Amazing though it may seem, we can in fact tell apart those among us who have a divine right to rule over everybody else, by their ability to detect surreptitious attempts to hamper their celestial comfort

Just like the Princess in Hans Christian Andersen's fable about the Princess & the Pea where her status as a real Princess was confirmed by her ability to feel a pea right through twenty mattresses and twenty eider-down beds, Prince Charles has disclosed in his recently published diaries that while taking the outward journey to Hong Kong on a British Airways 747 jumbo jet, mistakenly travelling Business Class instead of First Class, he displayed the same talent: "It took me some time to realise that this was not first class(!) although it puzzled me as to why the seat seemed so uncomfortable."

He then discovered dignitaries, including Edward Heath, Douglas Hurd, "the new Foreign Secretary Robin Cook", and Paddy Ashdown, were all "in First Class immediately below us".

"Such is the end of Empire, I sighed to myself," Charles wrote.