Can Meghan save the transatlantic alliance? She is more British than we like to admit

It’s a tricky time for the special relationship. Offering a sweepingly negative assessment of Europe’s fighting capability this week, JD Vance may or may not have called us “some random country that has not fought a war in 30 or 40 years”. A Daily Star front page featured “J.D. Dunce” in retaliation, and even Nigel Farage has been forced into publicly rebuking his chums across the water.

The Vice President has responded by denying he was talking about us, calling the media “hysterical”. History tends to suggest that this will not calm things down. With US tariffs hanging in the balance — not to mention World War III — a distraction must be found to subdue the escalating dynamic. Step forward, Netflix’s With Love, Meghan. There could be no better time for the Duchess of Sussex’s “tips and tricks” on how to become a Californian domestic goddess to finally hit our screens.

In Violence and the Sacred, René Girard argued that when two sides get locked into an apparently intractable feud, unity can only be restored by finding a scapegoat onto which to load the mutual animus by proxy. But not just any “surrogate victim” will do: “all victims [must]… bear a certain resemblance to the object they replace”. To reestablish transatlantic alliances, then, ideally we need a sacrificial object who seems quite annoyingly American (to us), but also quite annoyingly British (to them). And who better than a barefoot Meghan Sussex? Rubbing pink Himalayan salt into British economic wounds, she talks about being “defined by growth” — but also seems to have a not-very-Californian addiction to bacon.

The ostensible idea of the new show is educational. The Duchess will tell viewers how to become better hostesses by “elevating the ordinary”. This roughly translates as fiddling about with edible flowers and sticking labels on everything, written in elegant calligraphy. She wafts around an enormous Californian garden saturated with so much colour that sunlight-starved British retinas can barely cope, gasping at heirloom tomatoes and inhaling various scents through delicately flared nostrils. Then she pads into someone else’s well-appointed kitchen, chops a few things up with a tiny knife, and produces aphorisms such as “rosemary is nice and grounding” and “the brightness of citrus helps so many things”.

She seems extremely keen on managing people’s “experiences”. When someone comes to visit, she wants to give them “a guest experience”; when people drop kids off at a party for Archie or Lili, she wants to give them a “parent experience”. Arranging chopped fruit on a board to resemble a rainbow, she begins with the strawberries, but generously gives the viewer permission to do “whatever feels right for you”. The mantra “Love is in the details!” is uttered several times. Sometimes it’s with a slight air of passive-aggression, prompting the cynical viewer to imagine terrible rows with Harry when he forgets to bring her morning cup of tea.

So far, so stereotypically Yank; but there are weird digressions from the template here too. As I watched, I started to think her time in Blighty had left her with more than a taste for our dry cured pork products and a trauma response to adverts for The Crown. Incredibly for an American showbiz type, she can’t actually pull off all the positivity and quasi-sincerity; she comes across as too self-conscious, and her energy too low. It’s almost as if she is one of us.

The first two episodes demonstrate this most starkly. In the first, her make-up artist and gay BFF comes to visit and she tries very hard to give him a guest experience. The repartee between them is turgid and halting, his gestures are nervous, and they both seem like introverts, dying inside. At one point, he rebukes her for assuming he has a counter in his tiny New York kitchen; at another, he looks at the stunning Montecito mountains and says the quiet part out loud: “I feel like this is all fake.” Hovering in the background, laughing and taunting the dead air between them, are the ghosts of Will and Grace. At times it feels as if she would rather be communicating entirely with labels.

But this is as nothing to the awkwardness between Meghan and fellow celeb “toddler mom” Mindy Kaling in the next episode. The gimmick is that they pretend to host a kids’ party together, minus the leavening presence of any actual children. Over the course of 40 minutes, Kaling’s natural perkiness and gifts for comic timing are slowly crushed into the black hole of Meghan’s earnestness. “I’m so glad you’re here, it’s going to be fun,” our hostess-with-the-mostess says near the beginning, a quick smile reaching neither eyes nor voice. By the end, Kaling is having to conjure up enthusiasm at the world’s least exciting party bags — mini gardening tools, seeds, and compostable pots; not a Haribo in sight — and Meghan, gazing off into the middle distance, is trying to imagine what would be happening at their fake party if there were real people present. “The kids are enjoying it, and then as the kids run off to play, at least the adults still feel they have had an experience too.” “Yes, which is what these are for,” says Kaling, gazing gratefully at her peach bellini.

It’s a mystery why the series starts with these shockers, because the following episodes are a lot better. One can only assume some high-up at Netflix decided this could only succeed as a hate-watch and so frontloaded the cringe. In later ones, our impeccably clad protagonist hosts close girlfriends on various confected pretexts — a Mahjong night, a beauty session — with whom she is much more at ease. The warmth and affection between them look genuine, and especially after a drink or three — more evidence of the secret British heart beating underneath the beige knitwear.

It is at moments like this that the series comes closest to managing what it was presumably always supposed to be: a feast for envious female eyes. It certainly isn’t a cooking show; there’s not even the vaguest pretence at offering recipes. “Who wouldn’t want this?” Meghan asks us as she surveys her bountiful garden, summing up the attitude she secretly hopes onlookers will take to take every bit of her gorgeous life. When she says she wants to show those living “in a little flat in London or small apartment in the city” that they too can have “some small piece of this”, she probably means: why not try making mint tea in a tannin-stained mug to the sound of traffic; or cut up some puny strawberries on a scarred old chopping board, so your toddler can turn up her nose, make sick noises, and chuck them at the cat? That way, you can gain even more clarity about by how utterly unlike your life is to Meghan’s serene and beautiful one.

But the thing is, it doesn’t work. Alongside his work on scapegoating, Girard is now best known for his theory of “mimetic desire”. He thinks wanting something is just coveting whatever others already have, with no independent appraisal of its value. Most or even all human conflict stems from robotic, envious grasping at what other people want, allegedly. Peter Thiel is a big Girardian, as is Vance, or so they say. I’ve always thought the theory was far too simple. Blatant thirst-trap programmes such as With Love, Meghan are its reductio ad absurdum.

Of course, it’s true that desires can be generated via exposure to others’ desires. Wanting to try what others are already enjoying is a reasonably efficient heuristic, based on the assumption there is something genuinely enjoyable there that I might like too. But it has a limit: just ask toddlers, nonplussed by parental rhapsodising about strawberries, and unswayed by the preferences of peers. Adults, too, have minds of their own, at least sometimes; which explains why populist politicians such as Trump and Vance try to work out what those minds want, then give it to them. If anything, progressives seem more Girardian in spirit, assuming that if policies are presented with enough desirable surface glitter by celebs and influencers, our magpie minds will get onboard with the trend.

But sometimes, the more it seems someone wants you to want something, the easier it is to resist. In With Love, Meghan’s case, the desperation is palpable and it’s counterproductive. The only things worth envying in her life are the odd things here and there that seem real and unforced: her friendships, her love for family and dogs, her appreciation of nature. All the rest — the Le Creuset, the crystal glasses, the perfect blue sky, the irritatingly upbeat music — left me happier than ever with my food-spattered compost bin, my dishwasher-scratched glassware, and the iron-grey English sky. As the woman herself might say, it turns out that my viewing experience has been defined by growth.

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