Royals will regret turning into Keeping Up with the Kensingtons

ABUsy week at Kensington Palace. First came the news that Kate is expecting her third child, while tomorrow Prince George arrives for his first day at his new £6,000-a-term primary school.

in fact, it’s been a hectic few months, what with Pippa’s ultraglossy wedding and marathon honeymoon, William giving up his job as a helicopter pilot, the family moving to london, the anniversary of Princess Diana’s death and, of course, Harry’s blossoming romance with Meghan Markle.

Just in case you’d forgotten about that, up pops the suits actress in the latest issue of Vanity Fair, posing barefoot in a black-and-white tulle ballgown, all golden limbs and tousled bed-head, gushing lyrical about her ‘boyfriend’.

‘We’re a couple. We’re in love,’ she says, adding: ‘i’m sure there will be a time when we come forward and present ourselves, but for now this is our time, this is for us’.

No, i’ve no idea what she’s talking about either, but unless she’s gone entirely off the reservation it seems pretty clear that some kind of announcement is imminent.

it’s all so different from the highlycharged language Harry used last year when he complained of a ‘line crossed’ in relation to what he saw as intrusive media coverage of his romance with Markle, declaring ‘this is not a game’.

Perhaps, like Kim Kardashian and her rap-star husband Kanye West, the happy couple will soon be pictured embracing on the front cover of Vogue, she demure in white organza, his hands clasped protectively around her belly.

The way things have been going recently, it wouldn’t surprise me. Because there is something about the recent conduct of these young royals that smacks more of celebrity than royalty.

it’s almost as though they were intent on transforming the House of Windsor into a reality TV show: Keeping Up With The Kensingtons. Even the way they announced Kate’s pregnancy felt like some prime-time drama, complete with pictures of a concerned Mrs Middleton dashing to her daughter’s side.

yesterday William was talking publicly about the ‘anxious’ start to his wife’s pregnancy and appeared to let slip that she’s 11 weeks gone.

Of course, in some ways all this feels inevitable. Times change, and touchy-feely over-sharing is the curse of our age. But the emotions that William and Harry seem intent on sharing are not only unprecedented, they are also taking the royal Family into unchartered — and potentially, i suggest, dangerous — waters.

The boys don’t so much wear their hearts on their sleeves as emblazoned in 10ft-high neon lights.

and while i am more than sympathetic to their distress over the death of their mother, they’ve managed to out-Diana even Diana in their quest to re-cast her as some kind of latter-day saint.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with two young men honouring their mother. But in doing so they have unquestionably undermined the monarchy because, let’s face it, Charles’s side of the family has not exactly fared well in William and Harry’s account of events.

HOW Charles and Camilla feel about this — and their consequent plummeting popularity — is anyone’s guess. and that is precisely the point: the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall have behaved as members of the royal Family should at times like these — and maintained a dignified silence.

Which is why i struggle to believe William when he says he just wants his family to have ‘as normal as life as possible’.

if he wanted that, he wouldn’t be sending his eldest across town to one of our pushiest primary schools — Thomas’s in Battersea — or creating an alternative court at Kensington Palace.

yes, he is driven by a genuine desire to help people, but he also has a strong — and immature — need to be adored. But being a successful monarch is not just about winning the ‘People’s Prince’ competition. it’s also about tradition, history and, to an extent, mystery.

The Queen has always understood this, it’s what underpins her success. she has an authority, a wisdom, an air of mystique that elevates her above the everyday.

she is more than just a star turn; she is an icon, and that’s what makes her a Queen. it’s a lesson for anyone who would inherit her crown.