Meghan is unlikely to toe the royal line forever

IT WILL, for many of us, be the last royal wedding of our lifetimes. If you can remember the day Princess Diana emerged from the maternity hospital in that scarlet coat, with a newborn Harry in her arms, chances are you won’t be around to see her first grandchild walk down the aisle. The next time the royals give us a day out will probably be little Prince George’s wedding, so dig out your best hat, book a day off work and sit back in the knowledge that even if you live to be 100, you won’t see the like of this year’s royal nuptials again.

Prince Harry is the first heir to the throne ever to look outside a predictable pool of nice English gals – the Sarahs and Dianas, Catherines and Cressidas – for a bride. We thought his older brother was bucking convention when he married an air hostess’s daughter, but Kate Middleton was still a solidly middle-class girl from the right schools and the right background.

There were no awkward exes waiting to crawl out of the woodwork and, apart from a millionaire uncle with a chequered past, no embarrassing family members willing to gab off to the media. Add in a dependably drab dress sense – there’s no real risk of Kate ever generating the sort of fashion frenzy that kept her late mother-in-law on the front pages – and you’ve got a standard-issue royal consort.

But Ms Markle, soon to be HRH the Duchess of Sussex, is an entirely different proposition. Although she blossomed into a savvy media darling and a shimmering global star, even Princess Diana started out as ‘Shy Di’, and looked likely to subside into low-key motherhood and dull but worthy public engagements once the fuss died down.

With Ms Markle, though, it is clear that the fuss and hoopla and global fascination are only getting started.

From the point of view of modern royalty, though, Meghan’s background could be a blessing, rather than a curse. For a start, she’s unlikely ever to be naive enough to sunbathe topless, as Kate Middleton famously did, because she knows the media well enough to avoid any such blunders. And as a performer, she has the best chance of filling the inevitable star-power deficit which will arise whenever Queen Elizabeth NOW Michael Douglas has become the latest star to face sex pest claims – and has got his denial in first. His Hollywood royalty status might protect him but Michael has admitted being a ‘sex addict’ in the past – an excuse that’s unlikely to fly in the current climate… exits the stage and which is arguably essential for the survival of the monarchy in an increasingly uncertain world.

Charles and Camilla are the royal Darby and Joan, a pair of contented pensioners, who look as though they’d be happier at home on the couch with a couple of stiff gins and a box set.

Kate and William are only in their mid-30s but seem to have reached stolid middle age without ever passing through youthful abandon. You get the sense that the crowds that greet them at walkabouts are there out of duty, rather than excitement.

NOT so with Meghan, who was practically mobbed on one of her first public engagements in Brixton this week and who can play to the cameras in a manner that leaves late-era Diana looking like an amateur as she poses and pouts and simpers on cue.

She has a taste for haute couture and can more than afford her €70,000 dresses out of her own earnings, but knows when to mix it with high street bargains to stay within reach of the millions of women wanting to steal her style. This week, she wore a Marks & Spencer sweater on her visit to a Brixton radio station – and it promptly sold out.

The real X-factor to Meghan, though, was pinpointed this week by former MP Ann Widdecombe – there’s the delicious frisson of a suspicion that she’s going to turn out to be ‘trouble’. She has just shut down her social media accounts and already embarked on the treadmill of public engagements set to make up her only public profile for the rest of her life. Really, how likely is that?

If Diana, with her properly posh, privileged and aristocratic upbringing, couldn’t hack the constraints of palace life, how likely is an ambitious, independent and effervescent celebrity from a showbiz background to knuckle down to the gilded drudgery of the court circular for the rest of her days?