Are you being royally misinformed?

This Green and Surprisingly Pleasant Land ventures into the quagmire of reporting on the British royal family

Have you spent the last couple of weeks agonising over why Prince Harry Across the Water was not invited to see his father during a whirlwind visit to Britain, a nation which, apparently, is no longer up to scratch for his many needs?

Acres of newsprint have been devoted to this compelling subject and all manner of royal ‘specialists’ and ‘insiders’ have been wheeled out to tell us what they don’t know. Strangely they omit to mention this.

The reality is that despite intense interest there are surprising few verifiable facts about the royals in the public domain. What exists is usually confined to the daily Court Circular which reveals that His Majesty engaged in a series of engagements, various royal highnesses engaged in a series of engagements and, on occasion, one of them delivered an address.

Most of these engagements involve diplomats and other dignitaries dropping by to exchange innocuous pleasantries. Others involve a long line of people being bestowed with gongs for good works.

Thus the royals find their days largely gobbled up by meeting star struck subjects who are routinely asked whether they have travelled far to meet them, whether they agree that the weather really is not that bad for the time of year and, well, you get the picture.

Out in public view the royals must do their best to look rather jolly or at least to refrain from scowling. They are required to do so even when asked to shake hands with a ghastly dictator by the grubby little people who run the government.

Then there are the regular encounters between the head of state and his prime minister. The contents of these meetings are supposed to be a closely guarded secret, broken very occasionally by the most gauche and unreliable of politicians. Donald Trump and Liz Truss, you know who you are.

Aside from this what we think we know about the royals is largely gleaned from supposedly reliable ‘palace sources’, ‘sources close to the palace’ and ‘friends of His Royal Highness’, except for Prince Andrew who appears to have no friends but is in possession of a remarkably loyal ex-wife.

Anyone foolish enough to believe that the tittle-tattle emerging from these alleged sources is based on something more than a vivid imagination should immediately seek professional help.

My experience, as a common hack dealing with the average royal correspondent, is that they behave in a very grand manner, pretending that they are somehow close to the royal family whose aura somehow rubs off on them.

If they have all this insider knowledge why is it that the very few real exclusive royal stories come from journalists outside this royal enclave. The train crash Prince Andrew interview with Newsnight and the infamous Princess of Wales interviews with the now disgraced Martin Bashir being cases in point.

Most other royal reportage is better understood as light entertainment. That is not say that it’s all baseless guff. The numerous stories about Prince Harry and Mrs Prince, enumerating their many  grievances are most probably based on something real. The idea that the late Duke of Edinburgh did not like the press and was rather bluff, is almost certainly true and yes, rather obviously, the current Princess of Wales is no photoshop genius. As for the rest, frankly, I wouldn’t bother.

To put it bluntly the royals can put on a rather good show but, lamentably, they are really not very interesting people. The late Queen was genuinely interested in horse racing and Prince Harry is genuinely interested in himself. It does seem however that the King has more wide ranging ecological and architectural interests. Because of this he was accused of meddling when he was Prince of Wales but the rather exaggerated way his expertise is described rather suggests amazement that he is not as dim as other family members.

Another myth surrounding the royals is that they are supposed to be quintessentially British, except they are not because the royal family is German, more precisely Hanoverian and right up until the end of Queen Victoria’s reign German was as likely to be heard in the palaces as English.

The royal family may well have retained their Hanoverian identity had it not been for the wonderfully named Arthur Bigge, 1st Baron Stamfordham, who remarkably served as private secretary from the time of Queen Victoria to the early days of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. He suggested that the royal house adopt the name of Windsor, not a moment too soon bearing in mind the two wars Britain was to fight with Germany.

There is no need to get overexcited by the existence of an immigrant monarchy, all of Europe’s royal families percolated around the continent marrying each other and assuming crowns of disparate countries.

Anyway the German origins of the British monarchy are hardly a secret but, like so many other inconvenient royal facts, they are better not discussed, especially when so much other spicy stuff can be made up about the royals.

Fortunately my superior mind focuses on far more important things but I do wonder what Meghan Markle’s new jam tastes like. Is it bitter? Or is it more like a fine whine?