Highgrove is never going to look like the set of Shameless. Even so, the backdrop for Prince Harry's television interview was curious. Rather than picking some classless patch of organic curly kale or a ditch similar to the one in which the soldier-prince planned to spend his 21st birthday, the palace impresarios chose the estate's stableyard.In this equine Champney's, hunters deprived of their day job by the Blair government tossed coiffed heads over loosebox doors. You would not have been surprised to see a curricle full of Miss Bennets trundle across the burnished flagstones.It worked. Officer Cadet Darcy, with his supporting cast of point-to-pointers and poor black children from Lesotho, proved Harry's most successful image so far. But it would be unkind to mock someone who loves his parents, his step-mum, his brother, his girlfriend and his country, and who manages to introduce the word 'arse' so frequently into a formal conversation. If only his interviewers were so bold.Along with hiring and firing Prime Ministers and dissolving parliament, making people grovel is one of the residual powers of royalty. Normally robust questioners failed to follow up some interesting remarks and normally robust listeners failed to query the omission. Thus, the Today programme inquisitor did not explore Harry's line on why African children are so special ('Give them a tennis ball and they think it's Christmas') or seize on his hint that British children are less sweet.What tribe, exactly, was he thinking of? The undereducated, Asbo-breaching loser who ends up on remand in Feltham Young Offenders' Institution, devising six ways to kill himself with a bedsheet, or the polo-playing chavocrat who wears Nazi gear to a party and gets into a drunken brawl outside a nightclub?Still, Harry sounded OK and, besides, he was never the problem. The difficulty is the role for which he was born. The Daily Telegraph tested the theory that the office always justifies the occupant with its defence of the prince, at 21, becoming an automatic Counsellor of State, allowed jointly to preside over meetings of the Privy Council in the Queen's absence. The paper is partly right, though not for the reasons it supposes.Britain is daft enough to compel its Prime Minister and cabinet to take a 16-line oath of allegiance (often with fingers crossed) in order to sit on the committee that Henry VIII used to bypass parliament. So tough luck if the duty overseer has two lowish-grade A-levels and no obvious interest in matters constitutional, beyond how a dedicated smoker is to yomp round a Sandhurst assault course with a rucksack full of bricks.But even if Prince Harry were a complete ass', the paper says: 'He would be perfectly qualified, by his blood alone, to serve as a counsellor.' On the contrary, the link between rhesus positive and destiny is being stretched beyond its limits. A few months ago, the royals were doomed. The Camilla years had dawned and the media painted the Prince of Wales's new bride as Marie Antoinette in jodhpurs. According to one poll, fewer than a quarter of citizens approved of the union, and support for Charles as king sunk as low as 25 per cent.As with all royal upheavals, nothing much happened. Butler trials, dead princesses and household scandals only briefly disturb the grudging acceptance Britons accord the royals. Last week, as the Windsors got off what Harry would not call their backsides and began their autumn duties, it seemed like business as normal.Charles told Songs of Praise viewers how much he liked serenading Caithness seals with Scottish ballads. William became the patron of his mother's old charity, Centrepoint. The Duke of Edinburgh had a nasty moment when it was wrongly reported that his name was to be dropped from the famous award for young people, on the grounds that ethnic minorities and poor youngsters are oddly uninspired by a posh octogenarian role model still spry enough to be rude to Johnny Foreigner.Other things are changing. Post-divorce, post-scandal and post-death, the monarchy has lost even the propulsion of its own bad publicity. Though the Buckingham Palace flag flew at half-mast after the London bombings and an ageing Queen issued her condolences, there was no real sense of a head of state tapped into the mind of a nation that had grieved so extravagantly for her dead mother and daughter-in-law.Conflict does odd things to monarchies. The British model, the one European great-power version to survive 1914-18, emerged as the icon of Ramsay MacDonald, not the last Labour Prime Minister to protect the established order and enjoy its perks. The Second World War enabled the royals to look the East End in the face and set the stage for Diana's affinity with eel-pie Britain.If there is any niche for monarchy in an age of terror, it is not yet apparent. Scorned for his interest in Islam, Charles has combined his familiar dirge against modernity with flagrant raids on the nation's bank balance. Not long ago, it emerged that the &pound;336,000 annual Highgrove rent paid by the prince to the Duchy of Cornwall, which belongs to us, went straight back into his bank account.Behind their drawbridges, the Windsors look lonely. The 100 other aristocratic families who lived like them in 1939 are selling gooseberry jam to tourists. The old pillars - the established church and the Tory party - have crumbled. The European monarchies of Belgium, Sweden and Denmark have thrived by working for the public interest and marrying into typing pools, while ours remains a museum piece to privilege.Worse, it symbolises and ratifies a hierarchy of class and status. Last week, a UN report singled out the UK and the US for their growing gap between rich and poor. If you are in the bottom 10 per cent of earners, your weekly wage will have gone up by an average &pound;28 since Labour came to power, compared with &pound;119 for the top 10 per cent. Social mobility, on many measures, has declined.ITV's 49 Up programme, charting the lives of seven-year-olds now nearing 50, was a chronicle of predetermined fates. Last week's right-wing fury that the (relatively paltry) &pound;3 billion invested in SureStart had not instantly conjured baby Einsteins from sink estates illustrates the deep resistance to even trying to dismantle a class structure that sets ceilings, strangles hope and curtails lives.At its pinnacle is the royal family. Republicanism, like stem-cell cures, may still be far away, but any Prime Minister who wants greater equality can no longer shirk reform. Ending primogeniture and discrimination against non-Protestants, and making the Windsors financially accountable, should not be controversial issues.Tony Blair still seeks his legacy, so why not this? Forging a modern monarchy would delight Labour supporters, discomfit the Tories, become the foundation stone of a fairer society and even please a royal clan that knows what happens to dinosaurs in crowns. But first, he should watch Harry's birthday broadcasts. A prince is growing up. So why can't we?