It’s as if royal watchers have been fed on scraps all their lives – the breaking of the colour of a pair of tights protocol here, the “body language that suggested tension” there – and the Duke of Sussex has laid before them a banquet. His book Spare, leaked to the press, serves up course after course. Hardly had we digested the first revelation - a necklace-smashing fight between royal brothers - when the next were presented. The boys “begging” their father not to marry Camilla; two tearful bust-ups between duchesses; Charles joking that Harry wasn’t his; Harry’s frostbitten penis at William’s wedding. It was William and Kate, it turns out, who encouraged him to wear that Nazi costume in 2005 – Harry had just been following orders. Then there was the lost virginity in a field to an “older woman” who “treated him like a young stallion”. “I mounted her quickly, she spanked my ass and sent me away,” he wrote. If you thought that after the Oprah interview and “intimate” Netflix series, Harry would be flogging a dead horse – well, you’d at least be partly wrong. Of course, this has been greeted with the usual outrage by people who are patently absolutely loving this stuff. You can’t tell me that royal commentators – people who spend their lives trying to scrape a story out of a choice of dress – aren’t having the time of their lives. Or that anyone isn’t, excepting perhaps William, Kate, Charles and Camilla. The revelations, I’d say, have greatly added to the gaiety of the nation. And is it really true that Harry has caused the monarchy’s “worst crisis in 30 years”, as one front page ran? Has he, as one royal biographer put it, “cruelly undermined” the very tenets of constitutional monarchy? “The more light you shine, the less likely [the monarchy] is likely to survive,” said a former editor of the Sun, who, let’s be clear, once made a good part of his living shining a light on the monarchy. Really? What are the royals for in 2023? An alien arriving on Earth, observing the way we treat, pay for and “consume” them, would see the deal clearly. We keep them for our entertainment. The contract was made particularly stark in 2019, when Harry and Meghan first broke royal protocol and refused to show off Archie as soon he was born. “They can’t have it both ways,” royal biographer Penny Junor said at the time. “[We] are paying nearly £3m for Harry and Meghan’s house, so in terms of public relations it would be a good quid pro quo for the pair to briefly show Archie off.” We pay, you stump up the entertainment. If this is the bargain, Harry is now the hardest working royal out there. What else is a monarchy for these days? It doesn’t “represent” anything modern Britain agrees with. It represents the triumph of birth over talent, for example, in a country that prides itself on being a meritocracy. It represents colonial rule in a Britain that feels rightly uncomfortable about that part of its history. It celebrates first-born boys and fecund women (would the media love Kate as much if she were infertile?) in a country that strives for sexual equality. Perhaps we keep the monarchy for a whiff of history – a sort of comforting nostalgia, drawing us back to the Tudors and Plantagenets. In which case, we should be delighted at Harry’s leaks. What could be more nostalgic than a fight between two “arch-nemesis” princes, or royal wives, or wicked stepmothers, or kings doubting the legitimacy of their sons? What could be more traditional than the business of the royal bedchamber (or field) being a matter of public interest, whispered about in taverns throughout the land? No, Harry’s book has not endangered the monarchy. Nothing ever does – not divorce, not affairs, not the Queen attempting to mourn Diana in private, not Prince Andrew paying £12m to settle a case with a woman who claims he sexually assaulted her when she was 17. As far back as the Ipsos survey goes, which is 1993, a steady 70-ish% of the population has wanted to keep the monarchy. It doesn’t really matter what the royals do. If anything, the “core” members of the family should be thanking Harry and Meghan. When was the last time you saw a bad headline about William, Kate, Charles or Camilla? Now think back to the bruising senior royals tended to get in the 1990s and early 00s – the decision in 1993, for example, to run the transcript of a conversation between Charles and Camilla in which he fantasised about becoming a tampon. In the 2020s, the media behave more like an outpost of the firm’s PR machine – saving outrage for the “protocol-breaking’ activities of the Sussexes. Under this cover, Kate can wear whatever tights she wants. Walter Bagehot’s famous “daylight upon magic” quotation often overshadows his other thoughts about the monarchy. He also conceived of it as a showpiece for the public: the “nice and pretty events” and “irrelevant facts that speak to men’s bosoms”, leaving government free to get on with serious business. Yes, the true purpose of the royals is public entertainment. Harry should get all our thanks. Martha Gill is a political journalist and former lobby correspondent