When it comes to the Harry & Meghan ‘this is our truth’ Netflix documentary, the senior members of the royal family have decided to do what the Queen Mother’s friend Noël Coward always did when faced with adversity or criticism. They are simply going ‘to rise above it’. It won’t be difficult. While the Queen Mother loved Dad’s Army and Elizabeth II did her best to get to grips with Line of Duty during lockdown, Charles III watches almost no television. The Queen Consort told me that she had persuaded His Majesty to catch a bit of the Channel 4 series about canal-boating that I do with Dame Sheila Hancock, but I think she only said that to indulge me. Our new sovereign is a workaholic with a wide variety of private passions. TV is not one of them. Nor is he obsessing on the latest royal brouhaha. Like his mother, he is good at taking the long view. He knows this, too, will pass.

I am writing this on a train going to Manchester. Of course I am: I am an author with a book to flog and, stupidly, I live in London. Today it’s Manchester for BBC Breakfast, tomorrow it’ll be somewhere in Hampshire for Alan Titchmarsh’s Love Your Weekend. In my experience it’s daytime TV that best sells books. Appearing on a late-night chat show may seem glamorous, but it won’t necessarily shift much stock. No one turns off the telly at midnight and goes online to place their order. They leave it until the morning, by which time they’ve forgotten. I have now done a dozen interviews about my book, a biography of the late Queen. I am not sure that anyone who has interviewed me has read it. All I have been asked about is Harry and Meghan and Ngozi Fulani and Lady Hussey, which is frustrating because I like to think my book contains several nuggets about the late Queen that no one has revealed before. For example, did you know that at the time of her wedding and her coronation (in fact from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s), she had an unexpected make-up artist and personal cosmetician, an Australian lady by the name of Thelma Besant? Ms Besant happens to have been the daughter-in-law of Oscar Wilde. In fact, Oscar Wilde’s only grandchild, Merlin Holland, spent Coronation Day watching it all happen from a window in Buckingham Palace.

The last time I remember writing a Diary for The Spectator was 51 years ago, in 1971. I like to pace my appearances: no one wants too much of a good thing. I recall going to the magazine’s offices in Gower Street to meet the editor, George Gale. He communicated entirely by grunt and growl. Famously, he enjoyed a liquid lunch. When I saw him, at 5.45 p.m., he was just back from it. He went to his desk and, with some ceremony, sat down immediately alongside his empty chair. He collapsed straight on to the floor, but did not appear to have noticed that he had done so. Patrick Cosgrave (the deputy editor) carried on as if nothing had happened. Clearly, nothing out of the ordinary had.

I have reached the age where I am going to a funeral most weeks. I enjoy a good funeral, if I’m honest. It can give you a boost to realise you are still alive, while friends and family are falling by the wayside. And I like it because I come from an undertaking family. My great-grandmother was a Kenyon (they looked after Queen Victoria’s funeral) and I am the regular host for the Funeral Planner of the Year Awards where, when you have received your award, you don’t return with it to your seat. You are expected to hold it proudly while backing slowly to the rear of the stage where the curtains part and you disappear behind them.

For me this week’s funeral was more affecting than most. The departed was Robert Palmer (born 1948) whose claim to fame in the 1970s was as chair of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality and, briefly, the owner of Gay News. Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1967, but attitudes took time to evolve. I remember my wife and I visiting closeted gay friends and, when we arrived at the front door, we would hear their boyfriends shutting themselves discreetly into the bedroom at the back of the flat. Robert’s partner, Alan, in his eulogy, remembered those days when it was ‘still a very risky business to stick your head above the parapet’, when ‘going on a gay march stood a high chance of ending up on the ten o’clock news – where you might be seen by your employer and lose your job’. Worse still, said Alan, you might be seen by your parents and kicked out of home. It was one thing to be homosexual, but quite another to shout about it. Or as Alan’s mother memorably put it: ‘I understand you’re gay, dear, but why shove it down people’s throats?’

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