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Time's whirligig, as one surly underling told another, brings in its revenges. For the Royal Family, 2002 went bad faster than an over-hung widgeon. In September the Prince of Wales emerged as a nuisance letter-writer, badgering Government ministers with green-ink missives about the Human Rights Act and the hunting ban, and moans that Cumbrian farmers got a worse deal than blacks and homosexuals. In November the Princess Royal got a criminal record after her pet pit bull gored a child (the dog escaped the chop thanks to the Princess's top-dollar brief). Even Prince William, once the press's golden boy, was reported to have dispatched flunkeys to buy him porno mags from the local newsagent. Then came bruits of rape within the precincts of Buckingham Palace, and reports that the Royals' London flophouses doubled as totters' yards for laundering swag ('Del Boy Royals' was the Sun's unimprovable headline). All this knocked the gilt off the 'Golden' Jubilee.

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Commentators sometimes portray this monarcho-syndicalism as a coalition against capitalism, a pseudo-Tawneyite rerun of the Middle Ages. But the lines of allegiance can run either way, since capital's apologists like to pretend that companies such as Enron and WorldCom - sleights of the invisible hand - come to us by popular demand. In any case, it is a myth that royalty and capitalism don't mix. The first anniversary of Diana's death saw an effluent-stream of memorabilia, coffee-table books and the like, including commemoration plates which tootled out a rendition of 'Candle in the Wind' at the press of a button, assorted effigies and, reportedly, a commemorative seat-belt issued by an enterprising German auto-parts firm. The Golden Jubilee was marked by the issue of a limited-edition dildo embossed with the royal crest, presumably designed to concentrate the minds of Albion's daughters (and sons) as they gaze at the ceiling and wax nostalgic over Empire.

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