]Why does Meghan Markle need to be so huggy wuggy?

There have been moments, little quiet moments, when I have begun to ask myself, who the heck does Meghan Markle think she is?

Don’t all shout at once. Hear me out.

Yes, love her. Yes, adore her. Yes, accept and believe her to be a breath of fresh air blowing through the fusty hallways of Windsoralia.

And yet, after four official public appearances and leaked news of two ‘secret’ missions of mercy to console victims of the Grenfell fire, one can’t help but wonder where all this is going.

It seems far, far too early for Meghan to go into full Diana mode and unfurl any fondly imagined royal superpowers. Or to start believing that she can change the lives of troubled citizens merely by bequeathing a megawatt smile and a consolation hug around their luckless shoulders.

However, that seems to be exactly what is happening.

It is just three months since the American celebrity and Prince Harry announced their engagement. With only one Sandringham royal Christmas under her pencil belt, she is barely a stitch in the tapestry of our nation’s history.

Yet, already, she is behaving like a cross between Wilhelmina the Conqueror and Florence Nightingale.

In Edinburgh this week, St Meghan of Markle clasped people to her bosom as if the mere strength of her huggy-wugs could vanquish their problems.

Perhaps she doesn’t mean to, but in public she frequently slips into glutinous actress mode, as if she were rather hammily playing herself in some future episode of TV’s The Crown.

If only she could dial down the full beam of worried sympathy that strobes from her lovely eyes at every opportunity and give it a rest with the endless Lady Bountiful arm-pats, I think people would like her more.

Let us discover for ourselves how caring and kind she is, instead of her spreading it on so thickly that we can hardly see past the sugary glaze. Too many layers of the custard of compassion on this particular royal trifle is going to make us all feel a little bit sick.

It is nice that Meghan wants to ‘reach out’ to the British charity sector and use her fame to become a full-time philanthropist and concentrate on her humanitarian work.

Yet there are people in her own family whom she hasn’t reached out to in years, including her own father. With the best will in the world, it does put her one-gal task force for international healing and her undercover visits to mosques to console survivors under a slightly different, less rosy, light.

Charity begins at home — or it should, even for putative royals.

However, to find meaning and truth in the role of a royal spouse is a mighty and difficult task. Recent history is littered with casualties and examples, both good and bad.

Brittle Wallis Simpson was a woman of her time, one who cared for little except her pugs, her prince, her jewels and herself.

Prince Albert married not just a royal, but a head of state to boot, and, like Prince Philip a century later, found a way to make a difference through types of energetic philanthropy.

Diana set the gold standard for empathetic royal wives who worked with spirit and style for good causes, while Fergie . . . em . . . did not.

St Meghan would do well to note that the most successful royals keep their distance and their dignity. They embrace unfashionable causes, as well as headline-grabbing ones.

They attend flag-raising ceremonies in freezing South Korea, like Princess Anne. They visit farming communities in Cumbria, like the Countess of Wessex. They don’t need to be loved and adored. They just get on with it.

The Queen would never hug a stranger, even a needy one. She keeps her gloves on, physically and metaphorically, which is one of the reasons why she has endured.

Meghan’s biggest gesture to date has been giving up her acting career so that she and her prince can save the planet together — or whatever it is that they want to do.

So I don’t think that she is a phoney. I do think she is marrying for love. And I believe she has a lot to offer this country.

However, the royal kind of fame is like no other. It can easily corrupt and be corrupting, for it is not based on achievement or merit, but upon status alone.

And having said previously that Meghan can’t wear £56,000 dresses and expect people to love her as she doles out broth in a soup kitchen, I now wonder if she and Harry shouldn’t smarten up, just a bit. In her urban-girl uniform of black trousers and coats, straggly-haired Meghan turns up on official royal business as if she were on her way to get coffees for the office. Joined by a tieless Harry, they crash around, high-fiving, cuddling, rapping to order and generally getting down with the kidz. One wonders who is advising this headstrong young couple and where their unconventional approach will lead.

In the meantime, lovely St Meghan should put a little starch in her shirt and stop trying to be a legend before her time.

Come on out, Julian! This farce must end

One night this week, I went to a Venetian-themed party in a London restaurant. Harry’s Dolce Vita in Knightsbridge was a riot of confetti and delicious cicchetti.

Pretty Italian waitresses tied coloured streamers in their hair and delivered trays of foaming bellinis as a promenading opera singer made the rafters rattle.

Customers and staff alike wore glitter masks and all entered into the uproarious carnival spirit. Bellissima!

Sipping my drink amid all this revelry, it seemed strange to think that, less than 200 yards away, Julian Assange was closeted in the Ecuadorian Embassy, where he has been mouldering away like a cheese for five-and-a-half years. The WikiLeaks fugitive has locked himself away from life, from the joyous bustle of living, from his loved ones and his family.

The WikiLeaks fugitive (pictured) has locked himself away from life, from the joyous bustle of living, from his loved ones and his family

When I met his actress friend Pamela Anderson recently, she told me: ‘Julian has small children and he desperately wants to be part of their lives.’

Yet his incarceration is entirely self-inflicted — and not likely to end any time soon.

This week, a British judge upheld the warrant for his arrest, and he will continue to face detention if he leaves the Embassy.

Judge Emma Arbuthnot said she was not persuaded by the argument from Assange’s legal team that it was not in the public interest to pursue him for skipping bail.

She said he should have the ‘courage’ to come to court like everyone else — and she did not agree, then or now, that he would necessarily be extradited to America.

So, there he stays, locked away in storage like an unloved piece of furniture — the unwanted guest sleeping on the couch who won’t take the hint and move on.

The Conservative MP Nicholas Soames has no sympathy for his plight, rudely tweeting that Assange must ‘smell like a badger’.

But Miss Anderson says this is not true. He has his own shower cubicle, says the former Baywatch star. And no, she has never noticed a bad odour.

She brings him vegan snacks and encourages him to take exercise and eat well, but he gets little in the way of fresh air. ‘He can’t stand by an open window,’ she said, ‘because he might be assassinated.’

One can see how such endless claustrophobia must foster paranoia — in his own mind and those of his friends — even though it seems risible to outsiders.

Pamela sees Assange’s predicament as ‘a romantic struggle’. But sitting in the glamorous London restaurant nearest to his grimy digs, it seems like the exact opposite.

Laughter, music, the wet pavements, the warming glow of a candle on a table on a cold winter’s night: the life of this great city roars on all around Julian Assange, but for him, time stands still.

This awful farce should end — but Julian is the only one who can do that.

Cheryl judge a dance show? Don’t insult us

Oh, God. Just what we don’t need, another brand-new Saturday night talent show on the Beeb.

Only this time presented by — hold me, mummy — Cheryl Cole.

Yes, she’s back. The former Girls Aloud star and sometime X Factor judge was spotted at London’s Hammersmith Apollo taking part in a pilot for the BBC’s forthcoming series, The Greatest Dancer.

The former Girls Aloud star was spotted at London’s Hammersmith Apollo taking part in a pilot for the BBC’s forthcoming series, The Greatest Dancer

Produced by Simon Cowell’s company, it promises to be a dance-focused competition, which will perhaps involve elements of all other successful talent shows.

Contestants will have to bake a cake while dancing on a swivel chair, singing karaoke songs.

Cheryl will judge the winners in her usual fashion, by counting the number of hairs that are standing up on her arm.

It is bad enough that 34-year-old Cheryl — the Minnie Mouse of pop vocalists — was a judge on a singing competition. She wasn’t even very good at that.

But in this showbiz circle of hell, it seems like jobs for life for all the usual suspects. The fact that Cheryl — a woman who is about as syncopated as a dropped brick — is to preside over a dance contest is adding insult to injury.

The current production is only a pilot. Perhaps it will never make it to a series? Fingers crossed.  

‘Captain’ Joanna won’t be wearing black at the Baftas

Trust Joanna Lumley to speak more sense than everyone else put together about the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the accompanying #MeToo movement.

In an interview with a magazine, the 71-year-old actress refused to accept the feminist ideology that all women are victims and all men are aggressors.

The 71-year-old actress refused to accept the feminist ideology that all women are victims and all men are aggressors

She said: ‘I’m full of sympathy for the horrors that have gone on, but be your own judge. If you don’t know whether to take your pants off and sleep with him, don’t scream later: ‘I didn’t want to do it!’ It’s your ship, you’re the captain, so if somebody does something you don’t like, speak up. Don’t feel you ought to do it because you need a job.

‘Don’t go to someone’s hotel room late at night when you’re drunk. It’s not going to end well.’

Lumley is hosting the Baftas this weekend but, unlike most female attendees, she will not be wearing black to show solidarity with abused actresses.

‘I sorted out my outfit a long time ago,’ she said, crisply — just like any good captain would.