The British monarchy hopes the forthcoming wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton will boost the royal family's flagging popularity.
Pity the Buckingham Palace minion given the task of drawing up the seating plan for the royal wedding.
It's very 21st-century of Prince William to marry a commoner, but it presents a potential public relations nightmare for royal officials, the likes of which have not been seen for, well, the several weeks it has been since the last Windsor family scandal broke (Prince Andrew, last month).
Where to put the bride's wicked uncle Gary, exposed by the British tabloids as a tattooed cocaine snorter who hosts parties in the Ibiza home he calls ''La maison de Bang Bang''? What to do with our future king's future mother-in-law, Carole Middleton, who is liable to betray her vulgar middle-class origins by referring to the wedding napery as serviettes and not napkins? Can the former cabin attendant even be trusted not to chew gum during the ceremony, as she did during Prince William's passing-out parade at Sandhurst?
From Queen Victoria to Princess Mary, we step through time to study royal bridal fashions past and present.
These headaches arise even before you factor in the six former partners of the pair who will reportedly attend, and the added complication that no one is allowed to turn their back on the Queen. All 300 guests will have to moon-walk around the reception to avoid breaching protocol.
Yes, let's hope the wedding planners have access to good quality beta-blockers. For it is a truth not always universally acknowledged that while nuptials bring joy and tipsy loved-upness, they can also be occasions of gut-wrenching horror.
And the greatest threat to the sanctity of any wedding is always the relos. One of them is guaranteed to make an abject fool of themselves, aided by libations from the open bar. You can't control other people, even if you're the boss of Britain and all its colonies.
As the British tabloids (and the sniffier broadsheets) have taken great pains to point out, Catherine's family members are the real liabilities here. Their common-ness means they are likely to do appalling things like ask the butler where the toilet is. (The bride's mother has reportedly used the T word in royal company, thereby betraying her middle-classness. Well-bred people say lavatory or loo.)
The bride is tainted by her mercantile parents, who made their fortune with a mail-order business, and by the more general stain of her distant ancestry - she comes from a line of coalminers from Durham in England's gritty north.
The problems don't end there. Her second-cousin-once-removed is a chip shop owner who will capitalise on his fancypants connections by offering a Royal Wedding King Cod takeaway special on April 29.
The Daily Mail says another second- cousin-once-removed is a ''raunchy, tassel-twirling burlesque dancer'', whose signature act involves a giant cannon and a Union Jack bustle.
It's all frightfully infra-dig (aristo-speak for ''beneath one's dignity''). Until you consider what she is marrying into.
The Windsors' foibles are well documented, but a brief summary would have to include: the time Wills's dad was taped telling his then mistress the kinds of things no son should ever have to hear; the casually racist japery of his grampy; and the fact that uncle Andrew, a special trade envoy, has connections to dubious characters including, but not limited to, convicted paedophiles and Kazakh billionaires.
Then there is the extended clan. Wills is not related to the now extinct Habsburgs, so inbred they all had the same collapsed chin, but his family is no stranger to cousin-coupling. His paternal grandparents are distant relatives - both claim Queen Victoria as their great-great-grandmother.
Mor e than half of Victoria's 42 grandchildren married into royal families across the continent, meaning her dicey genes were spread far and wide. She is thought to have been a carrier of porphyria, a strange affliction that turns urine purple and can lead to insanity.
It has afflicted the British royals as far back as Mary Queen of Scots, and Vic's spawn managed to spread to the German and Russian monarchies too.
Some of the Eurotrash cousins have reportedly scored an invitation to next week's wedding. They include such monarchical peaches as Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg, who once called a news conference to denounce his mother. Not to forget Prince Albert of Monaco. He has two illegitimate children by two mothers, neither of whom is allowed to succeed to the throne when he dies. Just as Catherine's daughter won't be able to, if she is followed up in the birth order by a boy.
It makes you wonder which half of the happy couple is marrying down.
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