The weird, wacky world of the Windsors

It makes you think there may be something in David Icke's belief that they are space lizards

Within hours of the sensational collapse of the Burrell trial, vast amounts of energy were being expended on muddying the waters. On Friday, you might have thought fairly clearly that there was something pretty odd about the fact that the Queen had suddenly remembered that she had known that Burrell had kept "some papers" just before the butler was due to go into the witness box; it might have struck you as rather odder that so incomplete a description of what the police found at Burrell's house was apparently found to be enough to halt the trial.

Since then, the issue has been growing more and more complex, with blame being attached to the police and, ingeniously, to the late Princess's family, the Spencers. Attached to asseverations that the Queen could not have acted any differently, and other members of the Royal Family would certainly not have taken any action had they not been grossly misled, the objective is to remove any kind of blame from the Royal Family, or at the very least, to spread the blame until nobody really has any idea what the issue is here.

Actually, the main topic of interest here is quickly becoming the extraordinary insight into the style of life of the Royal Family. Whenever anything completely appalling and unplanned happens to any of them, some local detail often seems to leak out, and whatever the larger implications of the affair, the final result is to show how very unlike the rest of us they are. When Michael Fagan penetrated the Queen's bedroom in 1982, the larger issue may have been the slackness of security around the Palace. But the lasting revelations were, surely, that the Queen and her husband do not share a bedroom, and, most bizarre of all, that she was able to offer her unwelcome guest a cigarette from her bedside table. What non-smoker, married to a non-smoker, keeps cigarettes in her bedside table? Who were they for?

I suspect that, long after we've forgotten the constitutional issues supposedly raised by the Queen's last-minute intervention in Paul Burrell's trial, we will still be mulling incredulously over the insights into royal life provided by the account of his duties leaked from his solicitor's firm. Some of these are wonderfully funny. The Royal Family has a good line in domestic insults; Lord Snowdon is reputed to have reduced Princess Margaret to tears by telling her that in her finery, she looked like "a Jewish manicurist". In the last years of the Wales's marriage, the insults reputedly came thick and fast. The Prince of Wales is said to have told his wife that in a black-and-white dress, she looked like a member of the mafia, and, in tartan, that she looked less like a Princess and more like an air stewardess (he had a point, I must say).

But the glimpses of the wacky world of the Windsors do nothing but confirm their sheer oddity. We might have been prepared for this by the grotesque, Moonie-like loyalty which Mr Burrell is sticking to: saying, for instance, "The Queen came through for me" in breathless tones, rather than "About bleeding time." The truth is that they lead such ludicrous lives that it must be hard for anyone working for them to think of them as human beings at all.

State gifts thrown on to bonfires; grown men talking about "Mummy"; books hurled at butlers ("Why are you all so horrible to your staff?" a friend is supposed to have asked one of the children); lovers of the Princess of Wales – quite distinguished heart surgeons, too – being smuggled through the police cordon in the boot of a car; footmen being sent out to buy pornography for Prince William; brothers, sisters, mothers, children, going on "non-speakers" for months on end; if half of this is true, it makes you start to think that there might be something in David Icke's belief that they are not actually human beings, but a race of intergalactic space-lizards.

But the single most ludicrous detail concerns the Prince of Wales's stay in hospital after a riding accident. Mr Burrell reports that "I was obliged to look after him and take all food and drink requirements for him from Highgrove to the hospital and furnish his hospital room with familiar objects such as pieces of furniture and paintings from Highgrove." He would only drink out of Highgrove crystal and eat with Highgrove silver, and when nature called, "The Prince's valet also had to hold his specimen bottle."

Of course, they are not like us. But these revelations of insane, spoilt whims and "gnashes" are not helpful, and are damaging to the institution of monarchy at a time when we increasingly think that the hereditary head of state only occupies that position by our ongoing assent. The behaviour of the Queen over the Burrell trial was certainly not very edifying. But I have a feeling that more damage has been done by the revelation that the next occupant of the throne won't drink tea out of hospital china. And it is difficult to imagine a head of state who isn't up to holding his own piss-pot.

p.hensher@independent.co.uk