Do you sometimes get the feeling you are being led a merry dance, or up the garden path and down an Irish country mile? That’s what the wedding of Peter Phillips to Autumn Kelly on Saturday at Windsor, is beginning to feel like.

The wedding has been full of contradictions from the moment it was announced.

First, it would be held at Windsor, but then it was moved to Scotland — to the church at Balmoral. Now it’s back at Windsor again in St. George’s Chapel and with a full complement of Royal guests.

Then we were assured that Peter would renounce his rights of succession to the Throne, as his bride-to-be is a Roman Catholic. But hold on, Autumn will now renounce her Catholicism instead.

The situation has not been much clearer over the girlfriend duo either. Chelsy Davy wasn’t invited at first, but Kate Middleton was. Now Chelsy is invited but Kate won’t go.

Prince William would be a supporter (best man), then an usher. Now he’s going on holiday. His change of mind is alternatively given as a reluctance to see Kate upstage Autumn, or as a gesture against the pre-wedding publicity.

Could all this be a deliberate ploy to keep the press and public guessing, or is the whole wedding a fiasco worthy of Gordon Brown?

Peter is known for being an intensely private man with few pretensions. The wedding, we were told, would be low-key and mostly off-camera. Now the couple has sold the wedding to Hello! magazine, which published a 20-page spread last week. Hello! also has some rights to exclusive pictures of the wedding itself. The fee is reported to be £500,000 ($1m).

It does seem to be a strange way to organize what is, in all but name, a Royal wedding at Windsor in the presence of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.

Or might they be delayed on their return from a State visit to Turkey?

Anything could happen between now and Saturday. We’ve got our ears to the ground. Both of them.

The Press Association has reported that Prince Harry has been serving on the front line in Afghanistan for 10 weeks. The news was leaked by The Drudge Report and reluctantly confirmed by the Ministry of Defence.

It seems likely that Harry will be recalled, as he will now become the one and only target of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The PA report states :

Prince Harry has been fighting the Taliban on the front line in Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed.

The 23-year-old Household Cavalry officer has spent the past 10 weeks secretly serving in war-ravaged Helmand Province.

The deployment had been cloaked in secrecy under a news blackout deal agreed across the UK media to prevent details reaching the Taliban and endangering Harry and his comrades.

But the arrangement has broken down after news was leaked out on the US website the Drudge Report.

As part of the deal a group of journalists had visited the Prince in Helmand on condition that details would only be publicised once he was safely back in the UK.

The deal was arranged after Harry’s planned tour to Iraq last year had to be cancelled because of a security risk sparked by publicity.

After the disappointment over Iraq, when Harry was due to work as a Scimitar light tank troop leader, he retrained as a battlefield air controller known as a JTAC (Joint Terminal Attack Controller) with a view to going to Afghanistan.

He flew out on December 14, two months into the current winter tour.

He spent several weeks working in Garmsir in the far south of Helmand Province, operating just 500m from front line Taliban positions. He has since left Garmsir to work in another part of Helmand Province, details of which can not be reported for security reasons.

There is no immediate steer from the Ministry of Defence on the future of his deployment.

Let us hope they move him to a place of safety. After 10 weeks, he deserves his medal.

Update: ITN’s Political Editor is suggesting that Harry’s deployment is now over. Everyone is amazed they managed to keep it quiet this long. He was due to stay until April, but will return home a hero having fought on the front line and controlled aircraft movements over various battlefields.

ITN has lengthy interviews with him on the ground. He seems fit, happy and glad to be there. The Queen and Prince Charles have said how proud they are of him, and Prince William has written to him saying how proud their mother would be at this moment.

For those who didn’t see the splendid five-part BBC documentary Monarchy: The Royal Family At Work, Amazon has the DVD out tomorrow, Monday.

Amazon.co.uk is offering a 40pc reduction at a value price of only £14 (around $27).

The documentary was shot by RDF Media for the BBC and caused a furore at the press launch when the Queen was said to have “stormed out in a huff” from a photoshoot with American star photographer, Annie Leibovitz. The footage actually showed her walking briskly into the session.

Some very senior executives lost their jobs in both RDF and the BBC before the matter was finally resolved and a re-edited version agreed with Buckingham Palace.

The scene — now shown in the correct sequence — is the first to be shown in Episode 1 of the series.

If you are at all interested in British Royalty — and you wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t — this is a must have collectors’ item. The DVD also has a bonus of half an hour of unbroadcast material, so contains around six hours of truly sumptuous viewing.

Let’s hope the extra footage has been cut in the right order.

We haven’t heard much news about Kate Middleton lately, so it’s interesting to hear she’s rather put out by Prince William’s proposed motorbike trip down Africa in June.

The idea, obscurely named Operation ER+Queen (something to do with Easy Rider and Steve McQueen), is that Princes William and Harry will bike 1000 miles down the length of Africa to Lesotho and South Africa in aid of Harry’s charity for African children.

Today’s Mail on Sunday has the following passage : “A friend of Harry’s said: ‘Chelsy has been helpful and encouraging about the trip.

‘She has travelled a lot in South Africa and hopes she and Harry might have some time together out there once he has completed the journey.

‘Kate Middleton, on the other hand, is rather put out by the whole thing.

‘She feels excluded because she can’t help in the same way Chelsy can and is annoyed William is choosing to spend some of his valuable leave away from her.’ ”

So there is some tension there. But this trip is so full of dangers, it may not happen.