Skipper

Can't say I've been even slightly excited by the upcoming Big Fat Windsor Wedding, but Catherine Bennett in yesterday's Observer(from whose wonderful article I lifted the last phrase) has changed my mind. I had no idea the NoW's 'Fake Sheik'(aka Mazher Mahmood) had done a number on Kate Middleton's uncle Gary who lives in a house called La Maison de Bang Bang in Ibiza. [I promise you I am not making this up.]

Nor did I know he is a tattoed property developer, who collects glass pyramids and who alleges the first words he used to Prince William were: "Oi, you fucker, did you break my glass pyramids?". In addition to this, however, he was hospitable enough to offer journalists both cocaine and prostitutes. The question the discovery of Mrs Middleton's younger brother raises is, deliciously: 'Oh My God! will the Windsor's feel able to invite him to the wedding? The damage such a person could do is incalculable and could provide the plot of an impossibly funny Hollywood comedy.

Bennet, however, does not miss the chance to point out that it is uncouth Gary who might feel he does not want to accept any invitation to spend time with the Windsors. Deploying the vituperative skills for which such Sunday hacks are paid hugely comfortable salaries, she sets about the royals with a enthusiasm. She begins by wondering if Mrs Middleton would like her daughter to reconsider marrying into a family:

where everyone, including the older males, relies on handouts from an elderly matriarch or the state. Hardly surprising, given their lifetime of dependency, that so many of William's relations have become resentful, infantilised, irresponsible. Not just Andrew – one thinks, in particular, of Princess Anne, repeatedly convicted for speeding, and once for owning a dangerous dog, Dotty, which having been acquitted in court of canine "malice" after biting two children, went on to kill one of her mother's corgis.

Another broadside is directed at the tendency of the royals to befriend princes "from despotic, corrupt, viciously misogynistic Arab states in which the routine torture, public executions and repression equal anything witnessed in the English middle ages"

Well into her stride by this point in her piece Bennett concludes:

For Kate... these tyrants will become cherished family friends, as they already are for her mentor and Diana's nemesis: Camilla. Factor in the Windsor family's divorce rate, its binge-drinking princesses, racist grandad and trashy uncles, and the only comfort for the Middletons is that this parasitic, feckless, ferociously right-wing family from hell, emblematic of so much that is amiss with Broken Britain, is not actually moving in next door.

Bravo! Fabulous stuff and enough to make me think this forthcoming sustained excressence of deference to royalty might contain some satirical gems nobody could have possibly ever made up.