"What sort of country do we want?" the former Conservative M.P. George Walden asked in the 1990s, considering the issue of royalty: "Reproduction antique?"

Since the arrival of George Alexander Louis and his debut in front of the world's press when his parents, William and Kate, left the Lindo Wing of St. Mary's Hospital, the 21st-century answer is, quite possibly, retro-modern and very middle class: the House of Windsor stripped of chintz.

The royal family has had more scandalous sub-plots than any television soap. There's been madness, abdication, fornication — and many of them have included a George — but, two decades after the queen's annus horribilis, how skillfully the team has revived, restored and reincarnated itself, blessed by the apparent ordinariness, warmth and ease of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.