Prince Will.I.Am - livin' the dream

His mother frugged regularly to Queen, Duran Duran and George Michael, while his father talked to plants. And, during the 1980s no mid-summer Wembley Stadium concert by any of rock's royalty seemed complete without the Prince and Princess of Wales waving somewhat awkwardly from the Royal Box.

And while his father would inevitably look as if he'd rather be at the opera, Mama would be in her element, Mama not only being the People's Princess (© A. Blair) but also the Pop Princess (as opposed to Kylie, who clearly is the Princess of Pop. Fact.)

So we should not be too shocked to see HRH The Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and second in line to the throne of the United Kingdom, rocking out with Jon Bon Jovi and someone called Taylor Swift this week at the first karaoke party of the Christmas season. Actually, it was a charity concert at Kensington Palace, but same difference.

As you might imagine, it all looked a tad awkward: a future monarch, suited-and-booted in a crisp by-royal appointment tux, leaning in on the diminutive JBJ and giving it the full "Take one's hand, we'll make it I swear...." as they belted out that Cheese-o-Rama classic, Livin' On A Prayer.

What did David Bowie do....?

In one go, Wills nailed his street smarts to the wall: eldest son of the People's Princess joining in on a solidly blue collar song about the working folk of New Jersey making it through a downturn. And ending it with a high five. Well, at least the evening' charity cause was the homeless.

William's performance, we are informed by royal lickspittles, was entirely "off the cuff". But as anyone who has ever joined an office outing to a karaoke bar knows, there's always one shrew-like colleague who, given the spotlight and an open microphone will burst forth with lungs like an industrial-strength Dyson vacuum cleaner, catching everyone off-guard with their rendition of I Will Survive.

Tuesday evening wasn't the first time William has done this, either. He is known to have given a solo performance of the Bon Jovi hit at the 2011 wedding of his cousin Zara Phillips to rugbyist Mike Tindall.

But fair play to JBJ for putting up with his stage interloper this time, being one of the most pleasantly down to earth rock stars I've ever met (even if he did once say of his album New Jersey: "New Jersey isn't a place, it's an attitude").

And let's not get too snotty about Wills, either. Together with his, let's face it, cooler brother, and his posh but pleasantly normal wife, he is the top-selling line of a new hip(ish), sub-brand of the House of Windsor. When not steadying RAF search helicopters over the Irish Sea (so he could have chosen the Stones' Emotional Rescue then), William is taking the GLW out to the pictures on a Friday night, 'disguised' in a baseball hat.

As a threesome, they were the combined face of last year's London Olympics. And with Harry living the dream, flying attack helicopters and hanging out at Las Vegas pool parties, you couldn't get a better branding of the next generation of British royals.

So, if I was the PR department of either Sony's PlayStation or Microsoft's Xbox, and was in an enterprising frame of mind, I'd be shipping one of their latest PlayBoxes and the hottest karaoke game round to Ken Palace in time for Christmas. Because I'm sure there's nothing young Prince George will enjoy more on Christmas morning than his dad and Uncle H cranking up the sound system with a megamix of festive karaoke staples. "So 'ere it is Merry Christmas, everybody's 'avin' fun...!".

Diana and I - an anniversary to forget

15 years ago tonight I, along with various other representatives of the consumer electronics industry, was in an East Berlin nightclub in what must have looked like a scene from Cocoon: The Return.

We were a collection of company PRs and journalists, barely anyone south of their 30th birthdays, but partying in the smoky haze of a squat. This was one of the many repurposed buildings in the eastern half of the unified Berlin that had been turned into cool hangouts for, er, the kids.

This particular Saturday night was our final evening in Berlin for the IFA - the gargantuan technology trade show which takes place every year at this time, swallowing up participants in a wagon circle of 26 huge exhibition halls.

For exhibitors and visitors alike, IFA is an event that requires the expulsion of steam, hence this motley collection grooving away in the gloom. Occasionally faces you half-recognised would emerge like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now!, appearing out of the Nung River to complete his mission and dispatch Colonel Kurtz to the next life. That, come to think of it, wasn't the only similarity to the Kurtz compound in Cambodian jungle....

Somewhere near four in the morning, most of this weary group of unlikely ravers decided to return to the spinning chamber that would soon be their room at the well-appointed Steigenberger Hotel across town on Los Angeles Platz.

As is my habit - and despite the ungodly hour and the need to be back on my feet again in three hours - I flipped on the TV to see what the news was, and came across a curious sight: a locked-off camera shot of a crumpled Mercedes lying motionless in a tunnel.

Not wishing to wake the neighbours, the TV's sound had been muted, but a single caption told me everything I needed to know: "Diana injured in car crash".

For the following hours I watched, with the sound still muted, as the story revealed itself. Gradually as, presumably, official protocols were enacted, the actual fate of Diana, Princess of Wales, became known to those who needed to be informed - the Royal Family, prime minister Tony Blair and other circles of the establishment.

As this took place, the caption changed every so often as the news worsened: "Diana seriously injured in car crash", "Diana critically injured in car crash", "Diana in critical condition following crash"... until "Diana dies in Paris car crash".

In reality, the princess had been declared dead at 4am, around the same time we were hailing taxis back to our Berlin hotel. The news, however, was just as surreal as the nightclub. Members of the British royal family - whether estranged or not - don't die in car crashes in Parisian underpasses in the middle of the night. Unless, of course, they are the world's most photographed woman, trying to escape a pack of paparazzi on motorbikes.

Shortly before 9am the press group I'd been out with only a few hours before assembled grumpily and reluctantly in the hotel lobby. As the hungover and bewildered slowly appeared, I began telling them the news.

At first none believed me (a stunning endorsement, I thought, of my communication skills), but as we arrived at the IFA the mood changed, in particular as the journalists caught the news for themselves on the banks of brand new TV sets throughout the exhibition halls.

During one bizarre moment that morning, when the writers were meant to be interviewing a senior Philips executive (Frans van Houten, now the company's CEO), he became the inquisitor, asking the press how they were doing.

By that Sunday lunchtime we were all ready to leave. It had been a long IFA anyway, but the overnight news just made it odd. On the plane, and in a business class cabin exclusively ours, the British Airways attendant handed out free copies of the Sunday Times.

The paper had gone to press long before the day's stunning news had beome public, and yet every single section appeared to feature something about Diana, her sons or the royals in general. Even the Personal Finance section carried an unfortunately prescient story about William and Harry's future financial security. The Sunday Times' technology correspondent, a member of our party, endured some ribbing over that, typical of journalists' black humour.

It wasn't, however, until we landed at Heathrow that it truly dawned that something big had happened. It may sound disrespectful, but we had been enclosed in a bubble of technology and laddish jocularity, disconnecting us from anything else.

As we waited for our luggage to appear, various members of our party disappeared to call home using payphones (yes, back then not everyone had a mobile phone), returning in varying states of shock: "My mum's in pieces - she's been round at my girlfriend's all morning. They're both hysterical" was a common report.

The next day I drove through Westminster. The entire area around Buckingham Palace was carpeted by flowers and zombified, tearful people walking in no particular direction, still stunned by the 24 hour-old news.

Like 9/11, it is still a stunning event now. Mercifully, however, the media obsession with Diana has evaporated over the past 15 years. Her boys have grown up, mostly, and are finding their own ways to both shun the spotlight and attract it. She'd be proud. Even of strip billiards.

I could never call myself a fan of Diana - I'm not that big a fan of the royals - but she carried an undoubted movie star aura that I appreciated. The carpet of people I saw covering Westminster that Monday morning certainly lent itself to Tony Blair's "People's Princess" soundbite.

But I couldn't help but feeling that the Diana Mania led to her tragic demise, that her picture was considered such currency in media outlets in just about every corner of the earth that photographers could pursue her to, literally, the very end.

Now I live in Paris, and frequently pass through or near the Place de l'Alma underpass where the fatal accident took place, I find it impossible not to think back to that surreal night in Berlin, and the events that would lead to a worldwide media phenomenon to reach such a tragic crescendo.

Cry God for Harry, England and Saint George!

Right now there can be few men between the ages of 12 and 92, of any particular proclivity, who isn't quietly lifting a titfer to His Royal Highness, the Prince Henry of Wales.

Britain's leading (occasional) royal hedonist - mostly known as Prince Harry, sometimes Captain Harry Wales, British Army, and quite probably now, the Viscount of Vegas (not a real title but I'm hoping it will catch on) - has managed to extend his strenuous summer watching sport by inventing one of his own, "strip billiards".

This is in addition to his admirable day job flying heavily armoured attack helicopters and snogging posh blonde heiresses in London nightclubs. Talk about living it large.

The revelation that Harry was partying hard in Las Vegas this week and ended up in a threads-free game of pool may be causing discomfort in certain circles of the British establishment, but let's face it, his ancestors - especially his namesakes - were known to do far worse. It's just that they didn't have smartphones and the Internet to contend with.

Until Harry's very own reenactment of The Hangover came to light, he was being lauded by the press for his infectious charm and easy-going nature, as demonstrated during his spring tour of Central America and the Caribbean as part of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.

During the Olympics he - along with his brother and sister-in-law - won credit for being a prominent and fervent patron of the London Olympics. However, even this didn't prevent one or two snide pieces along the lines of "isn't it about time the royal gooseberry found a girlfriend?". I can't vouch for whether Harry's opponent across the billiard table this week would be classed as a girlfriend, but, really, he should be admired for the sterling effort to acquire one.

The British media's obsession with marrying off royal offspring is nothing new: every time his father, as a younger man, was photographed with a bikini-clad nubile in the Australian surf, she was immediately installed as a future bride. Harry's uncle Andrew, on the other hand, provided a more obvious template for his nephew to follow, squiring an assortment of fun-loving types, including a soft-porn actress, until he met and married jolly aristocratic fun's ultimate exponent, Fergie.

Harry has had to endure a more aggressive, more intrusive, and more competitive media. But this cheekiest of semi-orphaned royal scamps, with that mischievous grin and shock of ginger on his bonce, has successfully eclipsed any other member of his family for having a laugh, perhaps because of, perhaps in spite of the magnifying glass that has hovered above him from the day he was born.

Ever since his mother died - 15 years ago, a week tomorrow - Harry has put up with speculation about where that ginger hair really came from, the continuing attention to his dead mother from an unhealthily obsessive media, and his role in the modernisation of a royal family, a modernisation partly prompted by its reaction to Diana's death.

I would hardly consider myself a card-carrying royalist, but on the other hand, I'm frankly amazed that Harry has grown up as normal as he has. Yes, he was caught smoking a joint and being drunk at school, but these could all be regarded as rights of passage many teenage boys go through (though the Nazi uniform was, however, an unforgivable error of judgement). It's just that some don't get caught, and most don't attract some sleeze with a cameraphone and an e-mail address for the picture desk of a website that has played more than its part in the voyeuristic intrusion of celebrities' lives.

Note: the Express's two front page lead
 stories are not necessarily related.

Harry's big Vegas weekend has inevitably led to a hue and cry amongst the British press, but not so much about what he got up to in Sin City, as the fact they haven't been able to run with the photographs of what he got up to, lest they end up en masse being carted off to the Tower.

Although they've got an argument, that the pictures of Harry racking up for his nude break are only a few clicks away online, they are being sanctioned by royal lawyers threatening the big stick of the Press Complaints Commission. And few newspaper editors appear willing to risk their future knighthoods for falling fowl of this apparatus of self-policing, a governance system partly put in place due to the handsome profits newspapers have enjoyed over the last 30 years from the lives of Harry, his brother and his parents.

Still, I don't know what would be worse - newspapers whining about not being able to run the nudie shots of H in action or them using the lurid photographs as an excuse to fill columns with moralistic pontification about what is and isn't appropriate behaviour for the third in line to the throne.

He may be third in line, and I'm sure his immediate family will not be best pleased by the attention he has created so soon after the summer love-in we've all had with British heritage. But has he done anything wrong? Is he not entitled to have fun like everyone else?

After all, even his granny spends here time jumping out of helicopters with James Bond, and no-one seems to wonder what that is all about...