What was funny if you were there is that we were all immensely sophisticated people who knew exactly what she was going to say and we're chatting away, nice to see you.
You do now have one in three people, as shown by the famous Carlton Monarchy debate poll, saying they want to get rid of the Monarchy. That was unthinkable even three, four years ago.
As somebody who's been writing about this subject for getting on twenty years now, it's astonishing how the climate has changed in the last five years.
We could have a political movement going if it had been properly organized but the Monarchy's done itself enormous damage possibly beyond the point of long-term recovery.
The Princess's so-called 'time and space speech' at the end of '93 about a year after the formal separation, looking back on it it's called her retirement from public life but we've seen in fact it's nothing of the kind.
Thatcher came under pressure from right wing backbenchers to shut up the Prince of Wales and there was a deal done between them where he did actually shut up in the end.
If you have an anecdote from one source, you file it away. If you hear it again, it may be true. Then the more times you hear it the less likely it is to be true.
I remember a moment when the Prince went back to his old school, Grammar School in Melbourne, and slightly to his horror his old music teacher produced a cello.
I decided he'd changed so much that a whole new book was required and that book actually I can say so was the first to say that the marriage was in trouble and the Prince didn't like at all and my book was being serialized in the Sunday Times over five weeks.
When the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were growing up, that was at it's height and the War cemented that with photographs of the Royal Family having breakfast together and so on, by pinning their reputation so firmly on that particular issue.
I think her friends were worried that the bulimia might come back, about some psychological slide, and she was given breathing space to some extent by the media as much as she ever has been.
I mean Buckingham Palace has never hired a professional public relations outfit let alone a Madison Avenue type and they would throw up their hands in horror at the very idea.
Among other things they picked out a detail that Charles had been offered the Governorship of Hong Kong in its dying days by Thatcher in return for shutting up about the inner cities. He quite rightly in my view led the paper on this story.
When the magistrate says 'That's not a good enough reason my man.' He said 'Excuse me, could I ask you? Have you taken an oath of allegiance to the Monarch?'
What it was at the time was literally a plea for, to get the pressure off for a while, to give her space to breathe. She was very unhappy. She was feeling pretty claustrophobic.
They tend to be civil servants, often diplomats drawn from the Foreign Office, who may be very pleasant, intelligent people, but once they get inside the Palace they're riveted to the status quo and they lose track of public opinion in the real world.
I don't accept at all the quite popular argument that the press is responsible for the monarchy's recent troubles. The monarchy's responsible for the monarchy's recent troubles. To blame the press is the old thing of blaming the messenger for the message.
