Harry's not the big royal story

The world and his wife have beaten me to it and absolutely everybody - from the angry bald man on the number 49 to your Auntie Joan - has an opinion, which has made the whole thing rather more tedious than it already was.

The level of coverage this story has received has been mind boggling with commentators and rent-a-experts gravely informing television and radio audiences that this is a Royal crisis to rival the death of the Duke’s mother, Princess Diana in 1997, or the abdication of King Edward VIII.

I would argue this isn’t even the biggest Royal story of the past two months - Prince Andrew’s car crash interview with the BBC late last year must surely rank ahead of this particular storm in a fine china teacup? Never before has a senior Royal been so horribly exposed as the Prince was when he agreed to let the brilliant Emily Maitlis quiz him about his association with the late paedophile businessman Jeffery Epstein.

And a constitutional crisis to rival the 1936 abdication? Harry isn’t King and, as sixth in line to the throne, he was never going to be, which is largely where my apathy to this whole sorry saga stems from. I know more than most that good headlines sell newspapers but does anybody really want to read 17 pages of news about any issue?

That is the number of pages one newspaper devoted to ‘Megxit’ last week on the same day ITN gave over the first 15 minutes of its flagship News at Ten programme to the issue.

That might have been okay if there wasn’t anything else going on but it happened to coincide with the revelation that the Tehran air crash that claimed 176 lives was caused by an Iranian missile strike. That really is a huge story.

Using my own trusted form of measurement - the pub test - the ongoing drama around the futures of Harry and Meghan is a huge deal, but should so many of us really care so much about it?