In a YouGov poll from January — conducted before Andrew’s arrest on suspicion of misconduct in a public office, but after the revelations that led him to lose his titles — just over two thirds of Britons said they were in favor of the monarchy. That’s the same as in 2019, before Andrew’s calamitous Newsnight interview. However much opprobrium the ex-prince attracts personally (he has a net approval rating of minus 87), it seems he can’t drag the rest of his family down with him.

The House of Windsor is, if nothing else, resilient. Its history is a history of crises, every one of which it has weathered: Edward VIII’s abdication; Charles and Diana’s divorce; Diana’s death; the subsequent cataclysmic unpopularity; Harry and Meghan’s resignation in 2020. Every one of these was pitched as an existential challenge to the institution of the monarchy, and none of them ultimately was.

But Andrew could be different. That’s the sense you get, at any rate, reading Russell Myers’ new joint biography of the Prince and Princess of Wales, William and Catherine: The Intimate Inside Story. The book is, on the whole, spectacularly boring, perhaps because the Prince and Princess of Wales are too. The several paragraphs on the intricacies of Kate’s family’s party planning business, and the detailed breakdown of her nursery schedule, suggest that Myers had slim pickings from which to build his portraits.

That’s not, however, for a lack of sources. Myers (the royal editor of the Mirror) had access to dozens of people from William and Catherine’s inner circle, both named and anonymous. While this biography is unauthorized, it has also clearly been written with a “team Wales” slant. It would be too much to read William and Catherine as a manifesto for this heir to the throne’s future reign, but it’s certainly sympathetic to his and Catherine’s interests. Unpleasantness tends to get glossed over: the false “rural rivalry” rumor of William having an affair, which eventually made it into a Stephen Colbert monologue on US TV, is only alluded to opaquely as “hurtful and often dangerous speculation… untruths and fake news.”

Wherever William and Catherine risk coming off badly, Myers is keen to give their side of the story — particularly in the case of their disaster-strewn 2022 visit to the Caribbean. Throughout the tour, which took place during what we can now term as “peak woke”, the couple were beset with demands to apologize for slavery on behalf of both Britain and the Royal Family. A photo of the couple having an unscheduled encounter with a group of local children was described as “a white-savior parody” (four years on, it looks touchingly organic and rather sweet).

In Myers’s telling, everything that went wrong happened because William and Catherine were imposed on with bad advice. But it was an experience with an important lesson: in his speech at the end of the trip, William broke with protocol to address some of the criticisms. This, writes Myers, was a sign that “William and Catherine would be approaching things very differently”.

Perhaps most significant, though, are the mentions seeded throughout of William’s antipathy towards Andrew. We learn that, after the Newsnight interview, William lobbied Queen Elizabeth and his father Charles to take immediate action. “He never much liked his uncle and wanted him out of the picture immediately before the rot further set in,” says a source. We discover, too, that William was an early adopter when it came to Andrew: “Long before he was embroiled in the scandal [involving Virginia Giuffre], he’d always thought his uncle was a bit of an ignoramus.”

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The repudiation is so total that you might even feel sorry for Andrew, were it not for everything we suspect about his character and personality (Andrew denies any criminality). But there is a delicate balance here. Yes, the rest of the Royal Family has been insulated from association with Andrew’s misdeeds up to this point. The problem is that much of the family’s current popularity derives from that of Elizabeth II. Unfortunately for her posthumous reputation, Andrew was her favourite child, and she protected him for far longer than is defensible.

“The late Queen sought to protect her son from complete banishment, clinging to the hope that he would one day be exonerated,” writes Myers. “Similarly, while acknowledging that his brother could never return to public duties, Charles attempted to honor his mother’s wishes and for a long time stopped short of pushing for Andrew’s complete banishment.” Elizabeth reportedly contributed £7 million of the £12 million settlement Andrew paid to Virginia Giuffre, who alleged that Andrew had sex with her while she was trafficked by Epstein (Andrew denies this). Another £3 million was taken from the late Prince Philip’s estate, while a further £1.5 million came from unnamed other members of the family: the King recently issued a denial that any of it came from him. It looks, and is, grubby.

That leaves William in a difficult situation. Being Elizabeth’s beloved grandson is an asset, for so long as the public continues to think of her as a benign and morally impeccable woman who shepherded Britain through one century and into another. But if that perception switches — if Elizabeth begins to be seen as a grotesquely indulgent mother who used her privilege to ensure that Andrew’s accuser was paid off rather than heard in court — then the association turns into a liability for William.

Andrew’s conduct has the potential to deeply discredit the whole institution. While Myers refers to the allegations against him, rather prissily, as “a vulgar scandal”, they are more profound than that. The decision to appoint Andrew as a trade envoy (despite what was already known about his worrying associations) points to the alarming cost of habitual deference to the royals. Andrew was already nicknamed “Randy Andy” and the subject of headlines about him “chasing girls”. The government must have realized it was, at best, subsidizing a libertine, even before we heard reports it was bilked for Andrew’s massages.

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The parliamentary maneuvers required to discuss all this in the House of Commons, where criticism of the Royal Family is generally forbidden, puts the lie to the idea of Parliament’s supremacy. The monarchy’s place in the British constitution is underwritten by its shows of deference to our elected leaders — hence the theater of Black Rod having the door slammed in his or her face every year when asking for admission to the chamber on behalf of the monarch. If the public begins to see that as a fiction, the monarchy’s future looks perilous.

The case against Andrew, then, could easily become a case for the abolition of the monarchy altogether. Why, the public might begin to ask itself, should we foster a sub-class of the indolent and entitled — “spares” who are necessary as back-up for the succession, but who almost inevitably become redundant and curdle in their own uselessness. It’s all very well to point to the counter-example of the diligent, hardworking ones like Princess Anne, but there’s no way to stop potential Andrews from being born without tearing the whole institution down. As a secular age made it increasingly absurd for monarchy to rest on the idea of divine right, the royals have claimed authority from its popularity. This has a costly flipside for them: if they’re not likable, or even actively disgusting, their existence becomes hard to defend.

This is why one of William’s most important jobs between now and his accession to the throne is to put as much distance as possible between himself and Andrew: not only to condemn Andrew’s actions (at a minimum, associating with a suspected sex offender), but to make it clear that William was always, always wise to Andrew’s turpitude. Monarchs have always had to be unsentimental about their own family to secure their own rule. Once, you might have had an embarrassing uncle locked in the Tower, and arranged for him to be beheaded (or discreetly strangled) when convenient. Now, the murder is figurative, but no less ruthless.

Myers’s version of William is fair-minded but implacable when the things he cares about are threatened: he is frequently described as “angry” when he perceives either that Catherine has been mistreated, or that someone within the family (usually his brother) has failed in their duties. That’s a trait that will be invaluable as he reshapes the monarchy to fit the sensibilities of a modern nation.

But his greatest weapon may well be Catherine. The descriptions of their relationship offered by Myers are often saccharine to the point of nausea (one source says they embody “love in its rawest, most powerful form”), but there is a hard-edged point to this. Their marriage serves in a way to reconcile the hopes of his bitterly divided parents. Charles and Diana understood themselves, and eventually each other, as victims of the royal machine: both sought to make their sons’ lives a little closer to “normal” than their own had been.

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Catherine is portrayed here as the exemplar of that normality. Not a member of the aristocracy, but a regular middle-class girl he met at university. Not a trembling virgin many years his junior, but a peer and (emotionally, at least) an equal. Not a fairytale princess, but a young woman who takes her work seriously, whether that was her pre-engagement job at the fashion retailer Jigsaw, or her current job as a member of the royals. The snobbish jibes once aimed at Catherine and her family for being new-money social climbers, now look very misplaced.

Strangely, given Myers fetish elsewhere for chronicling every minute detail of his subjects’ lives, there no mention in this book of what I think of as Catherine’s most significant public action. In 2021, after the murder of Sarah Everard by police officer Wayne Couzens, Catherine attended the vigil in Everard’s honor. She did this not as part of a planned media op, but as a private individual, laying her own flowers.

Even as a longstanding royal cynic, I found it moving. Everard was not much younger than Catherine, living the kind of life Catherine herself might have lived under other circumstances; it also showed that she was one of “us”, even though she was now one of “them”. As a gesture, it was modest and compassionate, and the antithesis of everything Andrew has been accused of. More than anything, it articulated the kind of royal she might be. An ordinary princess — the true inheritor of Diana’s “people’s princess” tag.

Breaking the gilded cage that bred Andrew, or at least bending the bars, is good politics: it shows a rejection of the kind of irresponsible privilege that made his misdeeds possible. It also might be a little more humane for the individuals in the cage. No monarchist should feel comfortable defending an institution that has such apparent power to corrode a man’s morals. Our Royal Family will only be able to retain its special status if, paradoxically, it can assure its subjects that it is (in some ways) just like us. But when it is just like us, will we still remember what it is for?

The Saudis, backed by President Donald Trump, have of course denied that the murder was officially sanctioned, claiming that a rogue outfit was responsible after an argument got out of hand. However, the killing and dismemberment by the infamous bone saw were recorded in brutal detail by Turkish intelligence; and credible authorities, including senior intelligence officials such as Agnès Callamard, former UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings, have been unequivocal in their verdicts. Callamard’s report into the “execution” is damning: “Evidence points to the 15-person mission to execute Mr Khashoggi requiring significant government coordination, resources and finances… Every expert consulted finds it inconceivable that an operation of this scale could be implemented without the crown prince being aware, at a minimum, that some sort of mission of a criminal nature, directed at Mr Khashoggi, was being launched.” Just in case Prince William is in need of some small talk.

Of course, a visit by a senior member of the Royal Family is never just ceremonial. It is an act of diplomacy, and symbolism too. The moral endorsement of the British crown will be cherished by the Saudi regime, which likes to think of itself as “royal” in the grand tradition of the Western monarchies, despite its parvenu origins. But Prince William’s visit raises uncomfortable questions — not only about Middle Eastern realpolitik in an era of shifting alliances, but about the values that the United Kingdom claims to uphold.

These questions have become especially acute in the wake of a recent High Court judgment against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It concerned Ghanem al-Masarir, a Saudi dissident living in Britain since 2003. Through his popular YouTube channel, The Ghanem Show, recorded in Wembley, al-Masarir uses satire to expose corruption and human rights abuses within Saudi Arabia. His reach is vast, amassing over 300 million views, primarily from audiences inside Saudi Arabia who seek alternatives to state-controlled narratives and pro-regime bots.

But the authorities are aware of him too. Al-Masarir has been under constant harassment since 2004. He claims that a large check was forged in an effort to break him financially; that his phones were infiltrated with Israeli-manufactured Pegasus spyware; that he was followed and assaulted in broad daylight; and that he received explicit death threats from individuals linked to the Saudi royal court. The most violent incident, al-Masarir says, occurred in August 2018 he was followed from a cafe and assaulted by two men near the Brompton Road entrance of Harrods. Al-Masarir alleged that during the beating, the attackers repeatedly shouted: “Who are you to talk about the family of al-Saud?” and “How dare you curse Prince Salman, we won’t allow it!” They called him a “slave of Qatar” and threatened to “teach him a lesson”. When an English friend who was with al-Masarir told them they were protected by the Queen and British police, the attackers retorted: “Fuck London — their queen is our slave and their police are our dogs.”

In 2010, al-Masarir was befriended by an individual claiming to be a Master’s student in the UK who repeatedly attempted to persuade him to travel to Italy or Egypt. He later discovered this man’s true identity: Rajeh al-Baqmi, the head of Saudi intelligence at the Saudi embassy in London. He also encountered Maher Mutreb, a Saudi intelligence officer at the embassy, who made an explicit warning that he should never leave the UK. This might have been a back-handed threat with a hint of protection, suggesting that unlike their Russian counterparts who were prepared to murder co-nationals in London or Salisbury, Saudi mafiosi are more comfortable conducting their nefarious operations outside the UK, in countries such as Turkey.

Mutreb is clearly not to be messed with. A brigadier general commanding the Saudi hit squad or “Rapid Intervention Force”, it was he who led the team charged with killing and dismembering Khashoggi, assisted by Dr Salah al-Tubaigy, a forensic pathologist who is thought to have wielded the bone saw. In the audio recordings revealed by Turkish intelligence — the Saudis had failed to sweep the consulate for bugs — it is Mutreb’s voice that dominates. “Keep pushing, don’t remove your hand!”, followed by: “It’s over, it’s over, it’s over,” with the sounds of plastic sheets and the whine of an electric saw. While there is no audio directly linking the Crown Prince to the Khashoggi murder, the circumstantial evidence is compelling. In a separate audio, leaked by the CIA, the phrase “tell your boss” occurs in a conversation between Mutreb and the Crown Prince’s de facto chief of staff, Saud al-Qahtani. As Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst, told The New York Times: “A phone call like that… is as close to a smoking gun as you’re going to get.”

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The disclosures implicating MBS in the murder will certainly be ignored in the current White House — whose incumbents include the Crown Prince’s close friend, Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law. But is it really always necessary for the UK to toe the US line? At the very least, the High Court ruling in the Ghanem al-Masarir case should give the Palace — and the Foreign Office — pause for thought. Saudi Arabia initially attempted to claim immunity under the 1978 State Immunity Act. However, the court ruled in 2022 that the Kingdom was not immune to these claims. After the Saudi state failed to pay court costs and its appeal was struck out, the final judgment was delivered on 26 January. Judge Pushpinder Saini found that on the balance of probabilities the Kingdom had been responsible for the physical attack on al-Masarir and for hacking his phone: “The KSA had a clear interest and motivation to shut down the claimant’s public criticism of the Saudi government.”

In its ruling, the court awarded al-Masarir more than £3 million in compensation for the psychiatric harm caused by hacking his phone as well as the physical assault. This marks a significant benchmark in the defense of human rights — though, given its refusal to take part in the legal proceedings, there is no certainty that the Saudi government will actually pay.

Nevertheless, any concerns that the British state has about criminality are outweighed by realpolitik. As David Hearst, an astute Middle East observer, has argued, a profound realignment is underway in the Arab world. It is not driven by palace intrigues, tribal rivalries, or the usual contests between regional proxies. Nor is it about Iran or political Islam — the two habitual anxieties of Sunni Arab rulers. And unlike the Arab Spring, it has not emerged from popular uprisings or mass protests. Yet its consequences could be just as far-reaching.

What has changed, according to Hearst, is that the region’s most populous Arab states — above all Saudi Arabia and Algeria, and potentially Egypt — have begun to recognize the threat of a shared project of Israel and the United Arab Emirates to reshape the Middle East. Their fear is that Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi intend to fragment Arab-majority or Arab-leaning states. This would enable the Israelis and Emiratis to control key maritime chokepoints, such as the Straits of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb, and entrench military and economic dominance across the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa, and beyond.

This strategy is already explicit in Israel’s actions: in its efforts to create de facto enclaves in Syria protecting the Druzes and Kurds; in its recognition of Somaliland, which gives it a foothold in the Horn of Africa; and in its general efforts to weaken Arab polities where national unity tends to be problematic. For the UAE, fragmentation has been a long-running method of power projection. It’s visible in Libya, where the UAE has provided military support to General Khalifa Haftar against the UN-supported government in Tripoli; in Sudan, where the UAE backs the genocidal Rapid Support Forces against the central government; and in southern Yemen, where the UAE armed and empowered the Southern Transitional Council (STC) in pursuit of a separatist state aligned with Emirati interests and open to ties with Israel.

Indeed, Yemen is the decisive fault line in the plan for regional fragmentation. What began as a campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood-linked al-Islah movement evolved into a broader attempt to carve out an Emirati client state in the south, centered on the port of Aden and extending east into the Hadhramaut valley. The separatists’ attempt to take over the port of al Mukalla in the Hadhramaut region at the end of last year proved a turning point. Saudi Arabia, now encircled on its southern frontier, felt that Emirati ambitions were now threatening its security — and duly responded with force. Backing official Yemeni government troops, it bombed STC positions in Mukalla, reversing much of Abu Dhabi’s decade-long project in a matter of days. Almost simultaneously, Israel’s recognition of the separatist government of Somaliland (it is the only UN state to formally do so) confirmed Saudi fears that these were not isolated moves but elements of a coordinated strategy across both sides of the Bab el-Mandeb.

The rift between Mohammed bin Salman and his former mentor, the Emirati president Mohammed bin Zayed, was now gaping. The pair were once close partners in resisting the Muslim Brotherhood and allied movements. Now, Riyadh has not only confronted Emirati proxies militarily but also publicly reframed Abu Dhabi as a destabilizing actor. The Saudi media attacks on Mohammed bin Zayed have been blistering, depicting the UAE’s president as a disruptive force rather than the trusted ally of yore.

And the break reflects a deeper recalculation. Saudi Arabia understands that its strategic weight — in terms of population, territory, and oil power — far exceeds that of the UAE. Once you remove the expat community living in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, there are barely one million Emirati citizens. Abu Dhabi may specialize in covert action and proxy warfare, but it cannot prevail against Riyadh when vital Saudi interests are at stake.

Meanwhile, Washington under Donald Trump has intensified Saudi unease by treating global energy resources as prizes to be seized and threatening to depress oil prices, undermining the kingdom’s fiscal stability. Riyadh has concluded that US military power does not equate to responsible governance, and that American adventurism routinely generates chaos it cannot manage.

So the Saudi turn is not moral but strategic. By resisting Emirati-Israeli plans for regional fragmentation, Riyadh is positioning itself as an autonomous Arab power, potentially aligning more closely with Turkey, Egypt, Algeria — and perhaps, even long-term, with Iran. What it favors is a regional security order independent of Washington and Tel Aviv.

Given the emerging regional configurations, the British government — and the Palace — would be right in thinking that Britain’s interests align more closely with the Saudi Kingdom which, like it or not, is emerging as a leading player in the region and a potential source of stability rather than with the disruptive UAE. But does all this mean that the heir to the throne must cosy up to his murderous Saudi counterpart?

Prince William has cultivated an image as a thoughtful, socially conscious public figure — engaged with environmental issues, interfaith dialogue, and the responsibilities of leadership. It does not befit that persona for him to associate himself too closely with a regime implicated in surveillance, murderous violence, and repression. If William proceeds with the visit, he will need to find ways of expressing a certain distance from his hosts. He should certainly decline any invitations to inspect MBS’s yacht, Serena. According to the anonymous Saudi activist who goes by the name Mujtahid, Jamal Khashoggi’s fingers are kept on board as a trophy.

Instead, we get William Windsor, who carries himself with the quotidian air of a secular, modern Everyman: the sort of amiable public servant you might find working in a countryside charity. Watching his meeting with Donald Trump after the re-opening of Notre-Dame in Paris at the weekend, the royalty seemed to be on backwards. It was the democratically elected leader who came across like a monarch, grandly telling the actual prince he was “doing a great job” while Wills nodded and smiled like a bureaucrat.

It has long been presumed that even those retrograde nations that keep falling for strongman leaders will see the superiority of liberal democracy in the end. And this goes some way to explaining the hysterically overblown progressive panic about Donald Trump’s purported “fascism”. For simply by existing, and being popular, Trump contradicts this supposed arc of the moral universe toward rational, besuited proceduralism.

This must be frustrating for the progressives; the arc has been bending their way for a long time. In a 1923 essay, “Roman Catholicism and Political Form”, the political theorist Carl Schmitt was already cursing their triumph. In his view, the “economic-technical thinking” behind it — which today we’d call “managerialism” — displaced an older, more esoteric mode of representation with its “representative” government through elections and parliaments for a far.

What it replaced was “representation” not as a count of voters but a series of metonyms: parts that represent a whole, as “keel” might be used metonymically in poetry to denote the whole ship. In this mode, hereditary or appointed figures stand as representatives of distinct “estates” — that is, interests within the overall polity — such as the clergy, the landed gentry, the artisans and so on. But as we arrived in modernity, Schmitt argues, this understanding of “the principle of representation” was gradually lost — for it is the “antithesis to the economic-technical thinking dominant today”.

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But if this case seemed hopeless to Schmitt, something has changed. Whatever the official policies on the table, at the vibes level, the 2024 US Presidential election pitted the spirit of “economic-technical thinking” against that of “representation” in the sense Schmitt describes. Consider: Trump’s opponents offered what was by then very plainly a purely self-propelling managerial regime, whose ability to run entirely on autopilot was revealed when its purported leader became so senile in office that his dementia could no longer be hidden.

Against this, two of the most iconic images of his presidential campaign — Trump “working” in McDonalds, and Trump in a bin lorry — show him deploying the vocabulary of representation-as-metonym: in them, he stands as part-representative for whole classes (or, as the medieval world would have had it, “estates”) of the American electorate, especially in lower-paid and menial jobs.

And while there has been discussion of Joe Rogan and the podcast ecosystem, this is one of the less well-understood ways the digital revolution helped to win the election for Trump. That, as contemporary readers of the great 20th-century media theorist Marshall McLuhan are fond of asserting, “digital retrieves the medieval”. According to McLuhan’s theory, shifting to a new technology will often retrieve older social forms or ideas the previous technology seemed to have rendered obsolete. Contemporary McLuhanists argue that shifting from a print to digital-based information environment re-opened space for cultural norms and practices that were common in the Middle Ages, but which “arc of history” enjoyers had since come to view as relics of the past.

For example, digital media reliably produces increasingly neo-feudal concentrations of wealth and power, which in turn enables the rise of a new class of lords and princes. The same revolution has retrieved the medieval experience of signs and symbols as a living language, in the form of memes. And Trump is by no means the only political leader who has grasped the power of digital to retrieve political legitimacy in a register that’s far more like the one Schmitt describes than the “economic-technical thinking” he decried.

If Trump does this instinctively, perhaps the most obviously skilled communicator in this register is El Salvador’s leader Nayib Bukele. Bukele (or his social media team) is online a lot, plugged into the Anglophone meme discourse, and artful in cultivating his presence in this field. His X timeline blends retweets of frog jokes, conventional state announcements, and visuals from Little Dark Age edits of El Salvador’s armed forces to intimate and painterly visuals such as this, seemingly calculated to convey a sense of the king among his people, lit as if by the grace of God.

As for Trump, having secured his election at least partly via his instinct for internet-mediated medieval-style representation, he is now presiding over a de facto court his haters decry as markedly monarchic in character: picking favourites, greeting petitioners and toadies, and playing courtiers off against one another. Henry VIII was reportedly by turns charming, volatile, generous, and mercurial, and always completely confident of his right to power. And when I try to imagine life in his court, it sounds much more like being around Donald Trump than the polished, controlled, and formally powerless William.

And much as a medieval monarch would, Trump is choosing his inner circle from among the realm’s real lords and princes. This has always been a pragmatic consideration, for a monarch: how do you keep your nation’s most powerful close enough to be on your side, but not so close they try and depose you? Accordingly, Trump has already appointed enough billionaires to his cabinet to form a football team. Indeed, if we were in the 13th rather than the 21st century, these notables would likely already have been granted honour and titles. As it is, Americans don’t really roll like that; but perhaps first-name-only fame, plus serious proximity to the empire’s nuclear core, is the 21st-century equivalent. (Elon was also at Notre-Dame.)

But while in some ways most of this is just a different inflection on existing democratic norms, what’s distinctive about “representation” in the digital age is that you gain legitimacy via genuine affection between people and leader — and this is hard to fake. As disdainful politicians from Gordon Brown’s “Bigotgate” to the Boriswave migrant explosion attest, it’s easy enough in the UK to be elected as a parliamentary representative, via “safe seats” and the party machine, without feeling any special affection for or affinity with the people you represent. But for leaders exposed online, that’s almost impossible to disguise. Regular people may be busy, but they’re not stupid: they will swiftly identify a representative that disdains them, and take note, and hate them for it.

Genuine affection, on the other hand, will cover a multitude of flaws: a blessing for Trump, who is not short of them. And yet he has a clear love for America and Americans, evident in the way he can pose in a bin lorry, a McDonald’s apron, or a police mugshot and look iconic, rather than stage-managed. He may thus turn out to be a terrible leader; but he’s nonetheless a potent antithesis to the headless, faceless, “economic-technical thinking” order not in spite of but because of his personality. The same goes for Bukele: it’s clear, in the way he speaks to and about the people of El Salvador, that he views them as continuous with himself.

By contrast, it’s difficult to imagine Starmer feeling warm and fuzzy about ordinary Brits; he usually emanates something more like tightly controlled fear and disgust. As for William Windsor, I have no reason not to believe he feels some fondness for the people of Britain. But it’s an open question whether he’d ever represent us in this sense. After all, his whole dynasty, and mode of royalling, only came into being after Britain’s last absolute monarch was deposed in 1688. The “constitutional monarchy” that replaced it has always known itself to be defanged, a settlement that suited an increasingly mercantilist country and which has served Britain well enough for several centuries.

For the same deeply embedded historical reasons, I think Britain will have to grow considerably more fed up with our managerial overclass than we are even today, before we’re willing to revisit the pre-1688 monarchical register in any more serious a manner than the Faragist pantomine style. But there’s no reason to believe political legitimacy always and forever flows through the same channels. And it’s clear that something much more like the medieval version is now re-emerging, in the internet age, to challenge the managerialism Carl Schmitt so vividly depicted, and viscerally loathed. So perhaps there’s still hope for us; certainly I’d like to believe assisted political death by Starmerism is not Britain’s inevitable terminus.

So in this sense, perhaps the restoration and re-opening of Notre-Dame does indeed serve as sign. Not for moral collapse, but for the recovery of older forms we thought had burned to ashes. Both ancient yet brand-new, a restored medieval cathedral destroyed and then restored stands as a fitting representative for the restoration of medieval representation. I expect none of us will like everything about this development; but the managerialism it opposes is a whited sepulchre. Let it be defeated by its new, ancient antithesis; and in its place, long live the new kings.

A “lolcow”, for those who don’t know, is a derogatory, very online term for someone who gains notoriety via attention-seeking behaviour, combined with imperviousness to criticism and lack of self-awareness. And 28 years ago, in 1995, in an emerging world of 24-hour news cycles and ever-hungrier tabloids, Harry’s mother became the first true lolcow. She also set the bar for media oversharing, in the notorious Martin Bashir interview that tipped her from remote, paparazzi-hounded royal to press-courting celebrity megastar. Here, Diana coyly dropped bombshell after bombshell of juicy gossip for the media, interspersed with soft-voiced woe about how awful it was that the media wanted to know everything about her.

In Spare, Harry has followed decisively in her footsteps, producing more than 400 pages of such painfully needy oversharing that every page of airport-novel prose cries out for a hug. And it does so while conveying a queasy sense of squinting through the curtains at some sordid domestic scene. Reading it left me bemused at how the people around this clearly unhappy man could have encouraged him – or at least not stopped him – over-sharing to quite such a degree.

But why do it? Why subject yourself to the hostility and humiliation that anyone could predict would follow these revelations? To a significant extent, the opportunity to lolcow himself in this way is not of Harry’s choosing. Rather, the larger context is the fact that this outdoorsy, obviously basically well-meaning-but-emotionally-mixed-up midwit was not born a prince in (as a wag observed on Twitter) an age where he could perish heroically in some ill-advised charge against Prussian cavalry. Rather, he had a prominent role thrust upon him, unasked, from birth, in an age that has made commodifying ourselves a centrepiece of culture and commerce alike.

I expected to feel exasperation and perhaps distaste reading what has by now been exhaustively trailed in every newspaper as a bombshell tell-all memoir of the notoriously private Royal Family. But I was surprised to find myself feeling deeply sorry for the Duke of Sussex. And if Spare has this unexpected effect, it’s less because it reveals him – as he presents himself – to be the innocent victim of persecutory tabloids and conniving courtiers. Rather, it’s in demonstrating just how ill-equipped he is, by temperament, to navigate the impossible choices with which fate has afflicted him.

In the decades since Diana’s death, ever greater swathes of the human soul have been redirected from human relationships to commercial exploitation. Celebrity culture is perhaps the most well-established and pervasive of such dynamics. It commodifies two other core features of our emotional landscapes, redirecting them from intimacy to profit: the social roles of gossip, and of self-disclosure. As our daily lives grow ever more atomised, we depend more and more on synthetic gossip about celebrities we don’t really know to fill the gaps in our personal “village” and provide fodder for its water-cooler conversations.

If gossip helps to oil the wheels of conversation, so too does self-disclosure. When we share something personal in a conversation, it invites an answering disclosure from the other. Over time, such disclosures create trust and intimacy. And the power of modern celebrity status comes from just such self-disclosures, but delivered asymmetrically: instead of forming part of an interpersonal exchange, the “celebrity” feeds gobbets of gossip to the publicity machine, in exchange for validation, money, or other opportunities.

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Even within my modest platform, I’m conscious of this dynamic. Nothing elicits positive feedback in a column like a juicy personal anecdote. And there is always the temptation to go ever further, spilling more and more of yourself out for consumption by strangers until the result — in some quarters — becomes a kind of pornography of the self.

I can only guess at what relentless press scrutiny — which Harry calls the “fishbowl” — would feel like for someone accustomed to it at such immense scale, since childhood. Or, indeed, how such an individual might feel about the fact that its hunger was partly responsible for his own mother’s death. But if Spare depicts being endlessly “papped” as a living nightmare, it’s also in the nature of Faustian bargains, as Darran Anderson noted yesterday, to offer power as well as a horrible price. It is, after all, a function of Harry’s public profile that anyone cares about his childhood or inner life at all. And if Harry laments the way media scrutiny ruins relationship after relationship for him, he doesn’t seem able to imagine simply opting out altogether. It’s not beyond the wit of man to imagine disappearing altogether; wildly famous celebrities sometimes succeed in doing so. Instead, though, Spare recounts him rejecting an offered position as Governor-General of Bermuda, which he interprets as a plot by Camilla to get him out of the way. Well, yes, but doesn’t he want to be out of the way?

But it really doesn’t seem to just be Harry who wants to be both private, and yet also public. As Spare convincingly (if perhaps unintentionally) reveals, the entire Crown is in hock to the same bargain. At one point Harry recounts being berated by his father for taking legal action against the press, because (as Harry reports a courtier putting it) “one has to have a relationship with the press”. If Spare is to be believed, Charles tells him repeatedly just to ignore the tabloids — while playing the press like a fiddle, sometimes at the expense of his own sons, via carefully-managed leaks.

Harry’s explanation of his father’s behaviour in turn sheds light on his own tragic path to lolcow-dom. After a youth “deprived of love”, Harry speculates, Charles is “dangerously, compulsively drawn” to the “elixir” offered by the media. If Spare is at all accurate, this could apply just as well to Harry. But perhaps what damns Harry, unlike his father, to a tragic fate as lolcow is simply that he’s not very good at managing the balance between disclosure and self-protection, probably because he’s simply not cold-blooded enough. A lolcow is, in essence, someone who isn’t very good at playing the game of calculated self-disclosure; that’s Harry, to a T.

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He clearly understands how avid the machine is for anything relatable. In one genuinely poignant passage, he recounts reaching for his father’s hand at the Balmoral gates, after Diana’s death, and how that gesture set off a barrage of clicking cameras: the media machine capturing an intimate moment, so it could be sold to the public. “I’d given them exactly what they wanted,” he says. “Emotion. Drama. Pain.”

But giving the public its fix of emotion, drama and pain shades over into lolcow behaviour at the point where sharing becomes a toxic cycle. In Harry’s description, at the gates of Balmoral, the cameras were weapons: “They fired and fired and fired.” And yet some go back for more nonetheless. For intimate self-disclosure to strangers rarely produces just empathy. While you may get a measure of this (and Harry has plenty of supporters) you’ll also get objectification, mockery, and further demands for personal details. Then, still needy, and still craving love and validation, those with lolcow tendencies will respond by further disclosure, thus provoking ever more objectification and so on.

My sense of the Duke of Sussex is that, unlike more cold-blooded and self-disciplined operators, he has spent his life since that moment in Balmoral reaching out again and again for a metaphorical hand-hold, only to receive in return another barrage of photography. So he’s given in, and attempted what he calls “honesty” — which is to say, flinging every personal detail into the maw of the machine at once, presumably in the hope that this will finally make the great mass of strangers like him.

Without ever leaving the same studiedly bland, tabloid-register prose, the book lurches between accounts of travel and action, grotesquely over-personal revelations, including about family members who doubtless never consented to be thus exposed, and strangely platitudinous passages of introspection. The cumulative impression is of someone who put his own personality into storage, and bought a replacement one in IKEA.

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What beggars belief is the sheer level of neediness implied by such a wince-inducing level of self-exposure. But it’s hardly difficult to grasp why he should be so needy: his mother’s death haunts almost every page of Spare. He describes Diana as “light”, and reminisces about “Her devastating smile, her vulnerable eyes, her childlike love of movies and music and clothes and sweets – and us. Oh, how she loved us.”

But one twist in this heartbreak is never acknowledged. For if Harry describes the boys at his prep school as “abandoned children”, and we may infer that he considers himself abandoned, by her death, he doesn’t acknowledge that — regardless of how much she loved him — in truth his mother abandoned him before she died. “My mother legendarily said there were three people in her marriage,” he writes. “But her maths was off. She left Willy and me out of the equation.” And indeed she did, divorcing Charles and leaving her two sons behind with him, while she jetted off to beach resorts.

Unable to tip his mother off her pedestal, though, Harry recounts a youth spent seeking maternal warmth wherever it might be scrounged. Spare is full of what a therapist later tells him are “surrogate mums”: school matrons, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, and Teej, an older friend. Meanwhile the sainted Diana can do no wrong.

Perhaps, then, we shouldn’t berate him for vulnerabilities and cognitive dissonances he has, to such a great extent, inherited from her. For Spare also reveals just how far Harry is his mother’s son. He has inherited her fear of the dark, he says, “along with her nose, her blue eyes, her love of people, her hatred of smugness and fakery and all things posh”. But he seems to have followed her footsteps in more ambivalent ways, too. Spare is already as much of a voyeuristic sensation as she was. And it’s not much of a stretch to imagine Diana rationalising her own prioritisation of personal feeling over tradition and obligation much as Harry does, as part of “living in truth”.

Harry talks about fearing “a repeat of history, another untimely death like the one that had rocked this family to its core 23 years earlier”. The clear implication is that he is afraid Meghan might die in a car crash just like his mother. But my sense is that if anyone is in danger, it is Harry. For if he has inherited Diana’s nose, we may infer from Spare that he has also inherited her cocktail of vulnerability, emotional reasoning, and (shall we say) below-average analytic capacity that, combined with unasked-for levels of public scrutiny, has sealed his fate as Prince Lolcow.

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Spare left me feeling genuine compassion for Harry, mingled with a queasy sense of shame for this tawdry era. Another time and culture might have afforded a man such as he an honourable life of leadership, even heroism. Instead, the 21st century has turned him into a broken reciter of Hallmark-tier therapy platitudes, hell-bent on strip-mining what’s left of public affection for him in fruitless pursuit of the empathy he clearly craves.

Arise, then, Prince Lolcow. For your own sake, please buy a few thousand acres somewhere remote, and devote yourself to something healthy and practical such as cattle farming. If you don’t, the media machine whose empathy you so self-destructively crave will continue farming you. And eventually it will grow tired of you, and torture you to death.

After a week of controversial and, at times, cringeworthy leaks from his book, Spare, Prince Harry’s interview with ITV came as an anti-climax. His host, Tom Bradby, gamely tried to stir up trouble while seeming to step back from it, suggesting to the Prince, about his relationship with the Royal Family, “you haven’t so much burnt your bridges as taken a flame thrower to them”. Harry’s response was arguably the closest he came in the interview to the disarming candour of his book, claiming “They’ve shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile. And I’m not sure how honesty is burning bridges. You know, silence only allows the abuser to abuse.” Yet throughout the interview, there is a sense of damage limitation, if not outright back-pedalling, that chimes with the generally scathing response his book has received critically.

As confessionals go, it’s a particularly evasive one. In contrast to the salacious, or salaciously reported, leaks from his book, of frostbitten appendages and so forth, there are few revelations here. There are references to leaked conversations with Camilla, troubling and melancholic remembrances of his mother’s death and the aftermath, acknowledgements that the Cambridges and Sussexes never entirely got on from the beginning, his entirely brotherly relationship with his brother, and so on. Little is surprising and there is much that is conciliatory. In the interview, he concedes “there are two sides to every story” and gives a mature and tender assessment of how difficult Princess Diana’s death must have been for Prince Charles, reflecting as a father himself, “Only now… did I really think about how many hours he’d been awake. And the compassion that I have for him as a parent, having to sit with that for many, many hours, ringing up friends of his, trying to work out, ‘How the hell do I break this to my two sons?’”

Throughout there is the suggestion of vertigo in speaking publicly about the issues compared with how emboldened print can make one feel; his book, by contrast, does not lack boldness and feels, occasionally like it could have been ghostwritten by a republican. Many autobiographical writers are plagued with a feeling they have betrayed and even sabotaged relationships with loved ones, simply by writing about them — “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished” Czeslaw Milosz has been quoted as saying —and there’s a sense with Prince Harry of at least wanting to heal the divisions, while, tragically, perhaps deepening them.

The most telling line, which reaches towards the heart of the matter, comes back to the Faustian nature of fame and particularly the media’s gaze and how that can distort, “After many, many years of lies being told about me and my family, there comes a point where, going back to the relationship between, certain members of the family and the tabloid press, those certain members have decided to get in the bed with the devil.” This reiterated the accusation Harry made against Camilla in his 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, where he claimed, she was “dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press. And there was open willingness on both sides to trade of information. And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her on the way to being queen consort, there was going to be people or bodies left in the street because of that.” Again and again, in his recollections in interviews and writing, Prince Harry comes back to the media as a baleful destructive force in his life.

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It is evident that, seeking sanctuary from these pressures, Harry often found cold detachment or rejection from his family. There has been much made of Meghan Markle’s apparent reluctance to play the game expected of a royal, but the reticence has been there in her husband for much longer.

What is particularly illustrative and sympathetic about Prince Harry’s relationship with fame is that it was not chosen. In the traditional Faustian transaction, the would-be genius or celebrity sells their soul, knowing that the cost is damnation and believing that the gains will be worth it. With the royals, fame is hereditary, which is as much of a curse as a blessing. The transaction is one-sided. No deal is made and yet the individual assumes precisely the same debt. In a world, even a country, where children are born into horrendous poverty and deprivation, it’s difficult to have sympathy for someone born into immense privilege. Yet it is warranted, given that child we watched walking along forlorn at his mother’s funeral did not choose any of this.

The problem is that Prince Harry is now a man and no longer a lost boy. Though he has chosen an arguably noble route of walking away from an environment that had shunned him, and he has the right to speak his mind and tell his own story, he has not walked away from fame. Sympathy, like any resource, is finite. It is entirely reasonable to wish to escape the stilted environment expected of the royals, the stiff upper lipped omerta that hides a multitude of pain and sins, the expectations to be a well-turned-out blind eye-turning mannequin (some years ago, I found myself in the unlikely company of a drunken lord who informed me that the royals were pitied by the rest of the aristocracy).

It is even more understandable to wish to escape the glare of the lens that played a part in the death of a beloved parent. Having chosen Meghan and America, Prince Harry had the chance to transcend fame and to effectively defeat the presence that has seemingly haunted his life. He could go semi-privately into any number of ventures. Harry was not, after all, a signatory to the Faustian pact. One of the most tragic aspects to what has been unfolding is not just the painful reality of a family schism, but rather that at the brink of escape, Harry decided to return to the table to sign the contract.

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A cursory scan over Twitter will show that there are those who dislike the Sussexes for petty vindictive reasons, casually firing around racist and sexist tropes in the process. Yet there are far more who have sympathy and are interested because it is a human story that resonates, especially those who have been through grief, familial rifts, childhood rejection and so on. The royals are just like us, it suggests. Who knew? The point where sympathy dissipates is with this issue of fame, the courting of it rather than the walking away. This is where the public’s role in the Faustian bargain comes in. This is what differentiates celebrities from the rest of us, the point of departure, and the judgement can and may well be merciless. By aiming for the echo chamber of the terminally online and the patronage of the American establishment, the wider sympathy is lost. It is especially frustrating as the prince had a chance to get out.

Harry’s case is not helped by a mixed tone of grievance and sanctimony. One moment, he is referring to the killing of Afghan militants as a game of chess, the next he is engaging in flagellation about his previous lack of social consciousness. At its worst, it seems distasteful and condescending, the opposite of a spiritual confessional. It undoes the undoubtedly brave work of speaking about trauma, autonomy, or even his right to speak. As George Orwell put it, “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful”, but here even the disgrace feels performative. It feels grubby and out of touch, both too intimate and too remote. It feels, in other words, like fame.

Here lies the deeper issue. Whatever you think of Harry and Meghan or the Royal Family, you are expected to think something — whether acolyte or tormentor. The public are the essential piece of the Faustian contract, as much as the media. We are its creditors. When it is signed, what might begin as human sympathy becomes a detached form of judgement. The figures we gaze at become dehumanised, either as saints or demons. The weight of having to play these roles or simply being perceived as such is no small thing, though we can always say they are well renumerated for their troubles. It is worth considering what the gaze of the media does to such figures, and Prince Harry’s life is an ongoing example, but it is also worth considering what it is doing to those of us who watch.

“Now Abel kept flocks and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also brought an offering – fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favour on Abel and his offering but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favour. So Cain was very angry and his face was downcast”.

As we know, Cain was so consumed with anger and jealousy that he attacked his brother in the fields and killed him. He was put under a curse to be a “restless wanderer” on the Earth.

On the surface this is a story of sibling rivalry, something tormenting Prince Harry. As reports at the weekend suggest, the rift between the young prince and his elder brother seems to be widening as publication day for the pointedly titled “Spare” draws nearer. It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Harry. It can’t be easy being the spare, the younger brother whose role in the royal “firm” started in a position of subordination and has become steadily more subordinate as more direct heirs arrive to dilute his lineage.

There are plenty of younger siblings who have suffered in this way although none of us can imagine the particular hardship of being the “spare” to a throne.

Cain and Abel, though, is about much more than sibling rivalry. It contains deeper truths about human nature and the “deadly” sin of jealousy. It sounds something of a warning, therefore, for the spare prince.

Life, and in particular free market society, produces a constant churn of perceived “winners” and “losers”. Society and the media measure people by criteria of material wealth, fame and power. Hollow as these perceived “virtues” may be, they skew our perceptions, driving behaviour and sentiment.

It is natural for the winners and losers to be attracted to systems of belief which support their self-interest. Thus the winners from capitalism tend to support capitalism and the losers tend to seek out ideologies that would challenge or replace it. Those who resist this temptation are the honourable exception — capitalists who see the flaws in free markets, show real compassion and are willing to give their money away; or those vulnerable and poor who bear no resentment or anger.

Unfortunately the exceptions are far too rare.

Ideas of resentment and jealousy echo through time, and played a prominent part in the 19th century, when philosophers sought to create new theories of morality without God. Nietzsche borrowed a French word, ressentiment, to anchor the origins of his moral philosophy. By his estimation, Western moral thinking had its roots in the master-slave relationship.

The weak and marginalised members of society (such as persecuted Christians) resented those who oppressed them (the masters) and inverted the prevailing morality, turning humility, equality and compassion into the highest virtues.

“While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself … the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment.”

The dominant creed of the resentful for most of the 20th century was Socialism. As George Orwell pointed out, socialists don’t generally love the poor, they hate the rich.

When Marxist materialism became discredited with the realisation of the economic failures of the Soviet Union and the rising death counts of Communists and Socialist regimes around the world, the bearers of “ressentiment” turned to other domains into which to inject their venom. Key targets were the spheres of culture, family life, sex and race.

And so was born critical theory, the bastard child of Post-Modernism and Frankfurt School post-Marxism. To this conception we owe the hierarchy of victimhood, the one to which we must now all defer; it also spawned the language of the social justice warriors — words such as “my truth”, “lived experience”, “white privilege” (or any other kind of privilege for that matter) “ intersectionality” and so on.

The virus of critical theory was smuggled into the American culture via academia (two members of the Frankfurt School — Marcuse and Adorno — actually emigrated from Germany to US universities before the war).

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From academia, critical theory (popularly understood as wokery) has infected the media, publishing, Newsrooms, Hollywood, football commentators, public administration, HR departments, and even Big Tech. Perhaps the last place you would expect it to appear is the British Royal family. Surely they are not the losers in life’s lottery?

But that is to misunderstand the nature of resentment. Even within the Royal Family there are those who consider themselves losers. Cain was only upset about his status relative to Abel. It did not matter that he was Adam’s first born son.

Harry has no doubt been deeply frustrated by his status within the family and the nature of his “spare”ness. There is resentment and there is jealousy. Of course the Woke creed appeals. And no wonder Harry adopts its language. Which leaves us, ironically, with a hereditary Prince lecturing us about “privilege”.

There are of course other dimensions to Harry’s story. There is the shadow of his mother and the influence of his wife. But to the extent that he is a victim, he is the victim not only of his family circumstances but also of poisonous philosophers. Perhaps his example can be a cautionary tale to the rest of us.

Paul Marshall is chairman of Marshall Wace. He writes in a personal capacity.

In its defence, the magazine could point to a multitude of other media outlets that had similarly been caught out by the sudden death of the Princess of Wales on 31 August 1997. And, more than the event itself, caught out by the public response.

Because the week that followed — between the fatal car crash in the early hours of a Sunday morning and the funeral the following Saturday, 25 years today — was an extraordinary moment, a week of all-consuming grief or hysteria (depending on taste), when nothing else seemed to happen, and nothing else mattered. There was only one subject of conversation, certainly in the media: radio phone-in shows experienced record numbers of calls, newspaper sales soared, and rolling news really came into its own.

There were two poles of attraction that week; two households, both alike in dignity. There was Kensington Palace, where Diana had lived. It became the centre of the people’s mourning: flowers costing an estimated £50 million were laid at the gates in a rising (and rotting) tide of tribute. And then there was Balmoral, where the Royal Family, including Prince Charles and his young sons, was on its annual visit. No visible expression of grief was forthcoming from that quarter, and even if that was understandable — after all, two children had just lost their mother and might wish for some privacy — the public was not in an understanding mood.

As the shock of the news began to recede in those days, the sorrow turned to anger, directed at the perceived failure of the royals to lead the national bereavement. “It is as if no one in the Royal Family has a soul,” raged The Sun, anxious to direct attention away from the paparazzi from whom Diana had been fleeing, and on whom the tabloids relied so heavily.

And since this was a time when flags were important to us, the anger focused on a third site: Buckingham Palace, where there was no flag flying at half-mast. The reasoning for this was protocol: only the Royal Standard flew over royal palaces, and then only when the monarch was in residence, and never, ever at half-mast. But that was precisely the sort of inflexible convention that Diana, the rebel daughter of an 8th Earl, had stood against. “I do things differently, because I don’t go by a rule book,” she’d said in her 1995 Panorama interview, “because I lead from the heart not the head.”

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That was the division that Diana Week exposed: head vs heart, duty vs feeling, the stiff upper lip vs the trembling pout. The Royal Family, wrote Daily Mirror columnist Tony Parsons, were stuck in the past, “undemonstrative, buttoned up, reluctant to show their emotions in public”, while the multitudes outside Kensington Palace were “very much a part of new Britain – emotional, passionate, willing to show their feelings. Just like Diana herself”. And if the nation was divided, the battle of the flag seemed to show who had the upper hand: on the Thursday, a Union Jack was duly hoisted to half-mast over Buckingham Palace.

There was much speculation that week about the end of the monarchy. Indeed, even before Diana’s death, republicanism had been on the rise. The year had started with an ITV show, Monarchy: The Nation Decides, filmed before a 3,000-strong audience at the NEC in Birmingham (more familiar to viewers as the arena for Gladiators). Less a debate than a forerunner of reality TV, it broke the record for Britain’s biggest ever phone-vote: 2.6 million calls were taken, with a third supporting the abolition of the monarchy.

A more orthodox poll by ICM in mid-August produced the same result: 30% said Britain would be better off without royalty, up from 13% a decade earlier. The upheavals of Diana Week seemed to have accelerated that trend.

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What halted the forward march of republicanism was the deployment of Princes William (aged 15) and Harry (12). They were carefully shielded from the media for the first days, but the pressure grew too great. On the Thursday, they appeared before cameras at Balmoral; on Friday they looked at the flowers and tributes outside Buckingham Palace; and on Saturday they walked behind their mother’s coffin in a funeral procession, the broadcast of which attracted a near-record of 32.1 million viewers — just shy of the 1966 World Cup Final. And the country felt better for having wept over the poor motherless mites. A poll by MORI immediately after the funeral showed just 18% in support of Britain becoming a republic.

It was, though few were prepared to say so, a bit ugly. A large part of Diana’s appeal had been her identification with the vulnerable. “I understand people’s suffering, people’s pain,” she’d said, in a leaked phone conversation. “It’s not only AIDS; it’s anyone who suffers. I can smell them a mile away.” Now, in her name — and in the interests of showing that we were a kinder, gentler nation — we demanded that her children parade their suffering on our behalf.

Then came the comedown. On Sunday there was nothing to do or to see, but still three million people found their way to the royal parks in London, seemingly reluctant to let go of the sense of a shared experience. And on Monday there began the process of forgetting just how bizarre that week had been, the sheer enormity of the public display of emotion, the “Latin American peasant hagiolatry”, as Boris Johnson called it.

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“We live in an age where feminism is a fact,” concluded Johnson, “where giving vent to emotion in public wins votes.” And that seemed to be the lesson. Tony Blair, who’d been elected just four months earlier, was the big winner of the week. He was convinced that his mantra of “New Labour New Britain” was in tune with the country that Diana symbolised. “In temperament and time, in the mood she engendered and which we represented, there was a perfect fit,” he wrote in his memoirs. And he might have been right; in the aftermath of her death, the opinion polls showed him with an approval rating of 93%, the highest ever recorded for a prime minister.

The Conservatives, on the other hand, were nowhere. Already reeling from their worst election defeat since 1906, they simply couldn’t fathom the mass mourning at all. “I walked through the crowds,” reflected one Tory ex-cabinet minister, “and realised this was no longer a country I truly understand.” In due course, the party decided to put that right with the election as leader of David Cameron, a man who, as a 14-year-old, had camped out on the Mall to witness the wedding procession of Charles and Diana. The assumption was that Diana had won. We’d finally shed the Victorian values championed by Margaret Thatcher. We were all emotionally literate now.

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Except that it doesn’t really feel like it. The clash of values that made such an impact in 1997 hasn’t been resolved one way or the other. It’s become more intense, more bitter, so that we now talk of a culture war, a conflict in which the two sides are pretty much the same as they were then. It’s still about heart and head, the subjective vs the pragmatic. The injunction to “be kind” still comes with an element of emotional bullying, and those who dissent are still, as John Redwood wrote of Diana Week, “well advised to keep their thoughts to themselves given the surge of public sentiment”.

And since this is Britain, the Royal Family is expected to play its part. So Harry is the champion of the Kensington Palace tendency, albeit transplanted to California. He’s prepared to tell anyone who’ll listen about his “genetic pain and suffering” and about his wife’s “lived experience”, in terms more Spencer than Windsor. (“I’ve never discussed private matters and I don’t think the Queen has either,” snapped Prince Philip, back when Diana was still alive.) Harry is not reluctant to share his truths. But every time he does so, he comes under increasingly heavy fire, and sheds more support. A YouGov poll in May this year showed just 32% seeing him in a positive light; even among those aged 18 to 24 — supposedly his constituency — this only rose to 42%.

William, on the other hand, is the heir to Balmoral, though with better PR advisors. There’s no radical departure from tradition here, just a steady adaptation. And the result is that he’s polling second only to the Queen as the most popular royal, with his wife in third place. The month after the funeral, the Queen mused: “I sometimes sense that the world is changing almost too fast for its inhabitants, at least for us older ones.” But she’s still with us, still quietly adapting.

Over the last 25 years, the noise from those rolling news channels, amplified by social media, has given the impression that society is in a state of frenzied change. Technology may be, but human beings are not. There is a generational evolution, as there always is, but what appeared to be a major step-change in 1997 was deceptive. Diana Week turned out to be an exception, not the making of a new rule. “Papa doesn’t embarrass me,” William was quoted as saying in 1995. “Mama does.”

And yet, at the same time, my heart sinks. You see, this isn’t just any royal tour — it’s a rescue mission. The itinerary takes in the Bahamas, Jamaica and Belize — all countries where Her Majesty the Queen happens to be head of state. But for how much longer?

Last year, Barbados declared itself a republic — and so it looks like Kate and Wills have been dispatched to shore-up the remaining monarchies in the region. Officially, the tour is about environmental issues, but no one’s fooled. This is very obviously a royal version of Operation Save Big Dog. And I’m not sure that’s at all wise. 

For a start, it raises the temperature. One moment, you’re a Bahamian or a Jamaican getting on with your day, the next a British Prince turns up and suddenly you’re forced to question why you have foreigner as a head of state.

Meanwhile, back home, all the wrong people will be milking the issue. That small band of fervent Remainers who take unwholesome pleasure from any hint of British humiliation will be overjoyed. Last week, they enjoyed a cheap thrill when the Russian foreign minister monstered Liz Truss in Moscow; so imagine what they’ll make of Prince William begging for his granny’s job in Jamaica. The spectacle of the Queen getting the sack from multiple countries would suit the declinists down to the ground. So much for Global Britain, they’ll chirp.

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The solution, of course, is not to rise to the bait. That isn’t to say we should applaud the end of monarchy in Her Majesty’s far-flung realms; but we must accept that any such decision is none of our business. Indeed, Brexiteers, more than anyone, should support the right of a country to assert its independence in whatever way it deems appropriate. 

Besides, there’s nothing new to see here. Most of the nations that have gained their independence from Britain opted for their own heads of state. Some of them took their time getting around to it. The Maltese waited ten years, the Sri Lankans 14 and and the Mauritians 24. When Barbados became independent in 1966, the island’s first Prime Minister warned against “loitering on colonial premises after closing time”. But, in the event, the Barbadians waited 55 years.

I don’t blame them for hesitating. Having a head of state is an awkward business. Do you go for a powerful, but potentially polarising, figure like the Americans? Or do you go down the purely ceremonial route and end up with some has-been politician or boring academic? It’s no wonder that monarchy retains its sparkle. 

However, if you haven’t got a royal family of your own, where do you get one? Newly sovereign nations used to borrow minor royals from other countries. Today, Harry and Meghan might fancy a crack at Canada, but sadly the royal transfer window has long since closed. And so, for fourteen countries — from Antigua and Barbuda to Tuvalu — the default option is to carry on with the same monarch as the British. 

Which is fine, I’m sure we don’t mind sharing. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that this isn’t an deeply odd arrangement. In fact, it’s very nearly unique. Apart from Elizabeth II, only one other person in the world today serves as head of state in more than one country: Emmanuel Macron, who by virtue of being President of France is also a co-prince of Andorra.  

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So if any or all the remaining realms opt for a more conventional arrangement, we shouldn’t take it personally. Replacing the Queen with someone who actually lives in the country is part and parcel of expressing sovereignty.

Yet sorting out a local head of state isn’t the only piece of post-imperial paperwork to be dealt with. The constitutional relics of the British Empire can be found across the world. Take the Union Jack, which can still be found on the flags of four sovereign nations besides the UK, not to mention several Canadian provinces and Hawaii. It would be understandable if these nations and territories wanted a flag of entirely local design. In fact, that’s what the New Zealand government proposed in 2016, though it was rejected in a referendum.

But if they ever change their minds, then, again, we Brits shouldn’t take it personally. One of the things that most annoyed Brexit voters in 2016 was the EU’s fatuous habit of stamping its flag where it wasn’t wanted — on our passports, on our number plates and on public works built with our money. I’m delighted that other countries have freely chosen to make the Union Jack their own; but should they come to think differently, then a redesign wouldn’t just deserve our understanding, but our respect. After all, we didn’t mind when the Canadians changed their flag in 1965.  

Indeed, contrary to the ravings of progressive ideologues, the British are far from obsessed with the Empire. It is the contemporary Left — not the Right — that can’t let the past go. Yet there is one thing that both sides still fail to understand, which is that the post-imperial era is also heading into the rear view.

As we’re discovering with Brexit, breaking free from a deeply embedded political order takes place suddenly in some respects and gradually in others. But while a transitional phase is inevitable, it is not interminable. Sooner or later, the new order is complete. From that point, it is time to look to the future.

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We therefore need to think about our post-imperial institutions — and especially the Commonwealth. The organisation was created as a successor to empire, a way of fostering relationships with and among newly independent nations. But in the years and decades ahead, the living memories of that time are destined to dwindle away — a fact that will be painfully underlined when our Queen’s long reign comes to an end.

So while there’s every good reason to cultivate friendships between nations tied together by family, language and common values, basing that community on a long defunct empire is going to become irrelevant. If it is to survive for longer than the monarchies of the Caribbean, the Commonwealth will need to move on. The membership of Mozambique and Rwanda, neither of which were ever part of the British empire, should be taken as a precedent not an exception. 

George VI was the first head of the Commonwealth. His daughter was the second; Charles will take over when the time comes. It is an extraordinary thing, based on nothing more than the continued respect of 54 independent and equal nations for one family. How long will that respect endure? There’s something for William to think about while he plays with his son on the beach.

He died December 14, 1861, leaving Victoria to her famously prolonged and expressive grief. Victorian medicine gave him a sorry end: on the day before he died, he was doped with brandy every half hour. This was the shattering conclusion to one of the great nineteenth century romances. Two cousins who had met young and married passionately were tragically torn apart. But as Albert’s comment about setting no store by life suggests, the marriage was not always the fairytale it was supposed to be.

Albert had been ill for years: rheumatic, depressed, full of stomach cramps, shivering in between bouts of diarrhoea. But he had not always been a sickly royal. In his short time as Victoria’s consort, Albert transformed the monarchy and Britain. Those 42 years had been enough for him to achieve in a lifetime what most people couldn’t dream of in a dozen. He is a model of hard work, someone who ought to be an object of fascination to Progress Studies for his ability to see the big picture and the details, and to get things done.

The wonders of his name form a dizzying list. Without Albert, we would never have had the V&A, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, Imperial College. That swath of South Kensington was based on his vision and paid for by money raised by the Great Exhibition, which he enabled and promoted. His proposals for affordable, sanitary housing for the poor were presented there.

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Albert was a reformer. He built a close relationship with Robert Peel, the prime minister who revoked the Corn Laws, thus making bread affordable for labourers. When he was appointed Chancellor of Cambridge, the syllabus was limited to Maths and the Classics; only 40 students each year took honours degrees. He introduced the chance to study Moral Sciences and the Natural Sciences; he also proposed using the colleges’ income from rents to fund 700 places for poor students. In 1843, Albert drove through the streets of Birmingham, side-by-side with the radical mayor, and was cheered by republican Chartists: he put the monarchy in touch with the people.

He also rudely awakened it to a new century of industrialisation, capitalism and technology. When he married Victoria, the royal household was still roasting 12 large joints of meat a day, and hundreds of candles were replaced overnight, irrespective of use. The monarchy was a sleepy old institution on the brink of republicanism. Albert was sent to save it.

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Albert tamed and tightened the royal household: he made it solvent and relevant. But he also tamed and tightened Victoria. The man behind the monuments is every bit as impressive as he is imagined to be, but like so many great Victorian men he combined public marvels with a darker domestic side. Victoria was broken into his expectations of a tradwife. This wasn’t just standard Victorian patriarchal dominance. As A.N.Wilson wrote in his absorbing biography of Albert — the first one since the 19th century — says: “Albert had entered wholeheartedly into the idea that he was being groomed and prepared to become Britain’s Enlightened Despot. Only the Little Woman on the throne was thwarting his ambition.” As well as being a beacon of progress and hard work, Albert’s life is a cautionary tale about how easily the pursuit of good deeds in a naughty world can become self-defeating and cruel.

When he was first married, Albert had complained: “The difficulty in filling my place with the proper dignity is that I am only the husband, and not the master in the house.” As with all his other achievements, he worked hard to establish things the way he thought they ought to be. After the first pregnancy started Albert moved his desk next to Victoria’s; when the child was born, she gave him the keys to Cabinet boxes. From here on, Albert expanded and maintained huge informal power, keeping, as Jane Ridley said, “a vigilant watch over all departments of government.”

He worked like a Catherine wheel. As Victoria had seven children in ten years — which for her involved depression and incapacitation — he became her de facto private secretary. Day and night, Albert drafted and copied letters. When Victoria wrote to her ministers, Albert influenced her, dictated to her, or wrote the letter himself. (Peel thought Albert’s endless letters were part of what made being Prime Minister unendurable.) He worked himself into an early grave trying to secure the power he thought should be his. In all this work, Alfred was, as Stanley Weintraub said, the uncrowned king.

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Albert manipulated Victoria, making her account for her moods and tempers. If she got angry, he would be silent, later sending her belittling notes admonishing her lack of self-control. These letters sometimes began, “Dear Child”. To help “improve” herself, Victoria kept a notebook of her shortcomings, writing down any instances when she had irritated or upset Albert, noting her failures to hold her tongue. If Albert was satisfied, he would give her a good certificate of improvement. He manipulated Victoria during a post-natal depression, lying about her childhood governess to have the woman removed from the household. This left Albert as the sole influence.

The effect of his disturbing treatment of Victoria is nowhere more evident than in the letters she wrote to their daughter Vicky after Albert died. So controlled had Queen Victoria been that for years afterwards she could barely do or think anything unless she felt her daughter’s “Dear Papa” — her Angel — would have approved. It’s not unreasonable to speculate that Victoria would have been treated far better by her husband if she hadn’t been unfortunate enough to be Queen.

The bullying was partly the result of their very different tempers. Before Albert, Victoria was a London girl who liked court life, with all its drinking, dancing, socialising and late nights. Before Victoria, Albert had been known to stay up until a reasonable hour playing sober games of dominoes. Albert took Victoria away from court life — quite literally — by establishing private royal residences on the Isle of Wight and in Scotland, living as if by Cowper’s dictum that “God made the country, and man made the town”. She followed because she was infatuated; he showed fewer signs of being in love with her.

His concern was to maintain bourgeois values, which were politically important. Victoria had to distance herself from her “wicked uncles”, the generation of Georgian and Regency rolling stones who had diminished the monarchy’s reputation; obese, dissolute, licentious and lecherous sybarites, her immediate predecessors William IV and George IV were the model of everything Victoria and Albert weren’t going to be. (Albert also had no-good relatives of his own to escape: his parents had both ended up in the middle of all sorts of scandals and had eventually divorced. Albert’s father then chose his own niece for his second wife.)

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We are used to a big royal family with a clear line of succession. It wasn’t like that before Victoria. Victoria’s second child, born in 1841, was the first Prince of Wales since 1762, when George III’s eldest son had been born. George III’s sons fathered plenty of children, but almost none of them was legitimate. Other than Victoria, the only heir was Princess Charlotte, who died in childbirth, leaving Victoria as the future monarch. If Victoria had died, the throne would have gone to Ernst, Duke of Cumberland, later King of Hannover, a notorious Right-winger rumoured to have murdered his valet and fathered a child with his sister.

With Victoria and Albert’s family, therefore, the monarchy was stabilising. As the world grew increasingly modern, they were a bulwark of traditional values. It wasn’t just the old-world feel of the gold coaches and mock-medieval robes that gave The Firm its publicity niche. Being a good old-fashioned family was (and is) essential to future success. The famous Winterhalter portrait of Albert and Victoria surrounded by their adorable children linked them with a middle class ideal of family. Their nine offspring were a sign that the Royal Family was respectable again, not Regency.

At Christmas, this message was broadcast far and wide. A popular etching of Albert, Victoria and their children admiring their newly decorated tree in 1848 makes the Winterhalter portrait look subtle. Albert is credited for starting the craze for Christmas trees in this country — the Victorian equivalent of Kate Middleton’s clothes selling out within hours of her wearing them.

William and Kate have just released their latest Christmas family portrait. It is as respectable and aspirational as a Boden catalogue and has more than a touch of Winterhalter about it. Taken on their “private vacation”, it owes a significant debt to Albert’s bourgeoise model. The Royal Family is still living in his shadow. And some of them, of course, are still struggling with the fact that not everyone can live up to his ideals.

In the Metamorphoses, the greatest anthology of classical myth ever written, the Roman poet told of Actaeon, a hunter who inadvertently stumbled upon Diana as she was bathing. The goddess, outraged that a mortal had seen her naked, turned the intruder into a stag. His own hounds then pursued him, dragged him down, and tore him to pieces. “Only once the life had left his mangled flesh, so it is said, was the rage of the goddess finally slaked.”

Today Princess Diana would have turned 60. What life she might have gone on to live had she not died trying to escape the photographers who, like a pack of hounds, pursued her into the Pont de l’Alma tunnel that fateful night in Paris 24 years ago? It is impossible to know, of course. One thing, however, is clear. The car crash that killed Diana at the age of 36 brought her immortality. It transmuted her once and for all into legend. Just as the break-up of the Beatles in 1970 set the seal on their status as the ultimate icons of the 60s, so did Diana’s untimely death ensure that she would ever afterwards be remembered as the archetype of a beautiful princess.

The parabola of a story, if it is to rank as great, requires a perfect ending. The ending of Diana’s story — so surprising, so unsurprising — seemed scripted to such a flawless degree that it has generated an entire multitude of conspiracy theories. Yet the attempt to blame “dark forces” for the car crash, to pin the blame on MI6, or Prince Charles, or Prince Philip, is really only a displacement strategy. We all of us knew in our hearts, when the news came through from Paris, who the guilty people were. We — the global public, hungry for every last sensational story, every last prurient snap — were the ones who had driven her to her death. Actaeon had never intended to intrude on Diana’s privacy. We, by contrast, had no such excuse.

“And it seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind.” It was a measure of Diana’s star quality that she could be compared at her funeral to more than one kind of goddess. Elton John, whose musical tribute to her directly preceded the Earl Spencer’s eulogy, sang lines that originally had been written to commemorate Marilyn Monroe. Everyone who listened to him perform at the funeral in Westminster Abbey knew this. Palimpsest-like, the two versions of the song co-existed. The ghost of one set of lyrics haunted the other. “Even when you died,” Elton had originally sung, “Oh the press still hounded you.”

As a superstar himself, he felt a natural sympathy for a woman plagued and tormented by journalists. Even so – unlike Diana, whom he had known well – Marilyn had been a stranger to him. He was just a kid, after all, when her candle burned out. He sang about her, not as a friend, but as a worshipper at the shrine of her celebrity, one of the numberless multitudes of her fans, a young man in the 22nd row. In 1973, when the song was recorded, Marilyn had been dead for over a decade.

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She had come, in that time, to serve as the paradigm of a peculiarly modern form of immortality: the celebrity cut off in her prime. Bernie Taupin, Elton John’s long-term collaborator, had been inspired to write “Candle in the Wind” after hearing the phrase applied to Janis Joplin. Aligned at her funeral with the gods of ancient Greece, Diana was aligned as well with more recent deities: James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Jim Morrison. In death, she had come to possess many different shades of immortality.

Yet if it was, in a Christian place of worship, startling, perhaps, to be informed that Diana’s name had appeared in the heavens, and that her footsteps, like some guardian spirit of the landscape, would always fall along England’s greenest hills, that did not render Elton’s song inappropriate to its location. Diana, unlike Marilyn, had married into the world’s most celebrated royal family. The tombs of her in-laws stood everywhere in Westminster Abbey. Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, had been married to England. Diana had been the country’s rose. Here, then, was yet a further burnishing of her myth. The Princess of Wales was hedged about by a mystique that did not derive solely from fairy stories.

A thousand years and more before her birth, a sister of England’s first king, Athelstan, had travelled to Germany, there to marry Otto, the heir to the Saxon throne. Eadgyth, according to one admiring witness, was a woman “of pure noble countenance, graceful character and truly royal appearance.” She provided, at the court of her hairy and martial husband, a touch of feminine glamour. Famously beautiful, she was renowned as well for her compassion and her concern for the wretched. When she died, at the tender age of 36, she was mourned across the whole of Germany, and commemorated as the people’s princess.

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Few today, of course, remember Eadgyth. No one watched her wedding on television; no one splashed her photo on the cover of a magazine. Yet the potency of Diana’s fame was precisely that it had a venerable as well as a contemporary cast, and was no less rooted in the traditions of Christian monarchy than it was in the fashions of pop culture. Eadgyth stood at the head of a long line of queens and princesses in medieval Europe who served their people as counterweights to the ideals of masculine royalty: as paradigms of mercy, compassion, care.

Eadgyth was not alone in being hailed by her subjects as a saint. Holiest of all royal women, perhaps, was Elizabeth, a descendant of Hungary’s first Christian king who, in 1221, married the ruler of Thuringia. She tended to the sick; treated their wounds; mopped up the mucus and saliva from their faces. When she died at the age of 24, no one doubted that she belonged to heaven. Proof of this was manifest in the numerous miracles reported from her tomb. A woman who had stuck a pea in her ear when she was a young girl regained her hearing; numerous hunchbacks were healed. To this day, Elizabeth of Hungary is revered by Catholics as a model of charity and compassion. Unlike Eadgyth, she continues to be commemorated as a saint.

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Diana, of course, was no saint. Her own brother, in his funeral address, acknowledged as much. She died, after all, in the back of a car alongside her lover. Yet her affairs, her fallibilities, her vulnerabilities only led to her being the more loved. This would not have been the case had she been merely a fashion icon. Medieval hagiographers had been deeply moved by the spectacle of royal women such as Elizabeth of Hungary tending to the sores of lepers in their expensive jewellery and finest robes. Diana’s admirers, when they saw her shaking hands with AIDS sufferers, were touched and inspired in a similar way. Dread of what tabloids called the “gay plague” ran deep in the Eighties. The role played by Diana in combatting the taboos surrounding it had required courage as well as compassion. When Elton, performing his threnody in Westminster Abbey, sang of how she had “whispered to those in pain,” he did so from the heart.

In the Middle Ages, the Matter of Britain was the story of King Arthur and the Round Table. Today, thanks to the inherent drama of the narrative, amplified and repackaged as it has been by The Crown, it is the story of Princess Diana. That there were many who found her shallow and manipulative, and who regret the loss of nation self-control that her death seemed to prompt, makes no difference to the potency of her renown. Myths are not bound by the rules that trammel mere mortals. Diana’s candle burned out long before her legend will.

Even two years in I was determined to pour scorn on the harmless young couple: “Prissy… simpering… clothes horse… will only ever be remembered as one of the House of Windsor’s plus-ones… Diana Lite,” I snarked in the Daily Mail of all places.

To be fair, I have always admitted to being just about the worst judge of character in Christendom; put me in a room with three saints and a sociopath and we all know who I’d be blood brothers with by sunrise. True to form, just a few years after laying into the Duchess of Cambridge, I was bigging up a certain American actress thus: “Meghan Markle has never waited soppily for some prince to rescue her. In fact, it seems far likelier that it is she who will rescue the prince.”

What happened to make me transfer my allegiance from Sussex to Cambridge? Two things: hypocrisy and the pandemic.

The first can largely be blamed on the House of Sussex. There is, after all, something grating about lecturing hoi polloi about carbon footprints when your Louboutins are click-clacking up the steps of Elton John’s private jet for the nth time. Later, while their subjects were being told not to leave their houses, there was something farcical about the speed with which the Sussexes struck out for what one feels was their destination all along: a gated community in La La Land; slipping over the Canadian border like draft-dodgers in reverse.

How different from the home life of our own dear future queen. Kate has had a good pandemic, upbeat and modest, sharing photographs of the children and her thoughts on home-schooling; visiting businesses affected by lockdown and just getting on with it. Her appearance at the Sarah Everard vigil was unexpected and beautifully judged; she looked like a thoughtful, sad student performing a silent and simple act of sisterhood.

I couldn’t help but compare it to Meghan’s scenery-eating style of feminism, which at its worst saw her writing “inspirational messages” for sex workers on bananas. We all know a Meghan. Sitting on her throne of sorrows, she is the moist-eyed paragon of passive-aggressiveness, soldiering bravely on in the hope that someone will find the heart to ask: “Are you ok?” As for those not brave enough to break free from the Firm, especially that stuck-up sister-in-law with her stiff upper lip — well, she’s just trapped and bottling it all up. Far better to let it all hang out and hold a pity party on prime-time TV.

How unlike Kate. She seems refreshingly liberated from the modern notion that mithering on about one’s troubles will in some way solve them; the Markle-isation of mental health, whereby the super-privileged signal that they too are in pain, so please don’t envy them all this lovely stuff. The Heads Together initiative — led by the Cambridges and Harry — may tick the fashionable boxes, but it appears to have far more to do with service than with therapy: supporting young people, veterans and homeless charities.

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Meanwhile, the pandemic has made us impatient with the rich and famous lamenting their lives from luxury fortresses, something which led to the all-time low audience for the Oscars on Sunday. In Kate, we see the difference between righteousness and self-righteousness, between stoicism and splattering one’s problems all over the shop.

Everything she did which I judged so ungenerously a decade ago reflects well on her now. “Waity Katie” passed the test which far more aristocratic young women have failed: the ability to stare straight back into a spotlight with perfect self-possession.

Though the likes of me gushed over Meghan for bringing “diversity” to the House of Windsor, we failed to register that the descendant of coal-miners and trolley dollies was equally as ground-breaking, and certainly more mocked by her prince’s inner circle (“Doors to manual!”) than Meghan ever was for her mixed-race heritage. Kate even has an embarrassing relation of her own; frisky Uncle Gary, proud owner of the Ibiza shag-pad known as La Maison de Bang Bang, who was welcomed whole-heartedly to the wedding.

She always gives the impression of having known what she wanted, and to be happy with what she has — an attractive quality in a world where screwing up and then griping about it passes for being “authentic” and where those who wear their troubles lightly are accused of being “in denial”. Much as I adored Diana, and found her expressions of emotion affecting and fresh, such travails are now the norm; everyone has an eating disorder, everyone doesn’t get on with their in-laws.

Similarly, I suspect she knows that another bout of over-privileged marital combat played out at peak viewing time is not something the public wants or needs. No one knows what goes on in any marriage and though the Cambridge’s relationship was subject to the usual tittle-tattle about William’s “affair” and her “rural rival” a few years back, they appear to have come through the rumours even stronger.

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Most of all, I like Kate for what she doesn’t do as much as for what she does. She will never throw herself down a flight of stairs, have her toes sucked by an ugly American or travel on a plane called the Lolita Express. Not yet forty, she is maturing from a coltish girl to a grande dame; at the funeral of Prince Philip, perfectly coiffed and clothed and masked, I thought she had a look of the actress Claire Bloom, in the way a young Queen Elizabeth did too.

And so the soft spot that even a hardened republican like me has for Queen Elizabeth II appears to be transferring to her granddaughter-in-law, the perfect queen-in-waiting. It’s telling that the only members of the family not to see an upswing in popularity after Prince Philip’s funeral were Harry and Meghan, reflecting as it did a life of service so profound that it was the only time I recall the deceased giving express instructions that they should not be given a eulogy. The fashion for publicly foisting one’s emotions which marked this century’s Troubled Teens is hopefully on the way out, helped along by this young woman of humble origins who appears to believe that “Never complain, never explain” is a pretty good rule to live by.