Personally, I find them an utter embarrassment. If they were beautiful and elegant and graceful, or spoke like characters in an Oscar Wilde play, it might not be so bad. They would at least make us look good abroad. But jesus, it's hard to imagine an uglier collection of gargoyles!
Someone wrote in the paper that if we got rid of the monarchy we'd be "a boring, insignificant little island" with nothing to be proud of. Really!? If you listed the ten most important scientists who ever lived, at least a third of them would be Brits. We have two of the oldest and most famous universities in the world. Our canon of writers is second to none (the American critic Harold Bloom included more British writers on his 'world canon' list than any other nationality). Our pop music is also second to none.
There are loads of things I hate about the UK, but I still find it a fascinating place to live. Virtually every great name from history seems to have been born here, or lived here, or died here. You can go to Highgate cemetery and see the graves of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, for example. You can walk around Cambridge knowing that it's where Nabokov and Wittgenstein and Darwin and Newton all studied, where DNA and gravity were discovered. Or go to Oxford and see where Oscar Wilde and Ruskin and Pater and Lewis Carroll lived.
Bill Bryson wrote that Britain fascinates him because it is "packed to bursting with incident" He writes that "you can wander through a town like Oxford and in the space of a few hundred yards pass the home of Christopher Wren, the building where Halley found his comet and Boyle the first law, the track where Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile, the meadow where Lewis Carrol strolled." Intellectually, it's one of the most stimulating places on earth. Like Greece or Italy or France, it fires the imagination.
Given all that, why should we be interested in an ignorant little oaf like prince Harry? Or a podgy, sweaty creep like Andrew?