Steve Hewlett would be “Reinventing the Royals” on BBC2 this Sunday if the all-too-invented royal solicitors, Harbottle & Lewis, weren’t doing their ancestral stuff. A tiff over film rights? Maybe. A more histrionic clash over the non-news that Clarence House once employed a spin doctor – the masterly Mark Bolland – to try to improve Prince Charles’s image? We’ll see as programmes disappear from the schedules, pending further this and that. But one big question won’t disappear. Has the BBC, even once, done something that ruffles the house of Windsor in the 20 years since Martin Bashir interviewed Diana? No, it’s all been sweetness and subservient since – well – Nicholas Witchell had a forelock to tug.
