I am not the father of Princess Beatrice

The latest one I heard was that one of the younger royals was fathered by a celebrity hairdresser

Here's a name from the past. Just as you thought that the only circumstances you would hear of him would be appearing after Erica Roe in an ITV documentary called Where Are They Now?, Mr James Hewitt has surfaced one more time. This latest attempt to keep himself famous takes the form of announcing that he is not the father of Prince Harry. This seems a curious thing to interest anyone, but one might as well get in on the act, so I am taking the opportunity to say that I myself am not the father of Princess Beatrice. At least, I don't think so.

The fabulous thing about this confession is that it exactly mirrors a very funny 19th-century story about the Empress Eugenie's rackety mother. She was once asked directly whether the Empress's father was, in fact, Lord Palmerston. "No," she said insouciantly. "The dates don't correspond."

How things have changed; Mr Hewitt didn't see anything outrageous in saying exactly that, and indicating that he did not seduce the Princess of Wales until some years after Prince Harry was born.

Anyway, I don't see the force of the rumour; the boy looks something like his Spencer cousins and rather a lot like the Duke of Edinburgh at the same age, and like the halfwit bounder, nothing at all.

Whatever happened to royal bastards? It's terrifically disappointing that they seem to have completely disappeared from society in the past hundred years or so. The sons of George III spread their seed among the actresses of Drury Lane with great energy and profligacy; it is a curious fact that just before Queen Victoria was born in 1819, George III had 56 grandchildren, not one of whom was legitimate.

The bastards were generally acknowledged and held prominent positions in society. Charles II was always creating dukedoms for dribbling infants. William IV was extremely fond of his many Fitzclarence offspring, and some of them, like Lord Adolphus Fitzclarence, held positions at court. That had always been the way with royalty; considering their duty to marry some frightful German princess and produce an heir, a certain laxity was always permitted them in their private lives. If English kings never tried to repeat Louis XIV's devious attempts to create an automatic place in formal precedence for their bastards, their offspring certainly had a kind of informal status, from Henry VIII's bastard Henry Fitzroy until the succession of Queen Victoria.

Since then, everything has completely changed, as far as one knows. No bastards of any English king have been acknowledged for a hundred years, nor even of their sons; names of Edward VII's bastards are sometimes suggested, but there has never been any convincing proof. George V and George VI lived lives of blameless fidelity; and no illegitimate children can be reliably assigned even to much more likely figures, the old Duke of Kent, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales or the Duke of York. I just don't believe that a secret could be kept so well; it seems more likely that there just aren't any.

What the hell is wrong with these people? There's something terrifically First-Gentleman-of-Europe about the Prince of Wales, with his Prince Regent-like gnashing and lavishness and grand building projects; his sulks and furious letters to government ministers – bashed out, I am reliably informed, on a wonky old typewriter and signed in green ink – are decidedly pre-Victorian, too. What could be more fitting than a little stable of FitzWales opening doors at St James's Palace?

The lack of any obvious and well-known royal bastards isn't really compensated for by a series of mildly ludicrous but well-loved stories about the true parentage of the royal princes and princesses. Such stories have always been enjoyed – the 19th century firmly believed that both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were not the children of their purported fathers, for instance.

Society has long held that the Duke of York's real father was "Porchey", later the Earl of Carnarvon, without any kind of evidence at all. There are still people who firmly believe in the Hewitt hypothesis regarding Prince Harry, which can be disproved very easily. The latest one I heard was an excitable theory that one of the younger royalties was actually fathered by a celebrity hairdresser, and I expect that, too, will turn out to be complete nonsense.

No, what we really want is proper, old-fashioned swarms of royal bastards, openly acknowledged and swanning around putting on airs. To be honest, by now, the main purpose of royalty is to provide entertainment. What could be more effective than a general and gracious policy of propagation; hundreds of pop-eyed Hanoverian babies from Belgrave Square to Fulham Broadway? It is their obvious duty, if you think about it. And someone ought to tell the Prince of Wales that going round behaving like a complete bastard is not the same thing at all.