father-in-law’s Duchy Originals look like the reduced counter at Lidl.

Her father-in-law, of course, is now King and if she and Harry hadn’t thrown their toys out of the pram and upped sticks to sub-Hollywood, she could have been at his side, in a unique position to harness whatever genuine passion she undoubtedly has for the benefit of the poor and the dispossessed. Instead she has reduced herself to the level of a back-bedroom teenager evangelising over the dubious wares she passes off on the terminally gullible.

The extent to which she has sold out is illustrated by her career trajectory these last few years. In 2018 she was cooking for homeless people and the elderly to raise funds for victims of the Grenfell Tower fire – some of whom will be lucky even now to get a bowl of soup for their tea, never mind cookies with flower sprinkles.

But if there is any remaining doubt that Meghan is away with the fairies, a glance at the utter twaddle she spouts on her TV show ought to seal it. “I love feeding people. It’s probably my love language,” she coos. On the apparently vexed issue of arranging flowers, she gushes: “Think about it like an outfit and once you pick the base look you have to accessorise in a way that makes sense.”

Her other lifestyle tips, dispensed from a kitchen rented by the TV people, include teaching a sycophantic friend to make bread, throwing a ‘games night’ and planning a brunch. All these are useful time fillers if you don’t have a proper job. Basically she’s flaunting her wealth for the poor people to see. Marie Antoinette had nothing on Meghan.

Granted, she’s an actress and TV is an artifice but ‘Love, Meghan’, as Netflix is calling it, is barely an entertainment; it’s unconscious self-parody: we’re not laughing with her, we’re laughing at her. It’s a big-budget version of a million home-made videos by food bloggers and self-styled beauty experts that have spread over YouTube like a rash

And ‘Love, Meghan’ has a very big budget indeed: Netflix is reportedly paying $100m for its deal with the Sussexes. That could feed a lot of people around Grenfell Tower.

It won’t last, though. A few more episodes of this and she’ll be as unbookable as Phillip Schofield.

With civilization on the brink of a new Cold War or an actual war, it would be hard to conceive of anyone or anything more out of touch. Yet ‘celebrity branding’ is not Meghan’s preserve alone. Ever since Gwyneth Paltrow launched a range of goodness-knows-what called Goop, YouTubers you’ve never heard of have been creating brands of their own because they think that importing tat from China, sticking a new logo on it and selling it at 10 times the price will earn them a living. In some cases it actually does.

But there is a limit to people’s credulity. No-one needs bits of flowers sprinkled on their biscuits and even if they do, they can do it themselves with a packet of Hobnobs and a bunch of tulips.

The irony is that people really do need advice on what to eat and how to cook. This week the Lancet medical journal published a prediction that the number of obese children will rise by more than half in the next 25 years – by which time a third of adolescents and half of adults will be overweight or obese.

Had Meghan not bottled out of her role with the royals and retreated into her fairytale world of jam in boxes, she would have been an ideal person to help lead an education initiative; a real princess that little girls aspired to emulate.

And, look, everyone’s an influencer, one way or another. Just last week I influenced Mrs B to try my cottage pie even though she doesn’t like red meat. But you don’t find me online flogging packets of gravy mix. If I did, though, I’d have the perfect slogan: Dave’s Dinners – For People Who’ll Swallow Anything.