What can our Tupperware Queen make of Meghan’s lavish trip? jan moir

Can you be a selfidentifying international humanitarian and have a £ 300,000- plus baby shower held for your already fabulously privileged unborn child?

While children starve across the globe and run barefoot in bombed out war-zones, is this ostentatious display appropriate?

That is what people are asking of the Duchess of Sussex’s five-day new York binge, which featured dinners in expensive Manhattan restaurants, hotel costs of £15,000, luxury gifts and private-jet travel both ways across the atlantic.

This incredible production also starred hostess and grand fame game dame amal Clooney, who apparently also picked up the flight costs.

amal takes the art of over-dressing to stratospheric levels and I almost love her for it. ‘She’s so precise,’ said one fashion expert, which is one way of describing a woman who’d wear a ballgown to breakfast if a Vogue photographer was on duty behind the marmalade pot.

But why is she so keen to ingratiate herself with the Royal Family and fund such extraordinary lavishness? One has to wonder what the ulterior motive is, and don’t kid yourself there isn’t one.

Just like Meghan, amal is also a millionaire - class international humanitarian, committed to improving the lot of those less fortunate than herself, which by my reckoning is absolutely everyone.

SO leT me ask again. Can you be a philanthropist in public, while living like a Roman empress in private? Obviously, Meghan and her gal-pals can — campaigning against poverty by day, then channelling Chanel at night.

Yet is there any point in us being pious or naïve about this? Most high-profile humanitarians are fantastically wealthy — which is why they can afford to indulge in empathy for the dread plight of all mankind.

The rest of us might care deeply about such issues, run a marathon to raise money for Rwandans, drop a fiver in a church box or spend a gap-year working in a refugee camp.

Yet somehow, we never can make it to the hallowed uplands of global humanitarianism, can we? We are just good people, perhaps a little neighbourly, at best. Get back in your box.

For celebrities and royals such as the Duchess of Sussex, a different set of rules apply. To be fair, Meghan did a lot of charity work before she met Prince Harry; their joint philanthropy was one of the things that bound them together. Yet where are we now?

During the current half-term break, while Meghan was accepting the hospitality and largesse of her wealthy american friends in new York, Kensington Palace officials were nobly tweeting about poor British families who cannot afford to feed their children during the holidays. ‘a gap which is estimated to affect three million children and young people across the UK, and 700,000 in london,’ they said.

Meanwhile, Meghan trotted around nYC in a pair of £800 boots on a trip of rampant ostentation. let them eat laduree macarons!

no one is saying she should live a penitent’s life of sackcloth, ashes and Zara cardigans. Indeed, who could deny the seven-month pregnant duchess a scant few days of fun with old friends on her home turf?

She is an all-american girl; someone who married into the fusty eccentricity of the Royal Family and has been entombed in their institutionalised weirdness ever since.

How she must miss america, and the casual freedoms of her previous life.

Heading out to the Polo Grill on a snowy Manhattan night for cocktails and a burger? Five-star living and nonjudgmental room service in one of the best hotels in the city? Flying home on a private jet packed with gifts? What could be lovelier?

Yet from damp and dismal Blighty, such profligacy looks downright terrible. Meghan, with the connivance of Harry, has burned down the Tupperware and patched leather conventions of moderate royals with the blasé indifference of someone lighting a scented candle.

at a time when the country seems to be lurching from political crisis to Brexit death zone, when car factories are closing and a deep unease affects us all, the ostentatious optics from this lavish trip are not good news.

Sources insisted that the £300,000 cost was paid by the Duchess of Sussex’s friends, but was it naïve of her to allow herself to be seen as the jewel in this very public crown?

BaBY showers were once a modest affair of gifted nappies and bibs, the exchange of good advice, the offer of support in the months to come.

Why didn’t she have a private party in one of her friends’ homes, instead of this grandiose affair?

I have written before about how I admire Meghan’s refusal to play the snide royal game of pretending not to be rich and wealthy. But there are limits — and we have reached them here. Think of the Queen, watching all this nonsense unfold on her sitting room television, as she sits by her two bar electric fire in Windsor Castle, nursing a cup of cocoa.

What must she think of it all? nothing good.