Monday 10th November, 2003 – Want To Know the Truth About Prince Charles? Read On! (This is surely the most effective current way to direct random Internet traffic to your website, no?)

Though I’m sure that Edward and Charles are as close as any pair of brothers, the irony of recent events is unlikely to be lost on either of them. Especially Edward. After having to put up with years of innuendo over his sexuality - based on little more than the fact that he didn’t like it in the Navy and has a strong interest in the visual arts – Edward has sired a healthy young daughter, proving him to be the virile, red-blooded, strong-hipped heterosexualist that his wife Sophie rather too vehemently maintained he was a couple of years ago.

At the same time, Charles is being hauled over the coals in the most humiliating manner possible, with the media making the most of the story that they are ‘not allowed to tell us’. By stressing this angle of the story – in full knowledge that the vast majority of us know something or other of the details of the allegations made against him – they have managed to turn a potential non-event into a thrilling international game of Chinese Whispers.

The funny thing about the current situation is that absolutely everybody now knows the bare bones of the alleged incident: that Charles was caught in a ‘compromising position’ with a servant. And yet the feeling is that we still don’t know the full story. The idea of Charles in sexual congress with another man – though sniggersome - is clearly not the devastating bombshell to the national psyche that he may have initially feared. What we are now waiting on is the details.

It is the details that will make or break Charles, and that the majority of the country is eagerly anticipating. When information began to filter out last week, my mind went back to the beginning of this whole incident, when it was widely claimed that the revelations to come would ‘bring down the royal family’. I assumed that it would be something deeply salacious; the disclosure of some private moment that would be impossible for the British public to assimilate.

When it became obvious that Charles was at the centre of these rumours, I’m sure that I’m not alone in imagining a number of lurid scenarios, each of them featuring a grimacing, sweaty Prince at the midst of a furious tumble of naked, glistening Village People clones. I don’t blame myself for this. I blame the media for inserting these disgusting thoughts directly into my brain.

Well, maybe that’s a bit much. But, obviously incensed by the Palace’s attempt to gag them, the press seem to have turned the situation to their advantage very effectively – by focussing so much on what they cannot tell us, they have left us to fill in the gaps ourselves. And no one understands the great British public like the press – thus, the story has gone into overdrive, fuelled partly by a steady drip-drip of incidental disclosures, and partly by the sordid minds of the people of Great Britain.

This is great for the press, and terrible for Prince Charles. For now at least. But the problem is that the eventual disclosure of what really happened is going to be the most enormous damp squib. I have just recently been informed of what these ‘damaging revelations’ are - the revelations that the press told us weeks ago would bring down the royal family.

We know that they involve Charles in flagrante with a male man-servant. But to live up to the shock that we have been promised, these two parties are going to have to be doing something pretty outrageous. Unless there turns out to be photographic evidence of said man-servant elbow-deep within the future head of the Church of England, or something similar, we the people are going to feel cheated.

Well, it turns out that the astonishing revelation is that George Smith claims to have walked in on Charles getting sucked off. And that’s it.

A surprise I guess, but not quite the epoch-making thunderbolt that we had been led to expect. True or otherwise, I think that Charles will be pleasantly surprised at how accepting / jaded and unshockable the people of Britain are. I think that – regardless of the nudge-nudge-ing of the pre-sex-machine Edward years – Britain is quite ready for a gay royal. In fact, in this age of Martin Bashir specials, and narrative politics, where people want public figures to show their human side (preferably on primetime TV), it could end up being the best thing that’s ever happened to him. Since Diana’s death, Charles has steadily been shedding his fuddy-duddy image, and his popularity has increased exponentially. With this, essentially low-key, sexual revelation, Charles could become one of our fluffy, camp, unthreatening gay icons, a la Graham Norton, as well as our future king.

I think Charles should come clean (whoops!) and grab this opportunity with both hands (ooooh!). The only downside might be that he will have to put up with a few humourless buffoons making desultory double entendres at his expense in the future. A small price to pay.