Delicate confections, these biographies of contemporary English royalty. You have to take so much on trust, the confidences of ‘friends’, the unattributed whispers, the hearsay, it only takes one ugly erroneous fact for the whole thing to slide away in front of your eyes like one of those huge cakes in comedy films. For me, in Charles & Camilla, this happened on page 153.

Just a short sentence. ‘The English had captured Caernarfon Castle from the Welsh in 1282.’ There was no castle at Caernarfon in 1282. What there was was a settlement of timber houses, this so small it took 20 men just five days to demolish the lot to make way for the English town, which the Welsh duly destroyed in 1294.

But the cake had begun to slide for me 18 pages earlier where Gyles Brandreth quoted a story told him by the broadcaster Wynford Vaughan Thomas. In 1936, sent to interview David Lloyd George, Vaughan Thomas found the former prime minister in his pyjamas in a hotel room, ‘sitting in bed between two topless tarts’. Under such circumstances the BBC interview duly took place. And if you believe that, sunshine, you’ll believe anything.

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