Indignantly, friends of the penniless Prince and Princess Michael of Kent are giving statements that Michael is still the grandson of a king-emperor and has been reared accordingly. Agreed, he never did an hour’s work in his life. It is just ghastly to treat him like a common tenant at his pauper’s abode in Kensington Palace. I mean, really, a tenant would be working for his money. How could a real parasite ever sink so low?

Prince Michael had led the royal soldier’s laid back life, but at 41 even that became too strenuous for him and he quit. The Queen, knowing the Prince for what he was, tried to foist him off on business by granting him the unique right to go into business. The Queen’s business sense was astute as ever when she made the move, but the object of her largesse was incompetent. Soon companies were queuing up to add the royal name to their letterheads.

These businesses paid ridiculous sums just to have the name on the list of directors. Prince Michael cashed in on his title. At the peak of this carrier he earned around $500,000 without doing any work at all. For the businessmen it was well worth the money, being upstarts from the Great Unwashed it added certain panache to their usual names dropping to include my friend Michael in it.

Being by nature greedy and none too intelligent, he accepted a series of television appearances in US TV to market off goods under the name House of Windsor. These ranged from crockery through trinkets to toilet brushes. Michaels name was consequently mud and this not only with the Queen. The income from letterheads dropped drastically down to zero. And like every failure before him he set himself up as a consultant. He was an expert on letterheads, so there certainly was a job opening everywhere. And he was an accomplished TV salesman as well.

Princess Pushy was at her wits’ end. Being used to spending money, not earning it, she started to plagiarise historical novels without great success. That’s when the Rent-a-Kent business came into being. For £25,000 the Princess would attend any venue, from opening a villa in Sri Lanka to showing herself at the Formula 1 Grand Prix. Nowadays these appearances are called lectures to make more palatable to the untitled that have to work for their money. That Austrian just sells off her title.

Price Michael had a looks work over to make him look like the late tsar Nicholas II. This has given him an opening to expand the rental service to Russian oligarchs. He has come full circle; again he is giving his name to people having come from the Great Unwashed. Already the Russian connection is bringing him new troubles. We may expect his counterfeit to appear on vodka bottles any day now.

In between all this, Princess Pushy insists on pushing her royal-ness down everybody’s throat. Having grown up a hairdresser’s daughter in the backstreets of Sidney, this pushiness sits ill with most people. As to her royal connection in Central Europe, who doesn’t? There were so many kinglets at one time or another; it would be surprising if one wasn’t related to them as they produced children like rabbits.

Right now the poor dears are living in strictest economy. They were seen in Rome strolling through town. Obviously it was a financial strain to take along the car and the driver as well. I pity them for having come to such dire straits in their dotage.