Long to reign over us? I don’t think so.
I’ll give it ten years, and that’s probably generous. By then, our Royal Family will have been consigned to history; socially, culturally and constitutionally irrelevant.
Princess Diana began the process all those years ago and her brother, Earl Spencer, a man who has scores to settle with the Windsors, seems intent on finishing the job with his memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister.
He is being ably aided and abetted by his nephew, the already irrelevant Prince Harry, who we learnt this week is negotiating to make a documentary about his beloved mother.
That is one of the reasons he has resurfaced in Britain. He also quite rightly wanted to be here for the Invictus Games, the sporting competition he founded in 2014 for wounded Servicemen and women.
And I expect he is keen too for his children, who are said to speak with an American accent, to be aware of their roots. They are enrolled in a private school near their new home, reported to be in the Cotswolds.
Harry is also undertaking quasi-Royal duties, mostly charitable work. His father the King has issued an edict making it clear that Harry is no longer a working Royal and that he and his wife Meghan Markle are here as private citizens with “commercial and charitable interests”.
I did wonder whether Harry was inadvertently causing havoc. I am now convinced there is nothing accidental about it. He wants to cause mischief in alliance with Earl Spencer, who seems to hate the Windsors with a passion.
And if, between them, they bring down the Monarchy, then so be it.
The two families, the Spencers and the Windsors, have history, as the saying goes. Boy, do they have history. The Windsors might be the ruling dynasty but the Spencers are often considered to be the nobler family with a lineage dating back to the 15th Century.
Not only do they hold the earldoms of Sunderland and Spencer, but also the dukedom of Marlborough. Winston Churchill, born at Blenheim Palace, was a Spencer-Churchill. By comparison, the Windsors are merely arrivistes.
And so the current Earl Spencer, metaphorically at least, bows to no man. And especially not Charles III, our King.
He said in his wry interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that he supported a Monarchy but that he wanted it to be a modern one. In that, he is right.
I’m a monarchist by default. I think it is a unique selling point for the country. A President might be cheaper – almost certainly would be – but they would not be lining the Mall to see him process to the Opening of Parliament.
My parents were of the wartime generation, respectful of King George VI and his wife Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon for their steadfastness in face of the Nazi threat. I remember the street party we had when their daughter Elizabeth II ascended the throne.
Queen Elizabeth was the glue in the Monarchy. As long as she was there, its longevity seemed assured. She was mostly wise and sure-footed and proved stubbornly resilient as the years passed.
But her husband Prince Philip made sure that the Monarchy served all the family. He called it The Firm. It grew to encompass God knows how many living off the public purse.
As Britain became more relaxed and less deferential, the Royal Family turned into a soap opera and under the relentless scrutiny of the Press, the scandals were many.
Charles, arrogant, aloof and impatient for power, treated Diana abominably from the start. In their engagement interview on ITV, they were asked if they were in love.
“Of course,” Diana replied.
“Whatever in love means,” added Charles.
In fact, he was in love with Camilla Parker Bowles, now the Queen. Spencer says in his book that Charles wanted Diana to know that he was happy to marry her but that he was not in love with her.
Even for a man of Charles’s limited empathy, that was crass.
Though not as crass as the Camillagate tapes, a recording of a conversation between Charles and Camilla leaked to the tabloids and published by The People in 1993, in which he said he wanted to live inside Camilla’s trousers and might as well be reincarnated as a Tampax.
If nothing else, it proved that you can’t have phone sex in upper received pronunciation.
But did Charles say of Diana, as Spencer claims, “We’ll forget her soon enough”?
Frankly, I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s a weak and spoilt man, for whom the word entitled was practically invented. Remember his petulant reaction when the fountain pen at his Coronation wouldn’t work?
His time to reign came too late for Charles to modernise the family. He is the continuity King, ailing, stripped of whatever vigour he possessed, held in no great affection or respect by his people.
It has come to something when he is mocked on TV’s Saturday Night Live.
Can the Monarchy hold on until its last hope, William and Kate, can update it, boot out the hangers-on, connect with the people?
The world order has changed and so has Britain. Nothing is certain any longer and the Royal Family, meant to be a bastion of stability, are facing their darkest hour.
