AMANDA PLATELL: The shattering truth that’s hidden behind Meghan and Harry’s Christmas card

How utterly adorable is Harry and Meghan’s ‘Happy Holidays’ greeting card?

The devoted parents’ arms are outstretched towards their joyful children Archie, five, and Lilibet, three, while their three dogs frolic around them.

It was a rare sighting indeed of the Sussex family. Even so, due to their concerns about privacy, we don’t see the faces of their children.

The card – which offers recipients ‘a very happy holiday season and a joyful new year’ from the couple’s private office, the Archewell Foundation and Archewell Productions – reveals only the backs of Archie and Lilibet’s heads. But how lovely that both seem to have inherited their dad’s striking ginger hair.

Let’s just hope the personal Christmas cards they send to the children’s grandfather, King Charles – who has privately revealed he longs to meet them – actually shows their faces.

This intimate picture only reminds us of the terrible chasm that now exists between the Sussexes and the Royal Family, who will be celebrating Christmas oceans apart. It does nothing to disguise the fact that 2024 has been the Sussexes’s annus horribilis – the year in which the world rumbled Meghan.

Once the darling of America, the Duchess of Sussex has in recent months been branded ‘difficult to work with’ while her and Harry’s latest screen offering – a documentary on the elite sport of polo – has been branded ‘a flop’, ‘tedious’, ‘mostly boring’ and ‘clattering and niche’.

Their Netflix bosses, with whom she and Harry have a $100million contract dependent on their output, are said to have been left ‘exhausted’ working with Meghan.

This family photo featured on the Sussexes’ ‘Happy Holidays’ card

Prince Harry and Meghan have been struggling for success since their move to the US

Yet the bad news doesn’t end there. Even the ultra-woke US magazine The Cut – bible of the liberal Left and formerly a fawning supporter of Meghan – has turned against her. It published an article last week about the Sussexes under the headline ‘Harry and Meghan’s Projects Can’t Stop Flopping’.

The article continued in a similar vein: ‘Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s tortured attempts to launch a successful state-side endeavour continued this week with a new five-part docuseries about polo on Netflix.’

And then just when Megs perhaps thought her media profile couldn’t get any worse, a Mail on Sunday investigation revealed the luxury handbag brand Cesta Collective which she announced this summer she was investing in – and which sells bags upwards of £700 each – pays impoverished Rwandan women as little as just 82 pence for an eight-hour day to produce them. This, despite the fact that Cesta boasts of its ‘fair compensation practices’ and that the duchess said: ‘With Cesta, I really started to understand how many women’s lives were being impacted and uplifted through their work.’

Meghan does not have a role in the company’s management and Cesta says many of the women would be paid more depending on how fast they weave.

Yet what is clear is that now Harry and Meghan have squeezed every last financial morsel out of their vindictive feud against the Royal Family, Megs is having to stand on her own two stiletto-clad feet – and it is proving far from easy.

No longer able to milk her royal connections, she’s being ridiculed by the American media.

Insiders say all now hangs on the launch of her Netflix cookery show early next year on the back of her lifestyle brand American Riviera Orchard. They are calling it the ‘last chance’ for her to ‘save’ the couple’s lucrative Netflix deal which is their prime source of funding.

Which raises questions in itself. Is Meghan going solo? And what cachet did she ever have apart from being a minor TV actress in a cable series who married a Prince?

Especially when it was questions about the state of their marriage that made the only headlines for Harry at a recent event held by the Left-wing New York Times, purportedly about his mission for Truth and Accountability from the media.

What’s so striking is that as Meghan’s star has waned, the very opposite has happened in America with the Princess of Wales after her traumatic year battling cancer. A year in which she made that remarkably raw personal video saying that she needed time for treatment and healing and to be with her young family.

Her honesty in sharing details about her health with the world – and, more importantly, with other cancer sufferers – earned her a place on the shortlist of the prestigious US Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Time cited Kate – who recently stepped out in London for her fourth ‘Together At Christmas’ carol service – as someone who had ‘stirred a conversation about privacy and health for public figures’. In the end, the Person of the Year award went to Donald Trump.

But there is a bittersweet joy in Kate being shortlisted after her own ‘annus horribilis’. It is an extraordinary achievement – she’s managed it when for most of the year she’s been out of the public eye, after undergoing serious abdominal surgery then chemotherapy.

None of which will have been lost on Meghan and Harry in their struggle for success.

Ironically, it was both the King’s and Kate’s cancer ordeals that I believe firmly put an end to Harry and Meghan making money through their spiteful tirades against them.

How could Megs keep coining it by being horrid about King Charles and the future Queen Catherine, as she has done in the past, when they were so ill. And when people across the world were admiring the way both King and Princess not only publicly revealed their diagnoses but soldiered on as best they could with their duties in spite of their illnesses.

Yet without income from projects like that Oprah interview, their tell-all Netflix documentary series and Harry’s book Spare, the couple have been woefully exposed.

How lonely and, yes, anxious, they must feel as they spend Christmas in their fine Montecito mansion. She with her mum Doria but with her dad, exiled from her life, and yet living just a few miles away, and Harry worlds apart from his own family. Even the dim-witted Prince must now be wondering if it was all worth it.