Truly, Harry, who is engaged in a preposterous legal contretemps with the Mail, is his mother’s son. While the Prince is filling his boots by turning his self-pity into an industry, his mother, I would argue, invented the art of victimhood – that insidious, debilitating, very modern malaise. The irony is that, unlike Harry, whose hatred for the Mail is almost as great as that for his father and brother, Diana was rather fond of us. She assiduously read the paper and so did her friends. In the vicious post-separation propaganda wars between Charles and her (‘She’s nuts, you know, old boy’), the Mail, whose target audience has always been up-market women, unashamedly took Diana’s side. Frequently I was invited to Kensington Palace where a moist-eyed Princess would emote about the unfairness of life, the beastly Palace and the ghastly rumours being spread about her by Charles’s friends (‘Do I sound mad to you, Paul?’), before reverting to one of her favourite themes – that her husband would never become king and that the throne would jump a generation to William.

Fast-forward to that terrible day in Paris. Dame Ann Leslie, the Mail’s brilliant and combative foreign correspondent, who died this year, went on the airwaves. ‘Yes, it was a tragedy but Diana’ – and I paraphrase her loosely – ‘was a vindictive, self-pitying minx who had wreaked huge damage on the monarchy.’ For the only time in my 28 years as editor, the office switchboard crashed under the weight of enraged callers. But Ann had a point. Diana may not have been over-furnished in the attic, but she had a near genius for manipulating the media by creating unforgettable haunting images of herself as a lone victim. Whether dancing sans husband with Wayne Sleep, sitting alone, wounded doe eyes, by the Taj Mahal, giving succour to Aids victims, walking solitarily through minefields, or utterly isolated on the end of that diving board on Dodi’s boat, she was a picture editor’s dream. In this bitter War of the Poses, Charles’s camp never stood a chance.

Harry’s B-lister wife is, as an actress, not in the same league as the beatific Diana

After her death the endless tsunami of flowers, messages and mourners flooding Hyde Park – most of whom were women, many, I’ve no doubt, who felt badly treated by men – sanctified Diana, Princess of Victim-hood. It also marked a milestone in the soft-ening or, arguably, weakening of a British psyche that for aeons had disdained the showing of emotion and admired pull-up-your-socks-and-get-on-with-it fortitude and self-reliance. And, of course, such values are antipathetic to the blame-everyone-else self-pity of the ‘me, me, me’ Harry and his B-lister wife who, let me tell you, as an actress, is not in the same league as the beatific Diana.

Will it be Petroc Trelawny on Radio 3 or Times Radio? After decades as a loyal listener, I can take no more of Today. It’s not just Mishal Husain’s cold, sanctimonious superiority or the faux matiness of a gabbling Amol Rajan (surely a shoo-in as the next D.G.). Nor is it the teeth-grating arrogance of Nick Robinson who is, depressingly, brighter than most of the ministers he interviews. Nor is it the knee-jerk journalistic ideas (which would die of embarrassment if they were presented to a Mail conference). No, it’s because the programme has such weak news values that it’s been captured by a shroud-waving, existential-crisis-promoting, victimhood-pleading cacophony of charities/lobby groups/thinktanks/quangos/commissioners and tsars. Collectively they are becoming one of Britain’s fastest-growing job-creation schemes, expanding exponentially by predicting the end of civilisation if the government doesn’t hurl ever more moolah at their individual special pleadings. Never are they asked by the Daily Dirge interviewer: ‘But where, in the name of sanity, is the money going to come from?’

Thus a welfare-ist, statist, money-grows-on-trees, subsidised BBC infantilises the public into believing that government not only can but must solve all our problems. It took Mrs Thatcher the will of the gods to persuade the British that they couldn’t spend what they didn’t earn and, anyway, it’s your money government spends not theirs (and, by the way, you’ll spend it far more wisely than they will). It has taken 13 years of Tory rule to eradicate these values, bankrupt Britain and turn self-reliance into a dirty word. We are all victims now.

The occasion: the funeral this year of the great columnist Paul Johnson, who, with the Mail, helped shape the Thatcher revolution. Present is my old Islington neighbour Tony Blair, recipient of Paul’s counsel in the early New Labour years before they inevitably fell out – and architect, without electoral consent, of the mass immigration that has so transformed Britain. Over the many years I commissioned Paul, he was gloriously judgmental in our non-judgmental age, his irascibility matched only by his appreciation of Lord Rothermere’s multitudinous sovereigns. One essay he wrote in the 1990s, however, was searingly prescient. In it, he predicted that the biggest threat to social cohesion in the ensuing decades would be the mass migration of millions from impoverished nations seeking a better life in the affluent countries of northern Europe. For years, the Mail was almost a lone voice in writing about and debating this theme. We exposed the misery of human trafficking and the armies of greedy lawyers gaming the immigration system by exploiting the Human Rights Act. We were banned by the then press regulator from using the phrase ‘bogus asylum seekers’, even though a blind man could see many of those decanting from lorries and boats were economic migrants.

The paper’s editorials argued that our concerns had nothing to do with race (many of the migrants were white) but everything to do with the fact that Britain’s schools, hospitals and housing stock couldn’t cope with such huge numbers, many of whom were being housed in the UK’s poorer regions. The resulting strains on social and cultural cohesion could, we suggested, precipitate the rise of ugly political extremism on both the left and the right. By giving voice to the anxieties of millions of our readers under-going the biggest demographic change in their nation’s history – something they were never consulted on – the Mail earned the opprobrium of the liberal consensus, living in their chi-chi neighbourhoods, who really run Britain – particularly the BBC, which even today describes critics of immigration as ‘far right’.

I have a suggestion to make. In future, the Corporation should refer to the following bodies as ‘far left’: boards of British companies that make more profit by ruthlessly employing cheap labour than by improving the productivity of their businesses; fifth columnists in the Home Office who have done all they can to sabotage attempts to control immigration; NHS bosses who plunder Third World countries’ vital medical staff rather than reform their own moribund institution; commissars of political correctness who dictate what people can and can’t say; high priests of multiculturalism who have cowed the indigenous population into accommodating the beliefs of incomers who, in turn, are allowed to strengthen theirs; right-on police chiefs who prefer bending the knee to arresting shoplifters; civil servants operating an insane welfare system that allows millions of Britons to remain economically inactive; and, of course, the BBC itself, which for years disgracefully censored any debate on one of the most important issues of our time.

Well, they’re all talking about it now. Riots in Dublin. The ascendancy of political extremists in Holland and, potentially, France and Germany. Populations the size of Birmingham arriving in the UK every year. For the record, throughout, the Mail has always praised the virtues of these new arrivals. Their belief in strong families, hard work and aspiration is our belief. Because of these qualities, their children, we argued, would doubtless become the high-flyers of tomorrow. And so how exquisite that it’s the Patels, the Bravermans and the Sunaks who are leading a debate that has been so shamefully shirked by our own bien-pensant class.

Born on exactly the same day as Charles, I have referred before to the fact that, at the Palace, I am known as The Twin. So I hope the King will not consider it lèse-majesté if I offer my alter ego the following altruistic advice: ‘Sir, the one mistake your saintly mother made was to allow the monarchy, whose verities should be timeless, to become a celebrity institution akin to showbusiness with its ephemeral, vulgar values. This has reached its inevitable nightmare apotheosis in the monstrous self-indulgences of Princes Harry and Andrew. Cauterise them, Sir. You and William need to return the crown to institutional obscurity. It’s the media that will suffer. The Great Royal Soap Opera of the past 30 years has sold billions of papers, particularly for the Mail. The less people know about you, the more your mystique will increase. Dare to be boring. You, your family and the British constitution will be the happier for it.’

For years, as divorce and single motherhood figures soared, the Mail, under my editorship, campaigned passionately for the preservation of the family (the best welfare system ever devised) and marriage (which we argued should enjoy tax relief). Research showed that children brought up by married couples outperformed and were happier than those brought up by single mothers (many of whom, we conceded, struggled heroically in adverse circumstances). Inevitably, this was derided by the chattering classes who seemed to glory in the demise of the nuclear family. With one in five British adults on anti-depressants, mental illness among the young soaring and Britain leading Europe in drug and alcohol abuse, am I being absurdly antediluvian to ask whether these issues are linked to family breakdown? And – again, wash my mouth with Dettol! – rather than shipping in countless foreigners to prop up our collapsing care system, might it not make more sense to encourage British families to look after their own old and infirm? Just a Christmas thought.

A quiet Saturday evening at home many moons ago. The phone rings. My wife, who even today (half) jokes about Diana and me, calls out icily: ‘There’s a woman who claims to be a princess on the phone.’ I pick up the receiver. ‘You tell that Miss Lee-Potter of yours,’ a familiar voice coldly enunciates, ‘that I bet she’s got cellulite.’ The line goes dead. That week, the Mail’s star columnist, Lynda Lee-Potter, had somewhat ungenerously highlighted incipient, disobliging wrinkles on the royal thighs of a swim-suited Diana. Oh, the travails of being an editor!