Not long ago the Royals seemed to be the most dysfunctional family on the planet. Not long ago a lynch-mob forced the Queen out of her palace to inspect the flowers left at the gate for her dead daughter-in-law, Princess Diana. "Show us you care," howled the crowd outside Buckingham Palace. Not so long ago Prince Harry was a swastika-sporting drunken Hoorah Henry who called his Asian friend "paki".
Now there is a PR campaign and the spate of recent stories that have made the royals seemingly ordinary and likable, and it's not coincidental that all this is happening in the jubilee year, the greatest celebration of the hereditary principle in modern times. The Romanovs and the Habsburgs may be history, but the Windsors still reign.
Harry's rehabilitation looks like part of a bigger campaign to make the royals seem normal, while paradoxically - glamourising them and reinforcing their regal status. "It's a marvel to behold," says PR expert Mark Borkowski, "and it seems to be working. What you have now is an amazing PR turnaround in an infinitesimally small amount of time."
"Of course there's a policy," says former BBC royal correspondent Jennie Bond. "The young royals are making the monarchy enormously cool."
The Royal Family now produce brochures detailing all their good works.
The branding of Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, is key to this turnaround. The "fairytale" royal romance and wedding prompted an outpouring of media-manipulated joy. No matter that her mum has an estimated fortune of £30m, or that she has married into one of Britain's wealthiest families, or that she has an apartment in Kensington Palace and will move to Buckingham Palace when she becomes our queen. No matter at all. She's just like you and me. Once again, there is another "peoples princess".
Seward, editor of Majesty magazine "The advisers used to be these ghastly rah-rahs who were all frightfully frightfully," she says. "But they've gone, and the structure of how they work has changed. The monarchy has to evolve and become as touchy feely as the rest of the population. That's easy for William and Harry, but not for the Queen. When you're an 85-year-old you're taught not to show your emotions. You don't hug anything but animals."
Among Clarence House's leading advisers is Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, 51, who has been private secretary to Charles, Camilla, Kate, William and Harry since 2005. He now advises Harry and William, helping the former to moderate his reputation for being a playboy prince.
Clarence House's press team has been headed since 2003 by Paddy Harverson, 49, a former Financial Times journalist who was for three years Manchester United's director of communications. At Clarence House, Harverson has presided over a rapprochement in relations between the tabloids and Harry and William.
One key Clarence House appointment was Miguel Head, 34, former Ministry of Defence press officer, as assistant press secretary. Head is seen as typical of the less stuffy breed of adviser the princes have come to rely on.
"Both of those guys are completely under the parapet," says Mark Borkowski. "Paddy Harverson's predecessor was Mark Bolland, whose problem was that he became the story. Harverson would never let that happen to him. Under him, the two boys who, because of how the media treated their mother and them after her death, were very suspicious of the press, had to recognise the importance of the media. Under Harverson they've become both open and controlled in dealing with the press, while seeming normal."
Tom Nairn, professor of politics at the University of Durham, argues that the Crown is hard at work re-establishing itself as a 21st century enterprise. That involves a "theatre of populism ... a modernising exhibitionism that deliberately underestimates the factors of tradition and retrospect that national identity requires".
What is the role of the monarchy? For Nairn it is to help Britons pretend that we aren't marginal in the modern world, to enchant us with the lie-dream of importance.
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