The Duchess of Sussex has achieved something quite remarkable. After the brickbats hurled at the first season of her Netflix show With Love, Meghan – the furious pro-monarchy outrage, the eye-rolling from critics, the memes that lampooned her syrupy anecdotes – many TV personalities would have flinched. They would have called consultants, tweaked the format, apologised by going in a ‘new direction’. Meghan Markle (or should I say Sussex) has done the opposite. Season two arrived last month: unchanged, unrepentant and every bit as twee as the first. 

Like her homemade ‘jam’, that’s not to say it’s gone down well. ‘Painfully contrived’, ‘irrelevant meets intolerable’ and ‘tone-deaf’ were just some of the newspaper reviews. Even the more Sussex-sympathising Independent gave the series one star. Many viewers, too, seem to have switched off: unlike her first series, which pulled in 5.3 million viewers across the globe, her second instalment has so far failed to break into Netflix’s coveted ‘top ten’.

Even so, Meghan’s saccharine stubbornness is precisely why she may yet succeed. Royal commentators and media critics alike have missed the key pull of her appeal. Her show isn’t for them. Instead, Meghan is carving out a space for a demographic long ignored, even shamed, by modern popular culture: the........

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