Tonight Channel 4 broadcast an explosive documentary about Prince William and Prince Harry.

Typically for Channel 4 it covered a lot of “toff” activities, like hunting and polo in a deliberately disparaging way, and hyped up every glitch and problem that the Princes endured in their youth.

More interesting were journalist Richard Kay, who was close to their mother Diana, and James Whitaker, the Mirror photographer and lately pundit on all things Royal.

Richard Kay suggested that William is using Kate Middleton as a kind of decoy to cover his other activities. Both Princes, he said, are reluctant Royals who don’t want to do the job.

Whitaker also pursued this line, saying that their decisions to continue in the military “were extraordinary” and indicated they were turning their back on Royal duties and, by implication, marriage.

William does not come out of this very well. We hear that Diana referred to Harry as King Henry because she felt he would be more able to handle the role.

Chelsy Davy’s recent split from Harry was spliced onto the end of the tape, but carried the same message: the Princes are not interested in settling down, and both girls now seem to be aware of that.

Royal Anecdotes has known this for some time, as regulars will know, but the most astonishing assertion, made by Richard Kay, is that Kate is a decoy for William’s private activities.

No doubt a lot of flak will be generated by this documentary, and by the main interviews in particular, so we will await the outcome without commenting further for the time being.

(Overseas readers may be able to watch it on the Catchup service under the title “What happened next”.)

Now here’s an intriguing question for the weekend.

We received an email about Royal fertility tests for women intending to marry a senior Prince. I think it merits some careful consideration.

It’s known that this practice has traditionally been part of the process of the marriage ritual of heirs, or very near heirs, to the Throne. Diana had to undergo a medical examination and we know that it was successful.

What, though, if someone failed? These days the hurdles are much higher than even 20 years ago. It’s not just a Yes/No verdict that’s available. DNA testing can throw up a mass of probability data over a wide range of genetic diseases.

Where does the fail point lie: a one in ten chance, one in 100, one in a million? Most people would probably fail if the criteria were set too high.

Now here’s the rub. How would the Palace handle a situation where a young women was generally fertile, but who had a mild to medium chance of producing children with some genetic disability?

Obviously, they wouldn’t splash it all over the press. If some journalists discovered the truth, editors would be very wary of putting private medical information into the public domain. There might even be general agreement across the media not to publicize it at all.

And how would this play into the current situation of both the heir’s heir and the spare’s long-term girlfriends?

This is a hypothetical question, but one which will make life very difficult in the future for the Royal Family and pose a variety of ethical and practical questions in an age of maximum media exposure.

In an article in today’s Mail on Sunday, Katie Nicholl reports that friends of Prince William and Kate Middleton believe that an engagement announcement is planned for “just before or just after Christmas,” and that a wedding could be in May or June.

If an earlier story is true that Kate will not be at Sandringham until Boxing Day (December 26), it will clearly be just after, which seems like perfect timing to catch the world’s headlines.

The article, however, maintains the Mail’s new policy of acknowledging the Kate-hating crowd of spitting and cursing opponents of her match with the world’s most eligible batchelor. A section of the piece reprints some of the vituperative comments from the paper’s website.

A careful reading of the article reveals it’s in two parts. The first reflecting opinions of some Buckingham Palace courtiers, while the second part concentrates on the view from Clarence House.

These two courts have been at loggerheads with each other since the days of Diana, Princess of Wales. It seems the dogs of war have been unleashed again on the subject of the entirely innocent and inexperienced figure of Kate Middleton.

As Royal Anecdotes reported some months ago, there appears to be a growing faction of “courtiers” at the Palace who oppose the wedding of the two young people. They freely quote the Queen as insisting Kate should get a job and that “she’s not proactive enough.”

I believe there may be some noises of disquiet, particularly from Prince Philip, at the lack of a firm decision on this match. One can imagine him stating that Kate really should be doing something else while she waits. The aim, though, may be to prompt William into “marrying the girl, or letting her go” — a statement attributed to Prince Philip two years ago.

The anti-Kate faction in the Palace has picked up on this theme and translated it as the Queen’s wish that Kate “got a job.” This then becomes “work for a charity.” Have they forgotten that Kate was involved with a charity cross-Channel dragon-boat race last year but was asked to pull out for safety reasons by Clarence House? A dig at Prince Charles’s press team, perhaps?

The article ends with extensive quotes from the Clarence House viewpoint which show the truth at the heart of this story:

Despite this reluctance to co-operate with the Press, Kate’s friends say she has access to Press officers and senior aides at Clarence House, where she is free to come and go at her leisure.

“Kate has a hotline to Clarence House and she listens to everything the Royal aides tell her to do,” said a friend. “When they advised her to pull out of the cross-Channel dragon boat race last summer, she did it immediately. Kate is approached about doing lots of things but the Clarence House staff are often against her taking part because they think it’s too high-profile and they want to keep Kate out of the limelight. She’s in a bit of a Catch 22 situation.”

Royal Anecdotes believes that what is happening to Kate Middleton is very close to persecution. The wave of teenage angst she has had to face from many downmarket websites, including the Mail’s (which is moderated), is almost beyond belief since very few of the trolls will ever have met her. To quote the Kate-haters as proof of anything rational is tantamount to giving up on moderate and accurate journalism.

We’ve long stated that only a quick resolution by Prince William will spare his long-time girlfriend this avalanche of mindless criticism.

We are delighted that an announcement looks possible from Sandringham at Christmas.

The jury in the Diana, Princess of Wales inquest today returned a verdict of unlawful killing through negligent driving by Henri Paul in the Mercedes and the vehicles of the paparazzi.

They singled out Henri Paul’s drink driving as a contributory factor for the crash in the Alma Tunnel in Paris in which she and Dodi Fayed were killed on August 31, 1997.

They were being followed by paparazzi after leaving the Ritz Hotel, and a large amount of evidence centred on how closely they had followed the Mercedes in the minutes before the crash.

At last the focus of the blame is being turned from the outrageously improbable conspiracy theories to the real culprits : the Ritz Hotel’s security arrangements and the chasing pack of photographers who appear to have had Henri Paul in their pockets.

All this has been clear since the French magistrate’s meticulous report many years ago.

An interesting point arising is that the verdict clashes with that of the Paget Report by Scotland Yard, which concluded it was “a tragic accident”. The jury has defined culpability here and that has not pleased Mohamed Fayed whose representatives still maintain his blame-deflecting case.

This verdict leaves him open to private prosecutions for what the jury calls “gross negligence”.