I NEVER thought I’d hear myself saying this, but I actually felt a bit sorry for Kate and Wills. They put a brave face on it, but travelling more than 7,000 miles just to be told your family has been sacked must have felt rather deflating. Well, at least they had good weather.

Sending the royal A-team off to Belize, Jamaica and the Bahamas to spread a little Commonwealth love may have looked good on paper – the customary jaunt to a far-flung colony, the chance for the delightful duchess to wear some stylish frocks and the handsome prince to show off his best Richard Gere look, a royal wave here and there, lots of shiny white teeth and smiles, job done.

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The perfectly-scripted exercise of soft power as UK plc’s super sales team discreetly drummed up business and kept Blighty’s international profile in the news. What could possibly go wrong?

Well everything, quite frankly. Over the weekend, the pile-on began as the fairytale dream started to resemble a grotesque freak show of archaic pomp, with blame attributed to the “tone-deaf” PR “masterminds” in the Palace. The star performers caught in a tropical storm.

To be fair, some of it was just bad luck. To describe the Cambridges as lambs to the slaughter may be pushing it, but images of them reaching out as anonymous black fingers poked eagerly through a metal fence trying to touch the pretty princess was the stuff of Dantesque nightmares.

If a picture tells a thousand words, then it spoke of generations of white saviour colonialism – two privileged beneficiaries of past exploitation sunning it up as the descendants of slaves begged for a tiny piece of Disney. It wasn’t a good look, to say the least.

Then there was the utterly ridiculous sight of the Cambridges attending a military parade in Kingston decked out in all their 1950s-style finery like two waxwork dummies atop a Land Rover. What may have been deemed a charming homage to the Queen’s past visits looked more like a third-rate scene from The Crown. Indeed, even Netflix would cut that scene on the grounds of being just too clichéd. And let’s not go there with the bongo drums moment. Enough said.

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It’s easy to put the boot into royalty, lord knows they don’t help themselves at times, but this tour has to go down as yet another wake up call for The Firm. How many do they need? Black Lives Matter, slavery, class and so on . . . it’s all connected. All branches of the same wilting tree of an imperial, and unjust, legacy.

For goodness sake, the duke and duchess’s own sister-in-law raised the hideous spectre of racism within the family. As Kate and Wills will be aware, image is absolutely everything. Cute photo opps can so easily make them look like guffawing Tik Tok toffs.

Besides, sinister Andrew’s transgressions have left the rest of the gang with a lot of ground to make up, so any missteps are proving harder to recover from.

Royalty exists on a symbolic, almost hyper-surreal plain of representing something and yet nothing at the same time. As a triumph of style over substance, it’s essential the content hungry media gets the polished product.

Make no mistake, royalty is in the grip of an existential crisis. Such a delicate tightrope do they now tread, that any slip-up can leave them seriously wounded, if not mortally so. I’m not predicting their demise in the next few years, decades or even in my lifetime. But after their trip to paradise, the Royal Doomsday Clock has just edged a little closer to midnight.

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