The prince's latest love story is entwined with the archetypal ritual of wealth being matched with pedigree
Meeting the parents is always one of those tricky moments for the young person in love. What if they don't like you? Or worse, having met your future mother-in-law, what if you start to speculate about making a handbrake turn on the highway of true romance? There are rules for this – whole websites, indeed.
This archetypal rite of passage, replete with Oedipal consequence, is fraught with complexity at the best of times. How much more ticklish does it get when the prospective son-in-law is third in line to the British throne and the bashful love interest is a blond 24-year-old dance student named Cressida Bonas, whose mother is Lady Mary-Gaye Georgiana Lorna Curzon? In her heyday, this celebrated girl-about-town unravelled a hectic marital history that chalked up four husbands, with whom she scored five children, including Cressida, plus some eye-watering divorce settlements.
Forget Leveson. Last week, thanks to the Daily Mail and the racier elements among Fleet Street's royal-watchers, the British public has enjoyed – hardly the mot juste – the ageless spectacle of Prince Harry in love (again).
In medieval times, there was a popular genre known as "advice to princes" by such pre-Renaissance giants as Smaragdus of Saint Mihiel and Hincmar of Reims. On that shelf, Machiavelli's The Prince is probably the most famous volume. In a nutshell, the general line was: identify your strongest qualities and cultivate your virtues.
In the department of princely counsel, however, neither Smaragdus nor Hincmar could scarcely have anticipated the challenges of tact and etiquette facing Harry this week. As a gleeful regiment of court commentarians has noted, he is slated to meet at least some (all?) of his loved one's parents and step-parents at the wedding of Cressida's half-sister, Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, to Sam, the only son of Sir Richard Branson.
Already spoken of as "the wedding of the year", the Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe nuptials offer a fabulous and instructive snapshot of coalition Britain during the "great recession". Isabella will surrender her triple-barrelled moniker in her new father-in-law's "private game reserve", a mealie bread's throw from Kruger national park, to become another Mrs Branson. She will tie the knot before a sparkling galère of friends and family that will also include Harry's ubiquitous cousins, the princesses Beatrice and Eugenie.
The occasion will be as much property deal as a wedding. Branson, of course, already owns trains, planes, banks, holidays, money (lots of it) and mobiles. His future daughter-in-law's father John Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe is, according to the Mail, "a banking magnate" whose family owns most of Birmingham.
But this thrilling and profitable union pales into insignificance when you consider the implications for the prince's demobilised heart, a capricious organ so free, in fact, that it has become sensationally untethered from the attentions of his now ex-girlfriend, Chelsy Davy.
Never mind that Harry is officially on a visit to Lesotho to boost his bush charity for "vulnerable children", Sentebale ("Forget-me-not"). If Cressida Bonas becomes the new Kate Middleton, the national soap opera known as House of Windsor will register another surge in primetime ratings.
Despite her novelty value, Cressie Bonas is basically a posh semiquaver in a very old tune, New Money for Old. Actually, if there's a return match in due course, her pedigree will probably pass muster at Windsor. Cressie's mother, Lady Mary-Gaye etc etc, is a Curzon of deepest Tory blue and the daughter of the 6th Earl Howe, one of Edward VII's many godsons. Besides, what gives zest to the vapid cocktail of Harry's love life is his new girlfriend's likely fortune.
Meanwhile, variations on the theme, the Prince of Wales Cuts Loose, are hardly new. Harry may like to get his kit off, but compared with his great-great-great-grandfather, Edward VII (Bertie), he has yet to be cited in any scandalous divorce cases. Compared with George IV, he does not begin as a gambler. Indeed, compared with the rich men and women he will meet at Sam Branson's wedding, he is almost a pauper.
There are, however, two features of When Harry Met the Parents that make this episode in the House of Windsor a potentially groundbreaking renewal of the franchise. First, by going to Africa, the young lovers are making an unconscious but unmistakable connection with the indolent and risqué days of the 20s when Kenya's "Happy Valley" was approaching the zenith of its notoriety. It is always the charm of an old story that it finds new ways to strike a chord with a seasoned audience. Africa has witnessed plenty of royal romance. The Branson-Anstruther-etc wedding supplies a familiar and colourful va-va-voom: vulgarity meets vanity trumps vacuity.
And then, finally, there's Lady Mary-Gaye, a gorgeous marital mountaineer of whom far too little has been said. In the 60s this mother of the bride (and also of "Cressie") was one of the original "Birds of Britain" who once posed naked, but dripping with motor oil (a silent homage to her family's motor-racing past), in a glossy photoshoot. Today, as Andrew Lloyd Webber prepares to launch his new musical about the Profumo affair and Britain begins to celebrate half a century of Beatlemania, there's no escaping the news that the Swinging Sixties are back. (They never went away.) The late Princess Margaret enjoyed a full and lively career with the stars of the 60s and doubtless tripped the light fantastic with Lady Mary-Gaye. The other Windsors never made quite the same enthusiastic rapprochement. Perhaps Harry will be able to take up where his aunt left off.
In the post-Olympic Britain of 2013, this neo-Regency pageant is the dumb-show that Danny Boyle missed at last summer's Olympics. It could have made quite a tableau. The new class with whom Prince Harry will be hanging out on safari is the stuff of Mills & Boon, if not yet the silver screen.
Here at least is another royal mystery for Hilary Mantel to violate.