An amazing coincidence, or what?

There’s really nothing I can say about Harry’s evil attempts to destroy our monarchy that hasn’t already been said about double incontinence, syphilis and post-nasal drip.

Ideally, Harry’s effluvia in various media should simply be ignored with dignified silence. But the din has become too loud for that: the lad, ably assisted by his professionally manipulative wife, has continued his mother’s vindictive crusade .

The royal family can’t stay silent much longer. It must defend itself, and, as the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu said in his much-misquoted maxim, “Attack is the secret of defence”.   

One way of turning the tables would be to cast another glance on the photographic juxtaposition above and consider anew the persistent rumours that Harry is really the son of Diana’s lover, Capt. James Hewitt.

Harry was born in 1984, and both his mother and Hewitt himself have insisted that their five-year affair didn’t start until two years later. However, since veracity wasn’t the most salient virtue of either of the star-crossed lovers, a large grain of salt is in order, possibly washed down with a shot of tequila.

Both lovers used their adulterous liaison for other than purely erotic purposes. Diana opened up about it in that infamous 1995 BBC interview, when she flapped her eyelashes histrionically, hamming up her lines: “Yes, I adored him. Yes, I loved him…”

That interview served a dual purpose. Her most immediate aim was to force a divorce from Charles, retaining many of the royal privileges with none of the royal responsibilities. The second, and most important, aim was to take revenge on the institution that refused to accept that perfidious, empty-headed girl on her own terms.

Hewitt’s objective was more straight-forward: money. He wrote (or rather had ghost-written) two books on the affair, having received a £300,000 advance for the first one. He also got £1,000,000 for a tabloid interview, which he doubtless saw as only a good start.

The next step was selling Diana’s letters to the highest bidder, and the high bids were rumoured to be greater than his previous fees by an order of magnitude. Our guardians of public morals screamed bloody murder, but Hewitt was undeterred. “These letters,” he told an interviewer, “are important historical documents” and the gasping public shouldn’t be denied vital knowledge of historical import.

Judging by the only quote I’ve been able to glean from those missives, they are a matter of gossipy rather historical interest: “I have lain awake at night loving you desperately and thanking god for bringing you into my life… I just long for the days when we finally will be together for always, as that is how it should be.”

Be that as it may, all of a sudden Hewitt announced he wouldn’t sell the letters after all. By then his reputation as a “love rat” was so firmly entrenched, that he got few praises for that seemingly noble act of self-denial.

That, I think, was an oversight. For it’s hard to believe that Hewitt suddenly had a Damascene experience and found God. After all, until then he had been trading on his affair with Diana quite shamelessly. Call me a cynic, but I don’t believe he’d suddenly developed qualms on the verge of the biggest payoff of his life.

Moreover, even though he was already flush then, he certainly isn’t now. Reports say Hewitt has since squandered his penile fortune, had a heart attack and a stroke, and is now working as a £4,000 a year gardener in Devon.

This though he is still sitting on the instantly reclaimable treasure of Diana’s epistolary output. Now, I don’t fancy myself as a psychologist, but such restrained self-abnegation is glaringly out of Hewitt’s character.

There must exist a more practical reason for his suddenly acquired reticence, and that can only be some pressure put on him either by the Palace directly or through the mediation of our security services. They must have something on Hewitt, enough to force him to forgo millions and settle into a life of penury.

I shan’t try to speculate on what that might be: the range of possibilities is broad. Whatever it is, it has worked: Hewitt kept those precious letters to himself. The question is what else that leverage has forced him to do.

This brings us back to Harry’s paternity. Rumours about it began to circulate immediately after Diana’s affair became public knowledge. It was hard not to notice that the older Harry got, the more he looked like Hewitt.

It wasn’t just the red hair, for that tint exists in Diana’s family. As I can testify from personal observation, her brother, Earl Spencer, is a redhead too. However, his eyes are hazel, not blue like Harry’s and Hewitt’s. And in general, Harry doesn’t look at all like Earl Spencer.

He may look more like the young photographs of his paternal grandfather, but that facial resemblance is still not as close as between Harry and Hewitt. That’s why those ugly rumours just wouldn’t die.

At some point Hewitt dispelled them in yet another interview. He hadn’t met Diana until 1985, he said, when he became her riding instructor. Harry was already one at the time.

However, Nicholas Davis, the author of many books on the royals, contradicts that claim. Both Davis and Hewitt used to play polo with Charles, and Davis was his friend.

According to him, “Hewitt was seen inside Charles and Diana’s Kensington Palace home on several occasions in 1983 – 12 months before Harry was born.”

And then: “Only Charles, a few close friends and the Royal protection police were aware that Diana was Hewitt’s lover before Harry’s birth. And the reality is, she wasn’t sure who was Harry’s father. In her heart, she wanted it to be Hewitt, and she suspected that it was more likely to be him than her husband.”

Perhaps. But one way of putting paid to those rumours would be to do a simple DNA test. A drop of saliva, and Andrew is your uncle – and, more important, Hewitt isn’t your father.

Yet no one has even suggested that little exercise. It’s as if the parties involved would rather not know the possible result.

That leaves an opening for a counterattack that could damage Harry’s earning potential and possibly even his marriage. If Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and sixth in line of succession, becomes Harry Hewitt, born on the wrong side of the blanket to a louche officer, would Meghan be as smitten as she so expertly shows?

I don’t know. But I do think it’s time for the Palace to fight back – before those two objectionable spouses do irreparable damage not just to the royal family but to our whole constitution. As they appear hell-bent to do.