Mandy’s Monumental Royal Moan

[Update at end of post]

So Prince Harry visited Las Vegas. He did the local equivalent of going to the Rub-A-Dub and becoming Elephant’s Trunk And Mozart. He participated in a pool party and after entering into a state of alcoholic derangement played strip billiards. Then someone who was there took photos of him in a state of undress on their mobile phone. Am I bothered? Where’s the news value? Big deal.

Warning: do not approach this woman

Well, for the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre, this is a very big deal indeed, because folks who get up to this kind of thing are not The Daily Mail’s Kind Of People. So as Prince Harry is third in line to succeed The Queen (Gawd Bless ‘Er!) there has to be serious and weighty analysis, followed by why-oh-why punditry. And the pundit selected is appalling Glenda Amanda Platell.

Mandy, who will be hoping to renew her season ticket for the sofa on The Andy Marr Show (tm) for another year, says Harry is “Charming, brave and loveable. But I fear he’s a lost little boy”. So in her dreams she fancies him. And she’s got some stern words for him, too: “at the age of 27, he is now a man with the responsibilities of an Army officer”. Those responsibilities, Mandy, include enjoying your R&R.

But she’s serious about this: “If the prince himself doesn’t have the good sense to realise the catastrophic effects of such ‘high jinks’, it was certainly the duty of a courtier or police protection officer to intervene”. Catastrophic effects? What happened, did he chuck someone out the window and miss the swimming pool (very old Las Vegas Bond film joke there, folks)?

And why should anyone “intervene”? Hell’s teeth, do you have to have your sense of humour surgically removed before getting a berth at the Mail? He got pissed and larked about in his hotel room. It’s not as if he’d visited the local gun shop and gone on a rampage, or gone back to his regiment and ordered an airstrike on somewhere sensitive and unstable in the Middle East, is it?

But not to worry, Mandy’s got the answer: “the one blonde who has done most to protect him, apart from his mother, was his only long-term, now ex-girlfriend Chelsy Davy”. Yes, Harry needs the steadying influence of a nice girl like, er, one approved by the Daily Mail. Because otherwise, quite apart from all the crap coming out of Dacre’s bevy of Glendas, he’ll turn out like Prince Andrew (allegedly).

And Mandy knows all about what makes Andrew a bad sort: “pursuing women, luxury holidays and golf”. Golf? Christ on a bike, what did golf ever do to make itself such a heinous crime? The inhabitants of the Dacre Bunker need to get a life and lighten up. Young Single Army Officer gets ratarsed while off duty is not news, whatever his identity or status.

Life in Daily Mail land must be excruciatingly boring. C’mon, folks, get over it.

[UPDATE 24 August 1440 hours: just to show that Dacre has sent word to his Glendas on this story, Jan Moir, yes, the one who did the hatchet job on Stephen Gately, has covered the same ground as Amanda Platell with a why-oh-why piece headed "Someone has to drum some sense into the royal party animal before it's too late".

And don't approach this one either

Moir, like Platell, believes that Harry's protection officer should somehow have stopped everyone in the vicinity from using their camera phones, and that because someone used theirs, this meant there was some kind of security risk. No, Jan, that would only have happened if someone had pulled a shooter on the prince, or detonated an explosive device.

Tellingly, even most of the article's commenters can't see what all the fuss is about. Maybe this is the point where Paul Dacre's ability to know what his readers want to be told to think began to desert him]