This hard-working family have shown us how to care, how to mourn, how to rebuild our lives, how to live rent-free and even how get rid of unwanted presents. This latest delightful cameo of royal life would do marvels for breaking down class barriers and, in a very real sense, strike an blow for sexual broad-mindedness.Instead, even among the busiest court correspondents, silence reigned. I turned for an explanation to the veteran palace-watcher Talbot Church (“The Man the Royals Trust”), whose royal wedding tie-in – 101 Things You Didn’t Know About the Royal Love-Birds – remains one of the most authoritative works on the monarchy of recent years.”The royals would be quite happy for the royal yacht incident to be made public,” Church told me. “It has been some time since the public have been reminded that the country’s best-loved family also has an amusing and intensely fulfilling private life. The story of John Bindon balancing six glasses of beer on his manhood for the entertainment of Princess Margaret hardly counts.”There is a lot of resentment at the Palace that the most celebrated lover in the royal pantheon is Wallis Simpson, whose trick, the Macadamian Grip, which she learnt from a female nutcracker in Bangkok, gave such pleasure to Edward VIII.”The word at the Palace, says Church, is that our fun-loving royals are eager for details of the yacht party to emerge. Only the prissy disapproval of our thin-lipped, censorious journalists is preventing another glorious chapter in royal history from being written.Semi-success turns Partridge into a turkeyThe sad people who gathered for Alan Partridge parties, going “Ahaaa” at one another and making silly faces in celebration of the return of their hero to our screens, have been rather silent recently.

The latest series starring the character who was a great pioneer of the comedy of embarrassment has proved to be embarrassing in all the wrong ways.I feel personally aggrieved about this. For most of the year, I have lived in a small caravan in Norfolk while a house was being built. The news that the great Partridge was to take this set-up, so rich with sadness and comic potential, and use it as a back-drop to his new series has been, over the past few months, a comfort in uncomfortable times. Instead, Partridge has a palatial caravan beside a rather a large house.

He also has written a book of memoirs, is working quite happily at Radio Norwich and, most disastrously of all, has hitched up with a mad, attractive Russian who wants sex all the time.This is truly baffling. Steve Coogan and Armando Iannucci have taken a superb failure, an emblem of contemporary yearning and frustration, and turned him into someone who simply cannot be funny – a semi-success. No wonder that the new series depends for its effect on self-parodic routines and mugging to camera.What we need in 2002 is pain, failure, humiliation and we have learnt to expect all those things from Partridge. Steve Coogan’s rather sulky decision to retire his most famous creation was a sound one, if a bit late
More from Terence Blacker. The Cherie Blair story touches on the public interest at two points. The first concerns the role of the Number 10 (Government) press office in responding to questions which, strictly speaking, are nothing to do with the Government at all.

The second is the appropriateness of speculative investments of any kind by the Prime Minister and his wife. In the case of the Royal Family, for instance, the question is particularly relevant because of the way in which royal gifts have been sold off by palace servants. If the goods were privately owned, then the practice is no worse than tacky. If they were official presents, and thus the property of the state, then the pocketing of the proceeds by members of the Royal Family or their servants would be a form of embezzlement.