It’s safe to say that at the moment the royals are besieged by controversy and difficulty – partially through bad luck, and partially through problems of their own making. It has not, perhaps, then been the most helpful development that the Princess of Wales’s loud and self-styled ‘flamboyant’ uncle Gary Goldsmith has entered the Celebrity Big Brother house.

Joining the show along with fellow luminaries such as Lauren Simon, Zeze Mills and David Potts, Goldsmith has been described as the ‘tattooed, party-loving brother’ of Kate’s mother Carole Middleton. He announced that he would go into the Big Brother house in order to ‘put the record straight’ on his ‘bad boy’ reputation, as well as – the producers hope – discussing his extended family with far greater candour in public than ever before.

Whether Kate has ever needed the presence of her gregarious uncle in her life is a matter for debate

Certainly, Goldsmith is what television executives might refer to as a ‘colourful booking’. He once inhabited an Ibiza mansion named, tastefully, ‘Maison de Bang-Bang’, where the champagne flowed freely and a mural on the wall announced ‘It’s Gary’s world, you just live in it’. It was from this mansion that he is said to have first greeted Prince William with the appellation ‘Oi, you fucker’, and where he was caught in a sex-and-drugs tabloid sting in 2009, a year that he subsequently referred to with (inadvertent?) satirical humour as ‘my annus horribilis’. His reputation was not helped by a much-documented court case in 2017 when he was convicted of assaulting his ex-wife Julie-Anne Brown in a drunken brawl in the street, fined £5,000 and sent into rehab for alcoholism.

Goldsmith’s appearance in the Celebrity Big Brother residence, then, is one fraught with potential for difficulty and embarrassment. One well-placed source informed the Sun that Carole Middleton had ‘read [him] the riot act’ on the grounds that, with her daughter’s recovery still ongoing, ‘it is infuriating for them. Kate doesn’t need this stress’.

Whether Kate has ever needed the presence of her gregarious uncle – by his own account, a self-made millionaire many times over, with a penchant for eccentric and colourful clothing – in her life is a matter for debate. Yet he has also promised that he will not speak ill of the Princess of Wales, telling the Sun that ‘she’s beautiful on the outside, but more beautiful on the inside and really is a doting mum’.

The bookers will have signed up Goldsmith hoping for outspoken controversy, though, and already he has torn into Harry and Meghan and their public statements of ill-treatment from their family. He said their criticism of Kate had upset him because that ‘because you don’t put a stick into that spoke and reinvent history’. For good measure, he added, ‘Throwing your family under the bus just seemed inappropriate, especially what was happening with the Queen. I just thought it was totally unnecessary.’ That Goldsmith should now set himself up as an arbiter of all matters concerned with taste and dignity might seem bizarre, but stranger things have happened in the past few years.

Still, he has retained enough self-knowledge to quip, when asked whether Kate would be watching the show, that if she did, it would be from ‘behind the sofa’. Coincidentally, or otherwise, his grand entry into the house coincided with some grainy paparazzi pictures of the absent princess appearing in some American tabloid magazines. Given the plentiful rumours about her whereabouts, the appearance of these shots might at least dispel some of the more fanciful stories that have been sweeping around the internet. But even if she is indeed recuperating in the uneventful manner that her team would like the world to believe, there can be little doubt that the presence of her funny uncle on national television will not be assisting the healing process in the slightest.

When asked where his niece was, Goldsmith merely replied that she was in a ‘nice house somewhere’. Royal watchers, television producers and aficionados of chaos alike will be hoping that he becomes considerably more forthcoming over the coming days about this, and other matters. Chances are that we will not be disappointed.