THE usual insiders have lined up to condemn the sharing of Diana’s videos with the common people, notwithstanding that she regarded herself as “our princess”.

The programme revealed a clash of two paradigms for royal marriage, one of conventional Christian monogamy and the other in which it would be the norm for a prince to have a mistress. I don’t share the popular view that there is a self-evidently correct answer to this.

Since Saxon times the Church has been haranguing royalty to give up their mistresses. The men in frocks went from being a nuisance to doing real harm when they pressured our merchants, administrators and soldiers in India to eschew local concubines. I go so far as to sympathise with the notion expressed by Prince Charles, apparently in jest, that he should have a wife and family in every country of the Commonwealth.

Polygamy arouses intense antipathy. The US fought a second civil war to suppress it and at one time quizzed new arrivals on their attitude to it as they might now do on their affiliation to Al Qaeda or IS.

I agree that to have any place in the modern world it would need to be purged of subservience and men and women accorded much the same latitude in their relationships. But I won’t join in the socialist-think that ‘I can’t afford this so it must be wrong for anyone to have it’.

Given such an exceptionally tolerant stance, what can I make of Diana’s claim to be a wronged woman? While for me it would still be ok for royalty to separate the ceremonial and childbearing roles from the emotionally ones, it would no longer be reasonable to assume that everyone knows they will do this.

The critical question is one of informed consent.

By Diana’s account this was lacking, which would make it an abuse and one in which many people were complicit.

The tragedy is that Diana might still have been tempted to accept the gig, and enjoyed it a lot more, had they been honest with her.

John Riseley, Harrogate