AMANDA PLATELL: Meghan’s father’s heartbreaking new transfer must be taking part in on her conscience. Where’s the duchess’s ‘little act of affection’ for him?

At the very moment the Montecito-based Duchess of Sussex launched her multi-million-pound Netflix cooking series, With Love, Meghan – a show which embraces the importance of family and friends – her father Thomas Markle was 250 miles down the coast in Mexico packing up his few cherished belongings from his rented bungalow before moving abroad, going away for ever.

As Meghan gushed with her B-list celebrity besties that cooking was a way of ‘surprising people’ with ‘the little acts of love that show people you care about them’, her dad – who she hasn’t seen or spoken to since before the Sussexes’s wedding seven years ago – was ruefully bubble-wrapping childhood pictures of his daughter and putting them in cardboard boxes.

How bitterly ironic that the launch of Meghan’s gushing new show full of smiles and messages of love and companionship should take place just as the father she ruthlessly cut out of her life has never looked more lonely and is leaving to, as he puts it, ‘to find a new place where I can live among kind people and enjoy the time I have left’.

No love or compassion for him from the duchess, despite the fact that he has suffered 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 to be the only true love Meghan ever shows is for money and fame.

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

And yet here is Meghan in her new show portraying herself as a love-sharing, homespun mom who’s only ‘in pursuit of joy’.

I wonder if she ever thinks of the absence of joy in her poor father’s life over the 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 at a time when her mother Doria mysteriously disappeared for several years of her childhood.

Dad worked double shifts to give Megs dancing and acting lessons, to educate her privately from kindergarten through High School, and then at the prestigious Northwestern University in Illinois.

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

Poor, stupid Harry might have fallen for Meg’s victim 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 about him wrapping up his mementoes this weekend, I checked the comments under her article on Mail Online.

There were almost 4,000 from around the world when I looked, and almost none in support of Meghan.

Universally they were in sympathy with Thomas, sending him love and blessings for his new life – and they asked again and again how any daughter so loved by her father could abandon him in the way she has.

Again, I ask: does Meghan, supposedly so determined to spread the love, ever think of Thomas? Does she dwell on the love her father showed her, as shown by the pictures he was packing away – of him cradling her in his arms, rocking her to sleep, of them feeding ducks together, playing crazy golf and laughing during fishing trips?

We will never know, of course, but I hope such thoughts are playing on Meghan’s conscience, if she has one. In the years to come when the Netflix millions have disappeared, I hope she reflects upon it.

Of course, the Sussexes weren’t happy that Dad talked to the Press and posed for pictures ahead of the wedding. But wasn’t he simply 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 2018 wedding because he suffered two heart attacks on the eve of the ceremony.

He showed Caroline Graham the medical records which proved that, when Meghan and Harry claimed a car was waiting at his house to drive him to Los Angeles to board a flight for London, he was in hospital in Mexico being treated for heart issues before being transferred across the US border to have two heart stents inserted. A doctor’s note forbade him from travelling.

Which is why it was that the then Prince Charles, rather than her father, kindly walked her half-way down the aisle. Little did he know then the damage she would wreak on his family following that genuinely loving gesture.

How rich for Meghan now to coo like a demented pigeon about the value of family and friendship in a show with its saccharine title all about her bountiful ‘Love’. A show mocked already as derivative, cringe-inducing, dreary, hilarious – but not in the right way – and ‘specialising in extra cheese’, as one critic put it.

Perhaps she’s been driven to these desperate measures. A new Mail on Sunday poll shows 58 per cent of people view her negatively, with hubby Harry not far behind on 53 per cent.

In contrast, the Princess of Wales – who’s hardly been in sight in the last year fighting cancer – is loved by 77 per cent of us, the Prince of Wales not far behind on 75 per cent.

As Kate and William have proved, good words, good deeds, good thoughts always win out in the end.

The thousands of people who responded online to Meghan’s treatment of her father said everything more succinctly than I can. This is someone who publicly emotes about family values yet abandoned her own father, trashed Harry’s family and now lives a life in California with him, with few (if any) opportunities for the children to see their grandads.

What kind of woman are you? Not one With Much Love, Meghan.