Martin Amis was asked his opinion of Prince Harry by an interviewer at Shortlist magazine recently and the novelist replied by chanting the Army song about Prince Harry that his fellow squaddies sung when he was whisked out of Afghanistan after his cover was blown by an Aussie magazine.

“He’s ginge, he’s loud, he’s done us f****** proud / He’s here, he’s mean, his gran’s the f****** Queen…"

Later in the same interview he says:

“I approved of the irrationally happy Jubilee atmosphere I saw in Britain. But I was oddly pleased when I heard that 500 people were treated for hypothermia after the flotilla. The notion of these people trembling away through it all seems strangely fitting. They’ve got to wrap the monarchy up, but they won’t. They’ll resist and it will eventually become like the Spanish system, where it’s like an upper-middle-class monarchy. Then there’s the side of it that’s almost child abuse. It’s this strange idea of locking your children into that life. Having said that, although [the monarchy] is baffling and embarrassing, it’s hard to say it’s an evil thing. They unite races and have been a force for colour-blindness in society despite, to put it mildly, being an anachronism.”