AMANDA PLATELL: Meghan’s father’s heartbreaking new move should be playing on her conscience. Where’s the duchess’s ‘little act of love’ for him?

At the time the Montecito-based Duchess of Sussex launched her multimillion-dollar Netflix cooking series With Love, Meghan — a show that embraces the importance of family and friends — her father Thomas Markle was 250 miles away in the coast of Mexico he packed his few prized possessions from his rented bungalow before moving abroad, gone forever.

While Meghan shared with her B-list besties that cooking is a way to “surprise people” with “the little acts of love that show people you care,” her father — who she has since lost seen or spoken The Sussexes’ wedding seven years ago consisted of sadly wrapping childhood photos of his daughter in bubble wrap and putting them in cardboard boxes.

How bitterly ironic that the launch of Meghan’s splashy new show full of smiles and messages of love and companionship should take place at a time when the father she ruthlessly cut from her life has never looked so lonely and, as he himself says, leaves behind. to find a new place where I can live among friendly people and enjoy the time I have left’.

No love or compassion for him from the Duchess, despite the fact that he has had two heart attacks and a stroke since the days she threw him out of her life.

Which to me makes all this talk of love in her new show nothing more than a cynical marketing exercise – it seems like the only real love Meghan ever shows is money and fame.

Her vulnerable father, now 80, heartbreakingly admits he has given up hope of ever seeing his daughter again, or meeting his son-in-law Harry or his two grandchildren.

All smiles, the Duchess has just launched her new cooking show Much Love, Meghan on Netflix

A video shows her playfully welcoming the New Year on the beach and writing 2025 in the sand

And yet here is Meghan in her new show, portraying herself as a love-sharing, homely mother who is only “looking for joy.”

I wonder if she ever thinks about the lack of joy in her poor father’s life these past seven years, thanks to her. Thomas Markle, a celebrated, three-time Emmy award-winning Hollywood lighting professional, raised Meghan from the age of 11 during a time when her mother Doria mysteriously disappeared for several years of her childhood.

My father worked double shifts taking Meg’s dance and acting lessons, privately educating her from kindergarten through high school, and then attending the prestigious Northwestern University in Illinois.

It’s a far cry from Meghan’s poverty story, that she was so disadvantaged that she grew up eating salads from a fast food restaurant, when in fact she lived in privilege thanks to Dad’s efforts.

Poor, stupid Harry may have fallen for Meg’s backstory, but the facts prove otherwise. And Mail readers seem to be well aware of that.

After my Mail on Sunday colleague Caroline Graham, a friend of Thomas, wrote that he was packing his keepsakes this weekend, I looked at the comments below her article on Mail Online.

When I looked, there were almost 4,000 from all over the world, and almost none supported Meghan.

Overall, they sympathized with Thomas and sent him love and blessings for his new life – asking again and again how a daughter so loved by her father could abandon him in the way she did.

Once again I ask: Does Meghan, supposedly so determined to spread the love, ever think about Thomas? Does she reflect on the love her father showed her, as evidenced by the photos he packed—of him cradling her in his arms, rocking her to sleep, feeding ducks together, playing miniature golf and laughing on fishing trips?

In a perfect garden, Meghan wants to spread love and family values ​​with her new show

We’ll never know, of course, but I hope such thoughts are on Meghan’s conscience, if she has one. I hope she thinks about it in the coming years when the Netflix millions are gone.

Naturally, the Sussexes weren’t happy that Dad had spoken to the press and posed for photos prior to the wedding. But wasn’t he just a lonely father crying out for his daughter’s love?

And Thomas Markle is still ‘baffled’ by the fact he believes his daughter blames him for not attending her wedding in 2018 because he suffered two heart attacks on the eve of the ceremony.

He showed Caroline Graham the medical records that showed that when Meghan and Harry claimed a car was waiting at his house to take him to Los Angeles to board a flight to London, he was in hospital in Mexico lay and was treated for heart problems before being transferred. across the American border to have two heart stents placed. A doctor’s note forbade him to travel.

That’s why it was the then Prince Charles, and not her father, who kindly walked her halfway down the aisle. Little did he know the damage she would do to his family as a result of that truly loving gesture.

How rich for Meghan to now coo like a demented pigeon about the value of family and friendship in a show with its sappy title dedicated to her abundant ‘Love’. A show that has already been derided as derivative, cringe-inducing, bleak, hilarious – but not in the right way – and “specializing in extra cheese,” as one critic put it.

Perhaps she was driven to these desperate measures. A new Mail on Sunday poll shows that 58 percent of people view her negatively, while hubby Harry is not far behind at 53 percent.

In contrast, the Princess of Wales – who has been barely visible in the past year in the fight against cancer – is loved by 77 percent of us, while the Prince of Wales is not far behind at 75 percent.

As Kate and William have proven, good words, good actions and good thoughts always win in the end.

The thousands of people online who responded to Meghan’s treatment of her father said it all more succinctly than I can. This is someone who publicly talks about family values, yet abandoned her own father, destroyed Harry’s family, and now lives a life in California with him, with little or no opportunities for the children to see their grandpas .

What kind of woman are you? Not one with much love, Meghan.